Were They Only Feeling Themselves?

For years I ran the same demonstration at sports events and in one-on-one meetings. I asked someone to stand still while another person pushed or pulled on their shoulder, testing their balance. Most people wobbled or stepped sideways. Then I put a wristband on them and ran the test again. Most stood firm.

The product claimed the wristband carried frequencies, stored on a small disc inside it that the maker called a hologram. The pitch treated the human body as a kind of playback device, tuned to resonate with those frequencies the way a cassette player reads a magnetic tape. I ran that test hundreds of times at events and trade shows. I watched people wobble, then stand firm, then buy two.

One man has stayed with me. He was a tradesman type, arms crossed, the kind of scepticism that plants itself before you have said a word. “What a load of nonsense,” he said, in the flat tone of someone who has heard every pitch going. “Just try it yourself,” I told him. He did, reluctantly, arms still half crossed. Without the band he tipped sideways at the first push. With it on, he stood “like a tree”, impossible to knock over. He looked at me, said nothing and bought two. His wife had balance issues sometimes, he said. She could use it.

I stood there smiling proudly and took his money. Another one.

What happened to that man was real. I want to be clear about that before anything else, because it is the part I never doubted, even as I questioned everything around it. His body changed between the first push and the second, in front of a stranger, with nothing to gain from faking either result. I felt the same change in my own body when I first tested the wristband, long before I ever sold it to anyone.

What I could never settle was where that change came from. Did it come from the wristband, from whatever the maker claimed sat on that hologram. Or did it come from him: from standing differently once he expected to be tested, from bracing once someone told him to pay attention, from the shift in a room once excitement passes from one person to the next. Muscle tension and posture change measurably under expectation and under social pressure. What I could never prove was which of those forces was doing the work in front of me.

The placebo effect is one of the oldest mechanisms in medicine, documented and reproducible, and doctors and scientists take it seriously as a real physiological event. I went looking for that answer properly. I sat in university labs and talked double-blind protocols with serious scientists. I tested the product exhaustively. None of it gave me a clean answer. When someone tells you they feel something, you cannot argue them out of the sensation. It is subjective, and it is real. What stayed unproven was the cause the maker attached to it.

For a long time I had an answer ready for myself, and it survived my own scrutiny well enough to keep going. I didn’t promise any healing or make medical claims. I ran the test and let people feel. What they concluded from it was their business. That line worked for years.

It gets thinner the more honestly I look at it. I was the one who told people about the frequencies. I had heard the story from the product’s developer, who explained it to me really convincingly: every audio cassette is a magnetic tape holding stored frequencies, made audible by a player, and the wristband turned the human body into the player, a thing with its own magnetic field resonating with the hologram inside it. That theory gets more complicated than this summary allows, and another essay on this topic will surely follow soon. But I told that story to every person I tested. I built the expectation before the test itself. Without that framing, nobody would have wondered whether they felt anything at all; the question would never have occurred to them.

The staging was simple: two arms, a push, a wristband, a story told in advance. It worked hundreds of times.

That points at something larger than one product. How much of what we feel comes from outside us, and how much do we produce ourselves simply because we want to. The people I tested attached the entire moment to the wristband. What they actually experienced was a moment in which they could perceive themselves differently, standing firmer, feeling stronger. Over time the wristband became the occasion for that moment. It was not the cause. That distinction sounds like a technicality, but it was my own way out of a harder question, a way of not having to say I didn’t understand what I was selling.

I sold moments. Fraud is too clean a word for what happened, and honesty asks for a certainty I never had. The demonstration and the purchase occupied a space between the two, one that science, at least the science I had access to, could not resolve. The wristband was another product that did not deliver what it promised, and yet it triggered something, because we wanted it to.

I don’t know. I need a few more essays to understand it myself. What I am certain of is this: what people felt was real, because I felt it too, standing next to them. Whether it was their own strength, their own attention or something else entirely, I still cannot say. Their bodies reacted. Every one of them believed the reaction came from somewhere else.