In Conversation With Ellen Langer, Mother Of Mindfulness

I came across Ellen Langer’s research online, in a NY Times article What if Age Was Nothing But A Mind Set? My first reaction to the headline was skeptisicm. But, as I often do when something makes me feel uncomfortable, I decided to read.

The article described her landmark 1979 “counterclockwise” study in which elderly men lived for a week as though it was 1959 and seemed to grow younger.

I was entranced.

The more I read about Ellen and her work, the more I wanted to know. I bought her book COUNTERCLOCKWISE, as well as  MINDFULNESS, and MINDFUL LEARNING and read interviews with her.

At the end of that, I put her on my One Of The People I’d Like to Invite To My Dinner Party list. 

And then I thought, why not make this happen in an alternative way? The second best option was asking her if I could interview her for WWWB. To my utter delight, she said yes. What followed turned more into a wonderful conversation than an interview.

IN CONVERSATION WITH ELLEN LANGER 

What did you want to be when you grew up?

Happy! [laughs] Well… it depends what age we’re talking about.

Let’s say…Sort of by the time when people started to ask what you wanted to be …

I wanted to be a doctor. I was a chemistry major in college and I was going to get married and didn’t know if I’d end up going to medical school so I started to take liberal arts courses. I had taken a leave of absence from school and needed to choose a major and it was a random choice to go into psychology. I’m very glad I chose psychology.

Did you read lots when you were younger?

No, not more than other people. You know…I think that many people who read lots when young were doing so to escape, not all obviously, but I myself had nothing to escape from. I was very very fortunate that I had wonderful and kind supportive parents.

That’s beautiful to hear. You mentioned that in one of your interviews, the one with Krista Tippett, wonderful.

You started to write books about mindfulness and started to study mindlessness, I’d love to know, where did that fascination come from?

I was always interested in people. I would see these things that seemed strange to me and it didn’t seem appropriate to just call everybody stupid or to call myself stupid when I did these same things. I often say it crystallized when I walked into a mannequin and I apologized. [laughs]

The social psychology field at the time was steeped in what was called the cognitive revolution and so for me, rather than spend the time trying to think how people were thinking it occurred to me to ask whether people were thinking at all. Sadly the answer seemed to be not as often as people think they are.

I’ve read quite a lot recently on irrationalities and how we make decisions. Daniel Kahneman, in his book Thinking, Fast and Thinking Slow, explains there are two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. Where do your observations differ?

Well… system 1 and system 2 were described decades after I first wrote about mindlessness and mindfulness. Still, I probably should have been clearer throughout the many years of my writing so system 2 would not seem to be mindful. Mindfulness requires novelty. Thus, from my perspective both system 1 and system 2 are mindless.

Really?

Yes. System one and system two are more like automatic and controlled processing. Controlled processing …if you’re multiplying for instance 146 by 28 and you’d have to think about it but there is nothing novel in the thinking.

Without the novelty and without noticing new things it’s mindless and that’s why this system two, as he calls it, is effortful, where mindfulness is reasonably effortless. So if you were to say to yourself what number base would you use, base 2 or base 10 or whatever, then you’d be introducing more mindfulness into the activity.

Yes… that makes sense.

It seems way back when, that people talked about people being rational or irrational and mindlessness is neither.

It’s in some sense Arational. It is behaviour that made sense when you first learned it. And then you keep doing it and things change but you’re not aware of the changes so what you’re doing no longer makes sense.

An example I’m fond of when I give talks on this… I ask people who are, say, over 50 that if you’re in the car and it’s skidding on ice, what you do? And people all say you gently pump the brakes.

That made sense before anti-lock brakes. Now, for safety sake, what you need to do is firmly hit the brakes.

You learned things that at the time made sense and now the very thing that you learnt to do to be safe is putting your life at risk.

And there are so many examples of this.

Yes and the thing is, this is what I say all the time, no one thinks that they are mindless because when you are mindless you don’t know that you are not there.

But the 40 years I’ve done research on it tells me clearly that virtually most of the time we’re not there.

I’m actually trying to do this as a daily exercise, trying to uncover where I am stupid at that moment in time. [laughs]

But it’s not about stupidity…

One of the things you mention in your writing and which I think is an excellent example is that one and one isn’t always two…, how it all depends on the context. (one piece of gum added to one piece of gum isn’t two, it’s one piece of gum, just like one pile of sand added to another pile of sand is still one) It is such a wonderful example on how we take certain knowledge for granted.

