Rockmeister
pfm Member
This is from a study of medical placebo testing and looks at the way Placebos work in medicine, how they work and the circumstances that support their effectiveness.
"For years, a placebo effect was considered a sign of failure. A placebo is used in clinical trials to test the effectiveness of treatments and is most often used in drug studies. For instance, people in one group get the tested drug, while the others receive a fake drug, or placebo, that they think is the real thing. This way, the researchers can measure if the drug works by comparing how both groups react. If they both have the same reaction — improvement or not — the drug is deemed not to work.
More recently, however, experts have concluded that reacting to a placebo is not proof that a certain treatment doesn't work, but rather that another, non-pharmacological mechanism may be present.
How placebos work is still not quite understood, but it involves a complex neurobiological reaction that includes everything from increases in feel-good neurotransmitters, like endorphins and dopamine, to greater activity in certain brain regions linked to moods, emotional reactions, and self-awareness. All of it can have therapeutic benefit. "The placebo effect is a way for your brain to tell the body what it needs to feel better," says Kaptchuk.
But placebos are not all about releasing brainpower. You also need the ritual of treatment. "When you look at these studies that compare drugs with placebos, there is the entire environmental and ritual factor at work," says Kaptchuk. "You have to go to a clinic at certain times and be examined by medical professionals in white coats. You receive all kinds of exotic pills and undergo strange procedures. All this can have a profound impact on how the body perceives symptoms because you feel you are getting attention and care." My italics.
And so to HiFi. Is the ritual present? Yes. We have read the adverts, considered the opinion of engineers, read approving ratings and visited a show or a dealer where the 'expert' has approved our choice(s). So now we are primed to go. IF we can be bothered, we now move to 'testing', which, as one simple post here shows is just swapping from cable to cable with no attempt made to give 'no change' a chance. Everything in plain site, all those shiny new cables which we are pretty certain will make a change, just as we expect our pill to stop the headache, and so Bingo! There are the changes we expected.
As mentioned above, some of these changes are simply impossible (with a nod to open minded Scientists everywhere who will remind me that the purpose of investigation is to prove that what we used to know is now wrong, so one day maybe we will discover a reason) so an Ethernet cable should not, for example, make any difference at all and yet, apparently some do hear changes quite clearly.
Shortly I am hoping to post a cables opinion poll to see what the PFM hearers and non hearers balance is, just for fun, but before that I thought it interesting to consider the above. At the very least, we should all give that some consideration. It IS possible, according to what is admittedly quite new and incomplete research, but regardless, it is possible that Science is right. There can be and are no differences between ehternet cables of the same construction, and mains must also be in this cataegory . If that is true, then we must consider that the brain is making us hear what we want to hear.
Penultimate point: 1 other thing that I am concerned about. I think it is possible for any cable to sound 'different' if an engineer deliberately constructs it to perform 'badly', by which I mean, to colour the sound in some way. I have no links for that statement, but recall some very 'interesting cable deconstructions in the 90's that revealed components which had no place in any properly engineered construction.
And finally ofc, as posted before, if positive effects can be caused by Placebo, then surely so can negative ones be generated. In HiFi terms then, it must be possible to refuse to hear actual changes if ones belief in their non existence is strong enough?
"For years, a placebo effect was considered a sign of failure. A placebo is used in clinical trials to test the effectiveness of treatments and is most often used in drug studies. For instance, people in one group get the tested drug, while the others receive a fake drug, or placebo, that they think is the real thing. This way, the researchers can measure if the drug works by comparing how both groups react. If they both have the same reaction — improvement or not — the drug is deemed not to work.
More recently, however, experts have concluded that reacting to a placebo is not proof that a certain treatment doesn't work, but rather that another, non-pharmacological mechanism may be present.
How placebos work is still not quite understood, but it involves a complex neurobiological reaction that includes everything from increases in feel-good neurotransmitters, like endorphins and dopamine, to greater activity in certain brain regions linked to moods, emotional reactions, and self-awareness. All of it can have therapeutic benefit. "The placebo effect is a way for your brain to tell the body what it needs to feel better," says Kaptchuk.
But placebos are not all about releasing brainpower. You also need the ritual of treatment. "When you look at these studies that compare drugs with placebos, there is the entire environmental and ritual factor at work," says Kaptchuk. "You have to go to a clinic at certain times and be examined by medical professionals in white coats. You receive all kinds of exotic pills and undergo strange procedures. All this can have a profound impact on how the body perceives symptoms because you feel you are getting attention and care." My italics.
And so to HiFi. Is the ritual present? Yes. We have read the adverts, considered the opinion of engineers, read approving ratings and visited a show or a dealer where the 'expert' has approved our choice(s). So now we are primed to go. IF we can be bothered, we now move to 'testing', which, as one simple post here shows is just swapping from cable to cable with no attempt made to give 'no change' a chance. Everything in plain site, all those shiny new cables which we are pretty certain will make a change, just as we expect our pill to stop the headache, and so Bingo! There are the changes we expected.
As mentioned above, some of these changes are simply impossible (with a nod to open minded Scientists everywhere who will remind me that the purpose of investigation is to prove that what we used to know is now wrong, so one day maybe we will discover a reason) so an Ethernet cable should not, for example, make any difference at all and yet, apparently some do hear changes quite clearly.
Shortly I am hoping to post a cables opinion poll to see what the PFM hearers and non hearers balance is, just for fun, but before that I thought it interesting to consider the above. At the very least, we should all give that some consideration. It IS possible, according to what is admittedly quite new and incomplete research, but regardless, it is possible that Science is right. There can be and are no differences between ehternet cables of the same construction, and mains must also be in this cataegory . If that is true, then we must consider that the brain is making us hear what we want to hear.
Penultimate point: 1 other thing that I am concerned about. I think it is possible for any cable to sound 'different' if an engineer deliberately constructs it to perform 'badly', by which I mean, to colour the sound in some way. I have no links for that statement, but recall some very 'interesting cable deconstructions in the 90's that revealed components which had no place in any properly engineered construction.
And finally ofc, as posted before, if positive effects can be caused by Placebo, then surely so can negative ones be generated. In HiFi terms then, it must be possible to refuse to hear actual changes if ones belief in their non existence is strong enough?
