279 | Ellen Langer on Mindfulness and the Body

0:00:02.3 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. The idea of mindfulness has received quite a bit of currency in public discourse in the past few years. It's usually associated, very closely, with the idea of meditation, some sort of careful thought in quiet contemplation to looking in on what are the chitter-chattering thoughts flying through your brain, and trying to observe them and understand them and so forth. Today's guest, Ellen Langer, who is a psychologist at Harvard, is the pioneer of mindfulness. In fact, she is known, somewhat affectionately, as the mother of mindfulness. But she doesn't, for the most part, pursue it in the context of meditation. For Ellen, mindfulness is something much more active and pervasive and in some sense, easy. It doesn't require nearly as much discipline as you might worry about if meditation is your game. And what she has been doing over the last several decades is studying the effects of being mindful, both on our psychology and on our physiology. So by mindful, she just means literally paying attention to what is going on, to not let yourself fall into a cognitive rut where you assume that you know what is going on and therefore move forward with it, but instead really see, really hear, really perceive what is going on. And this simple idea, I mean, it really does... It is that simple as far as I can tell, has kind of amazing benefits.

0:01:40.1 SC: So we'll talk about some of the psychological benefits. But Ellen came out with a new book at the end of last year called The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health, which is about the physiological, the health benefits of mindfulness. And it's very interesting, she has a lot of studies, right? This is very data-based, and some of the results of these studies are kind of amazing. They typically start with people who are not being mindful about something and either use that to show them how to improve in some way. If you start paying attention to this or if you think about this thing in a different way, I'm speaking in vague generalities here so I want you to listen to the podcast, not just the introduction. But kind of amazing health benefits accrue. You can think of it as kind of like the placebo effect. You take some pill that really isn't anything at all and your mind coaxes your body into getting better. But turning that on its head to make it much more intentional and cognitive and active rather than tricking yourself, just thinking yourself into feeling younger, healing faster, generally being more healthy. So I mean the data are there. We talked about the fact that we don't really understand the neurological physiological basis for what is going on, but it's a phenomenon that needs to be explained and maybe needs to be taken advantage of by more of us, both in our everyday lives and when we go to the doctors for something bad happening.

0:03:11.3 SC: So I think it's a very interesting perspective on not only just how to feel better and be healthier, but how to live your life in a slightly more mindful way. So with that, let's go.

[music]

0:03:40.5 SC: Ellen Langer, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

0:03:44.6 Ellen Langer: My pleasure to be here, Sean.

0:03:45.5 SC: So you obviously talk about mindfulness a lot. You were talking about it long before it became a thing in the popular imagination. And these days, I think a lot of people immediately think of mindful meditation, but that is not exactly your angle here. So I thought we would just clear up that possible confusion right away.

0:04:06.6 EL: That's a wonderful place to start. I did research on meditation decades ago, but the work that I focus on is mindfulness without meditation. What people need to understand is that meditation isn't mindfulness. It's a practice you undergo to result in presumably post-meditative mindfulness. The work and that... And meditation is wonderful, but this is different. Mindfulness as I study it, is not a practice. It's a way of being that follows from a certain understanding of the world. And I'll explain what that means in just a moment. What's amazing to me, Sean, is that it's so easy and the consequences are so enormous, it almost defies belief. All you need to do is notice. Now, if you ask people, are they noticing? Of course, right? And so when I start lectures, what I often do is give them an instance where they're going to reveal their own mindlessness because 45 years of research has shown me that sadly, virtually all of us, almost all the time, are not there. The thing is that when you're not there, you're not there to know you're not there, but we're not there. And the reason we're not there is essentially because we know. If you knew what I was going to say next, why would you bother listening to me? And what people don't appreciate, and you as a first-rate physicist know better than I or most people, that uncertainty is the rule. It's not the exception.

0:05:49.8 EL: No matter what you're thinking about, looking at, can be seen, understood in different ways. Everything is always changing. Everything looks different from different perspectives. But we hold it still. And then what we do is we confuse the stability of our mindsets with the underlying phenomena. Now, the odd thing about this is that people hold things still and they want to know absolutely what something is in order to control it. But the very process of holding it still, when in fact it's varying, robs us from the control we would have. So I often start these talks and I might ask, the one thing that people are sure they know is how much is one plus one? And I must tell you that if I ask somebody this, not on a podcast, I have no doubt that they're going to look at me like I'm crazy or try not to laugh at me because everybody knows how much one plus one is. So, Sean, I'm sure you know, but how much is one plus one?

