That all sounds like wishful thinking, right? But a small new randomized trial on PRT and chronic back pain, published in JAMA Psychiatry, suggests the brain really may be a force against pain. Led by Yoni K. Ashar, Ph.D., a former student of Wager’s, and PRT developer Alan Gordon, researchers had one group do eight sessions of PRT—using techniques like those the Lin app teaches you—for an hour twice a week. Another kept on with standard treatments; the third group got an “open placebo” injection. (People who got it knew it was saline. These work similar to placebos, but without the deception.) A year later, they found that 51 percent of the PRT group was entirely or nearly pain free: almost twice the rate of the placebo group and about four times that of the people who didn’t change their pain care. Neuroimaging also showed reduced pain-related brain activity with PRT versus the other groups. This suggests there is some biological change going on in how your brain is wired to respond (or not) to these signals.
