For me, there are few things worse than being down with the flu. As a very active person, the worst part is lacking the energy to get up and do anything, which is why the past three days have driven me nuts. Still, I try to find the silver linings – being confined to the couch while my partner was at work meant I could finally start catching up on Downton Abbey. So over the course of the first two days, I brewed some Lemon Zinger and worked through the nine spectacular hours of season 2.
By the end, although the reasonable portion of my brain thought I was being ridiculous, the emotional part was pretty sure my stomach bug was really a 21st century descendant of the Spanish Flu.
Behold the power of suggestion. In an article published last summer for Science Illustrated, psychological scientist Robert Michael said, “We encounter suggestion every day of our lives. We like to believe that our thoughts and our behaviors are rationally constructed, but what the research shows is that, in fact, our thoughts and our behaviors are influenced by all manner of seemingly irrelevant information — including suggestion and expectation.”
In my case, my chosen distraction (the later episodes of Downton) featured an episode where several key characters contracted the Spanish flu. Although I had been feeling better as the day went on, after that episode I started feeling increasingly nauseated, achy, and feverish – even though my actual temperature never rose.
But can such a simple suggestion really cause that kind of reaction? Very possibly. An article published last month the the Chronicle of Higher Education recounts the experiment of researcher John Bargh. In the early 1990s, Bargh and his fellow researchers conducted an experiment where test subjects were shown pairs of seemingly random words. When the subjects left the room, a graduate student sitting outside the test room would time how fast the subject walked between two points in the hallway. The hypothesis was that certain suggestive sets of words would have an effect on how quickly the subjects walked down the hallway – for example, words associated with elderly people would subliminally influence the subject to walk slower. Bargh’s and subsequent experiments seemed to confirm that, so it’s not completely unreasonable to expect that an already ill person could see their symptoms worsen when watching a television program with characters dying of that disease.
The good news is, most of the characters recovered and went on to continue their lives in future episodes. I, too, am doing much better and greatly appreciating the fact I live in 2013 instead of 1918. Still, I think I’m going to postpone reading Stephen King’s The Stand again until after I’m completely free of so much as a sniffle.
thefourthcastle.com 