I spoke to my daughter about this and the next day, she told me she had been whispering to other kids in math class “Hey….you know….one and one isn’t always two!”

That’s great! It’s what we need to do, teach young people to be mindful so that when they grow up it’s a different world than we’re experiencing.

I’m trying to instil that in her. When she was younger I showed her the different perspective pictures,  those where when you look at it the one way it’s an old lady, and the other way it’s a young lady … 

Well… if you do the one with the young lady and the old one, all that you may be doing, if she processes that mindlessly, is think then that it can be one thing or another thing… What I would do, I would show a picture where it is a young lady, an old lady, but also a man. It can be multiple things.

It’s the way you learn it that frees it…the point is, you close yourself off to other opportunities.

Is it possible to mindfully read?

Yes sure, no matter what you’re doing, reading, writing, having an interview, eating a sandwich, playing a sport, you can do it mindfully or mindlessly. And the consequences of doing it one way or the other are enormous.

While you’re reading, if you’re asking yourself questions about the material as you’re taking it in, you read it more conditionally and with some uncertainty rather than you feel you know what will happen. As a result of that you enjoy the reading that much more and you remember more of it and most importantly, you have the material available to you for creative use in another context.

So it can be used as inspiration in a way?

Yes… and if you read about a person and you mindlessly see that person mindlessly as negative that’s all that person is for you. if you recognise the circumstances that led to that person seeming negative. If you turn that around and see how that negative can actually be positive then that same person you’re reading about or interacting with becomes fuller and there are more ways in which you can make use of all that information.

If I see you as an impulsive person I am going to respond to you one way, if I recognise as I’m reading, that I can also see you as spontaneous then if I meet someone who is spontaneous I won’t reject that as a possibility.

And that same method can be applied to writing…

I think what writers often do is take advantage of other people’s mindlessness by setting it up one way and then all of a sudden turn it around, based on how you might have seen the information.

Are you working on any books at the moment?

Yes, right now I’m working on a new book. I’m just finished with the first draft.

It’s a story about possibility again, the psychology of possibility. It started off as a memoir and then it became an idea memoir and now it’s more like my previous books but with many many stories to make it come alive.

I have a chapter on decision making and I go through certain experiences that I had that were problematic and I stop and ask what is the right decision before you find out what happened.

You can only look forward. Looking back, you can clearly see something with a negative outcome has been a wrong decision. Going forward you can’t be privy to all that can happen because overwhelmingly, what we experience is the unpredictable.

Is that a bit like the hindsight bias?

Exactly.

Before the hindsight bias, we had Kierkegaard who said we live our lives going forward and we evaluate it looking back and so what Langer says [laughs] that while we live our lives going forward, without knowing when we look back we need to remember that we couldn’t have known.

And there is a need for uncertainty, if there’s no uncertainty then there’s no reason for a decision.

Once you make the decision, then you’re faced with the road not taken, Even more important than that is, outcomes are neither good nor bad, that is a function of how we view outcomes.

But it’s also the way we look back, isn’t it? I mean, when you have an experience, at that moment in time, you don’t know if it’s actually good or bad until afterwards.

The experience is neither good nor bad, the experience is just the experience, the way you construe it makes it either good or bad or neither.

When people who are young especially, and many people throughout their ages, if there’s something good they have to have it. And often they misbehave to have it. When it´s bad they’ll do everything to get away from it.

When you recognize that the It is neither good nor bad, you can stay still and have a more relaxed life and be less reactive and more responsive about what is going on around you.

If you and I were going for dinner for instance and the food is wonderful that would be great. If the food is awful that is great because I would eat less and I won’t gain weight.

There is a way that one can move through this life where virtually all that they are experiencing is positive and the way to do that mindfully is to know that the It is neither positive nor negative.

I love that…it’s a bit like Cognitive Behavior Therapy, isn’t it? Note: CBT focuses on challenging and changing unhelpful cognitive distortions (e.g. thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes) and behaviors,improving emotional regulation.

Some of my earlier work I think was important to Cognitive Behavior Therapy.

