The “electrosensitive” are moving to a cellphone-free town. But is their disease real?

You can turn your phone on in Green Bank, W.Va., but you won’t get a trace of a signal. If you hit scan on your car’s radio, it’ll cycle through the dial endlessly, never pausing on a station. This remote mountainous town is inside the U.S. National Radio Quiet Zone, a 13,000–square-mile area where most types of electromagnetic radiation on the radio spectrum (which includes radio and TV broadcasts, Wi-Fi networks, cell signals, Bluetooth, and the signals used by virtually every other wireless device) are banned to minimize disturbance around the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, home to the world’s largest steerable radio telescope. //

As The New Yorker recently pointed out in a blog post, EHS, along with these types of episodes, hint at the bizarre power of the nocebo effect: the flip-side of the placebo effect, in which inert substances or the suggestion of harm brings about real physical symptoms. In many studies of the nocebo effect, simply explaining to patients that a pill might trigger side effects has been enough to cause everything from back pain to erectile dysfunction. “If you believe that a substance, compound, or phenomena harms you, and you start experiencing symptoms, there’s confirmation for your belief right there, and then it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Brian Dunning, a prominent skeptic who hosts the Skeptoid podcast and frequently takes on pseudoscientific claims, told me. “You see that your phone has a signal or that there’s a Wi-Fi router in the room, it further increases your stress level, and you have very real and very distressing physical symptoms. Once you have this confirming experience, it becomes really difficult to sit there and be told otherwise.”

Our brains’ expectations, it turns out, have a surprisingly potent effect on the functioning of our bodies. If the people who moved to Green Bank truly suffer from piercing headaches, nausea, and dizziness when they are around wireless signals, the nocebo effect (and previous instances of mass psychogenic diseases) is as good an explanation of anything we have so far.