Isaac Asimov once said: “in Man is a three-pound brain which, as far as we know, is the most complex and orderly arrangement of matter in the universe”. It’s rather ironic that the most complicated thing we’ve ever discovered is the very thing that does the discovering.
To anyone who thinks that they’ve got the brain all figured out, I offer the placebo effect. Find someone who is in immense pain and inject them with the principle active ingredient in opium: morphine. Its proven pain-relieving properties will soon have things under control. After several days, and without telling the patient, replace the morphine with a saline solution – i.e. instead of:
(5-alpha,6-alpha)-7,8-didehydro-4,5-epoxy-17-methylmorphinan-3,6-diol
(a.k.a. morphine), give them table salt and water. The patient, astonishingly, will report that their pain has been relieved.
Letters to Nature 