Can a Placebo Make You More Creative—or Smarter?
What your brain believes may shape what it can do.
Posted April 30, 2026 | Reviewed by Michelle Quirk
Most of us picture a placebo in a very specific way: a sugar pill, a clinical trial, a chart showing symptoms going down. In that framing, a placebo belongs mostly to medicine: important, even powerful—but largely confined to the treatment of pain or discomfort.
One of the questions that has guided my work is whether placebo effects extend beyond these settings.
At its core, the placebo effect represents a situation in which expectations about a treatment lead to meaningful improvements in symptoms, even when the treatment itself contains no pharmacological ingredients (i.e., a placebo). Importantly, the placebo effect is not about deception . It reflects how context and prior beliefs can shape the brain's responses to its environment. Indeed, the placebo effect is not "all in our heads"—it induces genuine changes in the brain's chemistry, including the release of neurotransmitters such as dopamine and endogenous opioids.
Now, if expectations can influence pain or nausea, there is no clear reason they should operate only in clinical contexts. The same mechanisms may shape everyday aspects of human functioning. I became interested in testing this idea in cognition , and in particular, creativity .
Creativity is often treated as a trait, something you either have or you don't. We asked a simple question: Can a placebo enhance creative performance?
To test this question, during my Ph.D., I conducted a study in which participants smelled an inert substance (odor) and were told that it enhances creativity. A comparison group received the same substance to smell, but without that suggestion. We found that those who expected creative enhancement produced ideas and solutions that were significantly more original and unique than those of the comparison group.
What exactly changed is still an open question. But it does suggest that the mindset you bring to a creative challenge may be part of the cognitive machinery itself. How you frame a task, what you believe is possible before you sit down to work—these may be part of the mechanism that produces creative output, not just how you feel about it. This is worth taking seriously the next time you tell yourself you're "not a creative person."
This pattern doesn't stop at creativity. A similar idea has been tested in research on intelligence and brain training.
Intelligence and Brain Training
In one study , researchers set out to directly induce a placebo effect in cognitive training. Participants responded to different flyers: One strongly suggested that the training would improve intelligence; the other was neutral. After just one hour of training, the "suggestion" group showed gains equivalent to a 5- to 10-point increase on a standard IQ test, whereas the control group showed no improvement. The only meaningful difference between the groups was what they expected before they began.
More recent work has tried to disentangle expectation from training itself. In one such study , participants who underwent cognitive training improved overall—but those given positive expectations showed larger gains than those given negative expectations, regardless of which training condition they were in. In other words, what you believe going in matters independently of what you actually do. At the same time, the training itself still had a measurable effect. Expectation doesn't replace the intervention—it adds to it. The study also found that individual characteristics, such as personality and motivation , shape how large that expectation effect turns out to be, suggesting that this is not a simple on/off switch, but rather involves individual variability.
These studies raise questions I find myself returning to. Can we simply "make ourselves" more creative or more intelligent by adjusting our expectations when going into a task? And if so, why can't we do it indefinitely—what are the limits, costs, or trade-offs involved?
Such research also has important methodological implications: Many studies fail to control for participants' pre-existing beliefs or expectations about whether a training or treatment will work. If those beliefs are themselves driving part of the effect, we may be drawing conclusions about our interventions that are partly, or entirely, about expectation.
If expectations can measurably shape how we think, create, and even perform on intelligence tests, the question isn't just whether placebo effects exist outside medicine. It's how often we're already living inside them. These are questions that now guide much of our work in the lab.
Rozenkrantz, L., Mayo, A. E., Ilan, T., Hart, Y., Noy, L., & Alon, U. (2017). Placebo can enhance creativity. PloS One, 12(9), e0182466.
Foroughi, C. K., Monfort, S. S., Paczynski, M., McKnight, P. E., & Greenwood, P. M. (2016). Placebo effects in cognitive training. PNAS, 113(27), 7470–7474.
Parong, J., Seitz, A. R., Jaeggi, S. M., & Green, C. S. (2022). Expectation effects in working memory training. PNAS , 119(37), e2209308119.
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Liron Rozenkrantz, Ph.D., is a neuroscientist and an assistant professor at the Azrieli Faculty of Medicine at Bar-Ilan University.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.