Interesting.  Two of the sources I’m reading at the moment are looking at the effects placebos have on us.

Dan Ariely tracks how higher priced drugs and placeboes have a greater perceived effect on people than lower-priced drugs; there are ‘blurry boundary lines between belief and reality.’

Seth Godin is looking at how marketing is really a placebo.  Here’s his short ebook Placebo, which he’s making available free.

This is where story comes in, because it can be argued the story I tell myself about my life is really self-marketing.  How we see things, then, individually and collectively, may not be how things really are.   Yet somehow they work, and work very well.  This is not the same as living a lie – a story lacking integrity – but is about the things we believe and love and value affecting our reality.

All of this is leading me here.  If Dan Ariely is right about what we believe really does affect how we feel, then we hardly know what the Human mind is capable of achieving, we hardly know what we are capable of, and perhaps the key to unlocking more is the story we choose to live.

The power of story is something that’s long been of interest to me for some time now, and it could be that it is the way of releasing Human potential.  And who knows, maybe the technology and genetics and pharmaceuticals may all prove, to some degree, to be placebos for releasing what Humans have always been capable of?