0:06:52.7 SC: I know. It's two, but I know... I'm just giving you the answer you want. [chuckle]

0:06:58.2 EL: Thank you. And I expect that to happen for the whole podcast. It'll be great. So one plus one is two if you're using the base 10 number system. If you're using the base two number system, one plus one is written as 10. And most people don't know there are different number systems, and that's okay. If you add one pile of sand plus one pile of sand, one plus one is one. If you add one cloud plus one cloud, one plus one is one. One wand of chewing gum plus one wand of chewing gum... Okay, so that in the real world, one plus one doesn't equal two probably as or more often as it does. Now, just think about it. Now that you know that, if somebody else were going to say to you, "Hey, Sean, [chuckle] you're a smart guy. How much is one plus one?" You wouldn't mindlessly say two. What you do is pay some attention to the context and you'd give a mindful answer and you'd say, "It could be two," which is very different. So this is the case for all of the facts that we learned. And let me tell you something that I say often, but it's so important. It changed my life. I was at a horse event and this man asked me if I'd watch his horse for him because he was going to get his horse a hot dog. Well, I'm an A+ student, just like you. Nobody knows better. Some may know as well, horses don't eat meat. It's that simple. They're herbivorous.

0:08:26.7 EL: And I'm trying to keep myself from being evaluative. How could you go get your horse a hot dog? So I say nicely, "Go. I'm happy to watch your horse." He comes back with the hot dog and the horse ate it. And that's when I realized that everything I thought I knew could be wrong. And there's something really sweet about that, Sean, that all of us who got these As because we memorized everything are going to be wrong an awful lot. And those who didn't memorize them in the first place, there'll be instances where these C and D students surpass us. But at any rate, what it suggested to me was that all sorts of possibilities exist, things that we reject because of this learned, over-learned information that's simply wrong in some context. And so you take those two facts, and you say, "Well, wait a second. If I don't know, what happens is that a lot of people then become scared." If you know, and I don't know, I've got to either pretend, avoid you, or just be in the interaction stress. What people need to understand is it doesn't make sense to make a personal attribution for not knowing. I don't know, but it's knowable. Instead they should make it universal. Nobody knows. And once you know nobody knows, then everything becomes potentially new and exciting again. So the process of being mindful, you can achieve it in two ways.

0:10:07.6 EL: One is you just spend time noticing new things about the things you thought you knew. The person you live with, if you live with anybody, three new things about them, and all of a sudden you'll see, gee, you don't know them as well as you thought you did. And then your attention naturally goes there. Or you can accept what I'm saying, test it for yourself, that we don't know. And if you start off knowing that you don't know anything, you sit up for everything. And you're not sort of a victim of the mindsets that plague most people. So I made a statement, and let me just throw this out also.

0:10:52.4 SC: Yeah.

0:10:56.3 EL: In a slide that I used to use, I would say virtually, and I mean really all. Okay, but you know, we're academics, we're not supposed to be so. And also I'm talking about the absolutes not making sense, so in some sense it wouldn't make sense anyway. But my belief is virtually all of our problems, personal, interpersonal, professional, global, are the direct or indirect result of our mindlessness. So now if you think about how easy it is to change from being mindless to being mindful, wow, all sorts of things happen. And I have 45 years of research showing some of these very big effects. You want me to let you ask the question? 'Cause I'm like a machine now. I can just keep talking.

0:11:45.6 SC: We're gonna get to the studies 'cause the studies are amazing. And that's my favorite part of this. But It's interesting the emphasis you just placed on the role of uncertainty, 'cause that's something maybe not what I would have guessed. I'm completely sympathetic to the idea that we human beings tend to either think that the probability of something is zero or one, either it's false or it's true, and we find that value. And so you're saying that one big aspect of being mindful is accepting the uncertainty in all these things that we like to think are true or false?

0:12:19.8 EL: Yeah, because when you're thinking of anything, rather than come up with a single answer, you're able to come up with multiple answers and so then you can't be sure if any of them are correct. But the way most of us have been brought up... And it happens. It affects our relationships, it affects our understanding of how we can positively affect our health, it affects everything. But if I say that you're an X, whatever that is, okay? Then what I'm going to do is just look for confirmation every time you do this stupid thing, right? But if I'm mindful, I'm not generalizing across all situations, all hours of the day, whatever. And then I'd be more likely to notice, "Well, gee, you are actually very kind," just a moment before. And so my thinking that you're a little gruff, which of course I don't. If I knew you better, I might, but I don't.