I did research on stress where people who were about to undergo major surgery were taught to reframe the hospital experience and as a result of that they needed less pain relief and left the hospital sooner

It’s not a surprise that there are similarities.

One of the experiments you did that blew my mind is the one with the elderly men … (Her landmark 1979 “counterclockwise” study in which elderly men lived for a week as though it was 1959 and seemed to grow younger)

I read CounterClockwise which details the experiment and I couldn’t stop quoting from it to everyone around me.

One of the things which stood out for me was one of the notions about forgetfulness, that we link that to old age. You describe in the book it doesn’t need to be like that.

Exactly.

And I thought how this applied to myself .. I’m 47 and going towards menopause and I’ve been fearing this for 4 years …

Why? Why are you scared of the menopause?

The thing is…I’m feeling great and I’m doing great and all of a sudden everyone talks about the menopause…wait until it hits and you’re going to get this and that and so I’ve been living in fear…and then I started thinking, what if it is all exaggerated? And after reading your book I decided I’m not going to have the menopause. [laughs]

[laughs] You’re not going to have the negative consequences thereof.

Yes.

It was like that for me, when I would have a hot flash I saw it as I’m losing weight, which is what you do when perspiring. Anything can be recast.

I also thought, what if we can attach a myth to the hot flash… Like when you have a hot flash we have a power surge. [laughs]

[laughs] Good! Perfect!

And you could do something creative with that power surge… If we had been told that…How much better would that be?

I think that is excellent…I think that’s great. [laughs]

This is the thing…most of the things that we were taught, we were taught in an absolute way. There is no science that yields absolute facts…science only gives probabilities, it will only happen some of the time to some of us.

When it is processed as something that is definitely happening to all of us, then we’re setting the stage for self-fulfilling prophecies. Often times we’re overlooking alternative understandings.

Lots of my work with ageing speaks like this.

For instance, when you get older it’s hard to pay attention. Well, that’s ridiculous. The world you’re presented with is not geared for the old. At my age, I’m not interested in a show that is for 20 somethings.

Also the mistake is often thinking I had forgotten it rather than that I didn’t care to learn it in the first place. If you don’t learn it then you can’t forget it. Older people don’t take in the same information as younger do, when they don’t find something interesting.

Kids are forgetful. They just don’t mind it. In my classes, I might ask my students questions about their distant pasts and they haven’t got the faintest idea.

Ah yes! I was talking to a friend with an elderly husband and he woke up and couldn’t remember what day it was. She told me she got all worried thinking it was the beginning of the end. Because I had read your book, I suggested to her that maybe he was just confused and tired that day.

I mean, I get up and sometimes don’t know what day it is…I just put that down to being tired. 

Yes… for me in the summer my schedule is my own. Unless I have tennis matches, it simply doesn’t matter what day it is. The problem is too, when people think someone is losing it, all they do is pay attention to the thing they don’t remember rather than the things they do remember.

How can we be mindful of becoming mindlessly aware? [laughs]

I think possibly the easiest to do so is think how else can that behavior be explained.

How do you deal with criticism? Has your work ever been criticized?

Mostly no. That doesn’t mean there hasn’t been any. I just haven’t been told it to my face. [laughs]

No one argues with the findings, the only thing they might take issue with is with the explanations and the subsequent studies.

I read about the diabetes study., that I found very interesting too…

That was the study where people with diabetes type 2 show up for an experiment and we take all sorts of measurements and then we put them down at a computer to play computer games and we get them to change the games they are playing every 15 minutes. That is just so they look at the clock.

The clock for a 3rd of the people is going twice as fast as real-time, for another third half as fast as real times, and the final other third real-time. The question we asked was if blood sugar follows real or perceived time and the answer is perceived time.

We did another study where type 2 diabetics are given a drink and the label on the drink varies. It either says sugar or no sugar and their blood sugar spikes even though neither drink had sugar in it.

What implication did those particular studies have?

For me the large point of all of the studies is that they all show that we have far greater control over our health than people realise.

Is there a possibility you can make yourself ill by just thinking you are ill?

Yes. Exactly

And also, medical tests are far from perfect.

We’re now doing studies with visual and auditory placebos because again, our hearing and vision perception changes over the day. However, people just assume that the numbers they are given by the doctors are how they see or hear.

