💡
My contention is that placebos need to be slightly absurd to work.fn1 All three elements that seem to make Red Bull such a potent mental hackfn2 make no sense from a logical point of view. People want cheap, abundant and nice-tasting drinks, surely? And yet the success of Red Bull proves that they don't. Something about these three illogicalities may well be essential to its unconscious appeal, or to its potency as a placebo. If we are to subconsciously believe that a drink has medicinal or psychotropic powers, perhaps it can't taste conventionally nice. Imagine a doctor saying, 'I have some pills here to treat your extremely aggressive cancer - take as many as you like. Now, would you like them in strawberry or blackcurrant flavour?' Somehow, that last sentence doesn't quite work.