take your left hand squeeze your thumb my making a fist around the thumb, raise your hand over your head and EUREKA! No gag reflex
All placebo
edit: source: personal experience
Your perceptional bias of it being such a far fetched thing makes it so that it doesn't work for you.
What? It was a joke.

Besides, placebo effect is still significant if you KNOW it is a placebo.
You see mine was a joke as well, Ryan and Will pay attention here-
You see you implied that placebo affect actively shapes my reality, while I tried to explain you morgan, that your approach to it being such an incredulous physical thing made it so that it didn't work for you.
Implying that while it may be a placebo effect it also very well may not be one, which means that our reality is shaped by our perception and consequently all reality is shaped by perception.
The further inside joke to myself was that this one time I was sucking this dudes dick and it literally was the best tasting thing I've ever had in my mouth, he showered well and I appreciated that. So anyway somewhere between the being flacid and in my mouth stage and the being completely rock solid hard and in my mouth stage I noticed I was having trouble taking his entire cock to the back of my throat without accidentally grazing my teeth on his penis, which I think is rude if you're sucking a dick.
Anyway, I tried the above mentioned technique and it worked, but part of me thinks this has vastly more to do with bring drunk than the thumb maneuver.
Anyway when I finally had him at the back of my throat he came without warning (which is very rude just fyi) my mouth was dripping absolutely full of his load and I was trying to swallow but he just kept jamming it down there and surprisingly I didn't puke but managed to swallow the extremely oversize load anyway. After I was done drinking up the yummy goodness I went to the bathroom to wash my mouth out and was laughing, he came in and asked what was funny (prob worried he did something weird) and I told him about this dumb technique I read about online that said you had no gag reflex if you did the following.
So anyway, he starts sucking my dick and we attempt the above mentioned technique it didn't work, so I just bent him over and fucked him as hard as possible and came on his back.
So you see Morgan, that's why what I said was meant to be a joke.