[chuckle]

0:13:19.0 EL: And anyway, so the main idea is that because you're no longer faced with single answers, the world becomes much more interesting. You have many more choices. And all of that relies on an appreciation of uncertainty. And it's interesting to me because people love choice. And I did some early research where we gave elderly people choices and they live longer. So choice is important. So they love choice, but they're afraid of doubt.

0:13:53.9 SC: Oh, yeah.

0:13:54.0 EL: And you can't have choice unless you have doubt. So we need to change our understanding of some of these things.

0:14:05.4 SC: So, is there some kind of systematic way of delineating what things we tend to notice and be mindful of versus what things we just assume and let run in the background?

0:14:17.9 EL: Do you know the famous gorilla study?

0:14:22.9 SC: Oh, yes. I do.

[overlapping conversation]

0:14:25.6 EL: Yeah. Okay, so people are playing a little bit... People are watching a video of basketball game, and in the middle of the game, somebody dressed in a gorilla suit walks on the court, and people don't notice it. So what you notice is what you've been taught to expect. I did a study that was the same thing, only not nearly as dramatic and fun many years, many years ago. Well, before that, where we simply gave people an index card and asked them to read it. And the index card would have on it something like, "Mary had a a little lamb." Or "I love Paris in the the springtime." And I'd show you the card and you'd read, "Mary had a little lamb." I'd say, "Okay, I'll pay you for accuracy." Mary had a little lamb. How many words are on the card? It doesn't matter. People see what they expect to say. So in some sense, the more we learn, the less we know.

0:15:21.5 SC: Oh, okay, very good. Okay, so one other thing I wanna get on the table before we dive into the specific studies that you've done is the role of time in all of this. In particular, sometimes we talk about living in the moment, being present. And is that related to the kind of mindfulness you're talking about?

0:15:43.4 EL: Yeah. It's kind of interesting that it's a very nice thing to tell somebody to be in the moment. But it's an empty instruction for the reason I already gave you that when you're not there, you're not there to know you're not there. So what I'm doing is basically telling you how to be in the moment and just by noticing new things. And that will put you in the moment. And the thing that if we can... If I contrast it, let's say with meditation, which is 20 minutes, twice a day in practice, you see how easy this kind of mindfulness is. That if you came to visit me, you've never been to my house, you don't have to practice being mindful. You'd walk in, you'd say, "Oh, did she do those paintings? What is she... What is that?" And as you're doing that, when you're actively noticing, the neurons are firing. And 45 years of research has shown that it's literally and figuratively enlivening. So it feels good. You can't be happy and feeling good unless you're being mindful.

0:16:51.2 SC: Good. Although it does, I guess...

[overlapping conversation]

0:16:54.3 EL: You can be... You should be mindful all the time. But if I say that to people, then they shudder because they think of mindfulness as thinking and they don't understand thinking either, where thinking isn't hard. What is hard is the fear that you're not going to be able to figure it out or do it well. So I think people should be mindful all the time unless two conditions are met. One, you found the very best way of doing something, and two, nothing changes. And clearly, I think those conditions are never going to...

[laughter]

0:17:28.4 SC: That's rare. [laughter]

0:17:30.6 EL: Otherwise, if you're going to do it, if you're going to do it, be there.

0:17:34.6 SC: Yeah, okay. But so I'm probably completely on board with this. But if I wanted to raise a worry, it would be, it sounds exhausting. It sounds like it's going to take energy for me to do this.

0:17:46.7 EL: No. That's what I was just saying. Could you be having fun all day long? I do. If that sounds appealing, this is the way to do it. We have data, if it were necessary to present, that it's energy begetting, not consuming. That it's not exhausting. Again, and what's exhausting is the fear that you're going to do it wrong, that some negative consequence is going to occur. So on and so forth. But the act of noticing is the essence of it all. What everyone wants. [laughter]

0:18:32.9 SC: Yeah, let's be a little sciencey here and put some data on the...

0:18:39.1 EL: Yeah.

0:18:40.3 SC: You claim that people are not as mindful as they could be. How do we judge?

0:18:43.6 EL: Oh, I don't claim, I assert. I don't claim.

0:18:47.1 SC: Okay.

0:18:48.9 EL: Claiming already sounds like I shouldn't do it.

0:18:49.6 SC: Oh, no. I claim things all the time, all in favor of it. But how do we measure it? How do we know how mindful versus mindless people are being?

