Sniff a placebo to up your creativity

Abstract

If people need to get creative, a placebo could help unleash their talents. The placebo effect is best known in medicine for making people feel better when they are given sham treatments. Now there is growing interest in using placebos to boost athletic and cognitive abilities. Previous studies have found that people lift more weights and cycle harder when they take medicines with no active ingredients that are falsely labeled as performance-enhancing substances. Placebo pills have also been shown to improve scores in memory tests. These findings prompted Lior Noy and Liron Rozenkrantz at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel to test whether the placebo effect can stimulate creativity too