You can heal someone by giving them sugar pills, that makes no sense (said a straw-man i just built) - yet placebo effect is a reality. As a matter of fact placebo take place even if you tell patient that they are given a sugar pill that has no effect on them (though effect is lower).
We are not master of our brain.
There are a lot of things happening inside that we are not aware of or only vaguely. Like split brain patients show symptoms of possibly two entities with separate choices on given questions.
Also consider tuplas, which are created entities that are separate from yourself living gin your brain. Those I believe were first described by Buddhist monks.
And the whole multiple personality disorder. I remember reading article about a person that was blind when one personality was in charge. Theirs pupils would not respond to light like a blind persons.
Sure there is no definitive answer here, but saying everything is fake and you need hard evidence is not getting us any closer to the truth.
Person suffering hallucinations is concerned they have a brain tumor, experiences said concern in the form of hallucination, turns out to have brain tumor, isn't an extraordinary claim. Person with symptom X consistent with disease Z worries they might have disease Z, expressed through symptom X, and finds out they have disease Z is ... not extraordinary at all. It's the particulars that make it an interesting anecdote, but the overall phenomenon isn't. Imagine we changed it just slightly:
Patient with spastic paralysis of their lower limbs thinks they have a brain tumor. Attributes that thought to themselves. Calls the nearest big medical center - because that's what people worried about cancer do - and gets seen by onco. Onco finds a brain tumor. Unsurprising, because central neuro symptoms.
The story changes only insofar as "symptom was a cognitive effect that made it an interesting anecdote."
No, burden of proof is on the person making the interesting claim. If I claim that I went to Mars, and you claim I'm lying, the burden is on me to prove I went to Mars, because humans lying is boring, and humans going to Mars is interesting.
This is what people are trying to get at with the "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" copypasta: It's so easy for humans to make shit up that the evidence is on the person who told the story, especially if it's an interesting story you want to believe.
> Fear of the unknown is also a bias we should be aware of.
Bulverism is saying "Of course you believe/don't believe that because of some trait you have!" It's irrelevant, in that it doesn't disprove the belief. It doesn't matter if they believe something because it's blue on Tuesday and today is Odin's favorite month. If it's true, it's true, and if it's false, you only find out if it's false by examining the belief and its logical consequences, not the traits of the person who proposed it, positive or negative.