And again when you tune into the variability then you have the opportunity to rethink it. If you see that, gee, my vision is good in the morning but not in the afternoon you don’t call it a vision problem. You say you’re tired. So rest.

People are attending to all of the problems…what they need to do is open it that up also to the absence of these problems and the positive version of it.

Has your work ever been misinterpreted?

Yes. Because the first work on mindlessness and mindfulness was conducted in that cognitive revolution, people assumed that mindfulness was a cognitive process and to me it is cognitive, sensory, tactile: it is noticing differences. It doesn’t have to be a deep cognitive process.

The most recent study is we’re finding ways to improve vision and we’ll do hearing touch smell and so on eventually.

In regards to different perspectives…there’s no mention of the use of drugs or psychedelics in any of your books, I’m just thinking of the Harvard, Timothy Learly connection.

And Michael Pollan.

Yes. I read his How To Change Your mind recently and It was surprising. You don’t mention anything about drugs in your works.

[laughs] You can’t mention everything and I don’t have any expertise with it. Everything you ingest potentially changes you, and noticing those changes is mindful.

But you could also use it mindlessly as well as mindfully I assume.

I think…if you were to take a placebo psychedelic that would make you more mindful as you would expect your mind to broaden then you can look at things differently. But I’m not suggesting you should or shouldn’t.

 What specific research are you working on at the moment?

As I mentioned in the Counterclockwise book I believe, we have lots of research on attention to symptom variability which is just a code word for mindfulness. We’re doing this with many diseases. The idea is that once people are given a diagnosis they expect things to stay still or get worse but nothing just gets worse but there are always changes. and noticing those changes becomes an opportunity to control our health.

There’s a study I describe which is of interest to me. If you look at people who are given a diagnosis, there are people whose tests are just slightly below those, so that statistically there is no difference between them, the only difference is one is told they have the disease and the other doesn’t. I want to see across different diseases how the people who essentially have the same symptoms but are not given the diagnosis, fare over time.

What is the most interesting study that you have done? Is there one study that stands out?

[laughs] No, that’s asking who is your favorite child. I’m eager to see when they work and if they don’t, which rarely happens, then that’s a puzzle to me. If I take the time to do them then I find them interesting.

—

Dr. Ellen Langer, Ph.D., is a social psychologist and the first female professor to gain tenure in the Psychology Department at Harvard University. She is the author of eleven books and more than two hundred research articles written for general and academic readers on mindfulness for over 35 years.

Dr. Langer has been described as the “mother of mindfulness” and has written extensively on the illusion of control, mindful aging, stress, decision-making, and health. Among other honors, she is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and three Distinguished Scientist Awards, the World Congress Award, the NYU Alumni Achievement Award, and the Staats award for Unifying Psychology. Most recently she received the Liberty Science Genius Award.

Dr. Langer is a frequent speaker on mindfulness at academic, professional and public events. She is also the founder of The Langer Mindfulness Institute, and is a gallery exhibiting artist.

Find out more about her on her Website http://www.ellenlanger.com

She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

 THE MINDFUL BODY

Bestselling author, and ‘mother of mindfulness’, Ellen J. Langer makes her long-awaited return sharing her groundbreaking research in The Mindful Body.

Have you ever wondered if you could improve your health by harnessing the power of your mind?

When it comes to our health, too many of us feel trapped by a medical diagnosis, believing that it can only mean a static or worsening condition. Whether it is stiff knees, frayed nerves or failing eyesight, your mind can lead you to believe things will only get worse. But with practical steps and scientific research you can take control of your mindset, by using your thoughts and perspective to help improve your wellbeing.

In The Mindful Body, award-winning social psychologist Ellen J. Langer draws on her lifetime of expertise and trailblazing research by revealing the capacity that mindfulness has to transform our lives. Opening the door to her pioneering Harvard lab, Langer uncovers the secret of how the mind and the body are in fact a single system, and if we embrace the idea of mind-body unity, new possibilities for controlling our health become available to us.

Featuring autobiographical anecdotes, iconoclastic philosophy and cutting-edge research, The Mindful Body will help you navigate a path to improved health and wellbeing and in turn boost your cognitive capabilities so that you can take back control of your body for a brighter future.

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, Interviews, On Writing