0:19:02.4 EL: Well, there are many ways, let's say I gave you... If you were mindful, and we've been using this, actually as silly as it sounds, if I give you an index card and you read Mary had a little lamb. And it says Mary had a a little lamb, you're mindless, if you... For me, I became aware of this, what is it, 45 years ago when I had walk into a mannequin in the store and I'd say, I'm sorry, I mean, what's going on there? And then we do this all the time. There are two ways of becoming mindless. One is you do it over and over and over again, until you now are sure you can do it without thinking, which people mistakenly try to make these behaviors second nature. Now, the problem with that is that once you make it second nature, you're never going to improve and circumstances are going to change. And do you want to lock yourself in when you're 20 years old, because when you're 32, you may be stronger, wiser, and so on as you get older.

0:20:14.6 EL: So, you don't want to put yourself on automatic pilot. The way that we become mindless, that's more pernicious, I think is, where we learn to be mindless on a single occasion. And that's, your teacher tells you, for example, one-on-one is two, horses don't eat meat. You just accept it and you accept it because you're oblivious to future circumstances where you might need that information. Now, when you process something mindlessly, it's not available anymore, it's not available for you to play with it and say, "Well, maybe this time, not under those circumstances". And so on.

0:21:01.9 EL: So how do you measure it? You throw in a monkey wrench, and do people see it? Or trip over it? That, you can... Two people can be doing the same thing, one mindlessly and one mindfully. But the next thing that they're doing might very well reveal which state of mind they were in.

0:21:25.0 SC: Okay.

0:21:25.3 EL: It's also, we have a lot of data now about how when you're mindful people find you more attractive, more trustworthy, when you're mindful, the neurons are firing, it's... There are probably many physiological measures that we could take, but I think people in some sense... Everybody's heard the expression of a lights on, but nobody's home.

0:21:51.1 SC: Yeah.

0:21:52.8 EL: We sort of know when somebody, they have one oar in the water or whatever, that we know when somebody's not there. And now I'm giving people a label for it.

0:22:04.2 SC: Right. So it's little bit contrast with...

0:22:07.9 EL: And in these studies, well, let me just say. In the studies, each study we make one group mindful, at least one group and not the other groups. And we have many, many measures. It depends on, what we're having them do, but as we talk about the research, that'll be clearer. What were you saying?

0:22:28.6 SC: I did talk to a couple of neuroscientists, who are interested in music and sports, and they were interested in the phenomenon of being in the zone where you're kind of not being too cognitive and mindful. Is there compatibility between that?

0:22:45.5 EL: Yeah, yeah. No, it's totally... It's the same thing, the noticing new things is a means to get to that place where you just are.

0:23:00.6 SC: Okay.

0:23:00.8 EL: So, and we can call that, the zone, so to speak, it's interesting because... Well, we called him Mickey, I can't pronounce his name, who studied flow when he was alive, and he was a personality psychologist. I'm a social psychologist. So we were talking to different audiences and people would ask him, "Well, how is flow related to mindfulness?" And people would ask me, "How is mindfulness related to flow?" And very, very similar with one very important difference. The flow state was taken to be something very rare, and being mindful is something available to all of us virtually all the time. But in both cases...

[overlapping conversation]

0:23:43.1 SC: Is there some sense in which in the flow state or being in the zone, you're mindful to the right things to the relevant things? Or is that a misapprehension.

0:23:56.7 EL: No. Yeah. No, I don't know how we would know what was relevant, people often confuse mindfulness with vigilance, for example. And it's very different because when you're mindful, in some sense, and this might sound too California but it's like a soft openness. So if I'm on a horseback riding through the woods, if I were vigilant, I may watch out for the branch so I don't get knocked off the horse as I go flying past it. And in the meantime, what happens is I don't see the boulder that my horse now trips over.

0:24:38.6 SC: Okay.

0:24:39.2 EL: If I'm mindful, I'm not looking for something in particular, I'm just aware.

0:24:44.7 SC: I see.

0:24:46.8 EL: But certainly you point out, that I can be mindful about content A and not mindful about content B, and you can't be mindful of everything at the same time. But one of the... I'm pretty sure that you're best off not being mindless with respect to anything. So you're either being mindful or potentially mindful, but as soon as you think you know, you don't tune in, you're not noticing subtleties and you're giving up control.

0:25:22.1 SC: So one of the studies that you did, which will lead us into others, is with the classical musicians, where they've been playing the same pieces over and over again, and you encouraged them to be a little bit more mindful. Can you tell us about that?

