The Man Who Froze Without the Cold
The Man Who Froze Without the Cold There’s this story that haunts me. A man gets trapped inside a refrigerated train container. He panics. He knows what happens in these things: freezing, numbness, the slow shutting down of the body. So he starts to write it down, leaving notes about how his hands are getting stiff, how his breathing is slowing, how the cold is swallowing him. When they find him, he’s dead. But here is the twist: the container wasn’t even cold. That detail always gets me. These containers only stay freezing when they are plugged in and powered. Once they are empty and unplugged, they drift back to normal temperature. This one should have been harmless. His body should have been fine. And yet, it wasn’t. So what killed him? -------- We usually think of the brain as an organ for thought, but it is more than that. It doesn’t just process reality, it can create it. Sometimes it even creates it so convincingly that the body plays along. The nocebo effect is one example. M...