0:25:36.1 EL: Yeah, and all we did was we had musicians symphony playing either mindfully or mindlessly. The mindless group they all played the same piece of music. Remember a time you played this piece and you were pleased with your performance. Can you just try to replicate it? It's gonna be the same always, that the mindless group, it's gonna be same old, same old. The mindful group is find something new. So for the mindful group, they were told, remember when you played this before, now we'd like you to make it new in very subtle ways that only you would know they're playing classical music. So it has to be subtle. Otherwise...

0:26:17.1 SC: Very subtle. Yes.

0:26:17.1 EL: All right. And we taped the, performances. And we asked the musicians, how much they enjoyed playing. They always enjoyed playing it mindfully, making it new, because they're present while they're doing it. And we then played the recordings for people who don't know that it was a study, and they overwhelmingly preferred the mindfully played piece. What was most interesting to me about this study was that when I wrote it up, I realized how it spoke to leadership, in a way that was not part of my original, understanding of what we were doing. Here you have, superior coordinated experience by everybody doing their own thing. So if everybody is in the same... And it led me to believe that the major role for the leader is to create this, the situation to promote other people's mindfulness, which you're more likely to do as a leader when you realize you don't know what the best thing is going to be.

0:27:34.3 EL: It's kind of funny as an aside, when you're hiring big shots, you're hiring a CEO for a mega company or what have you. You're always hiring people for yesterday.

0:27:48.5 SC: Yeah.

0:27:49.0 EL: Not for tomorrow. And so, in some way, we really don't know who the best people are going to be. We really don't know exactly what course of action anybody should take in advance. And so the best thing to do is to promote everybody's awareness of the ongoing situation.

0:28:12.4 SC: There is a stereotype of the genius orchestra conductor or architect or whatever, that they kind of don't let everyone do their own thing, that they're a little bit hyper controlling, but you're saying there's another mode of success they could tap into.

0:28:28.5 EL: Yeah. Yeah. But I think it depends on the performance, that if I am... When I'm writing, it doesn't really matter to me what the publishers may think and editor might... At that moment it's mine. So, that I could at those moments, I guess when I'm rejecting their help look the way you've just described. So it depends on what they're doing. And it also depends on who the... What the group is... Who composes the group. I mean let's assume for a moment that you are a spectacular genius and you're dealing with people who have very little experience. They know very little, they care very little. That could be a situation where in fact, you probably want to just go solo.

0:29:18.7 SC: You mentioned writing, which is very close to home for me, I guess in the previous examples that you mentioned, I was thinking about something physically active playing a sport or an instrument or walking around or whatever. But so mindfulness... So what does it mean to be mindful when I'm writing? Do I make sure not to use my favorite phrases over and over again, or how do I...

[overlapping conversation]

0:29:42.2 EL: No, no, I don't think so. Yeah, well, probably, you wouldn't know you were using the same phrases until you stopped and you were reading it over. And then you could be mindful and say, how else might I say this? But what I find when I'm writing, same thing when I'm painting, that I'm not really... It's like something takes over. So, and that's like what you were saying before about being in the zone or what have you. I think that, yeah. How would you teach somebody to write mindfully? It's interesting. There are so many natural things that we would do if we weren't taught indirectly to be stressed, because, many people are having trouble writing. It's because they're stressed. It's not because there's trouble writing. And it's always... It's interesting because mindfulness is a process. I could have called it being creative, a mundane creativity, but I think people have a misguided notion about creativity and focus on the outcome. And when you're being mindful, in some sense, it's all about process that oddly tends to lead to a better outcome.

0:31:12.9 SC: And I think when you mentioned the stress, that's very... That's the stress of writing, that seems to hit on a central point that we're going to keep coming to again and again. That I've perceived in the studies you've done, which is this difference between what we're taught to expect and then what we actually come across. I mean, a lot of this seems to be loosen your expectations or let go of your favorite expectations...

[overlapping conversation]

0:31:38.6 EL: Yeah, exactly. No, exactly. That's why, and if we were teaching ourselves or somebody else to be mindful, all the content would be given conditionally. It would seem that it could be one way of looking at it, perhaps, rather than is, so one plus one is not two, you would say one plus one could be two from this perspective one plus one is two and so on.

0:32:02.3 SC: Right, exactly.

0:32:04.1 EL: Yeah. And that keeps it all looser. And as it's looser, if that's the right term for us here, that keeps much more available for us, and then allows us to be more creative.

0:32:20.6 SC: So you've mentioned some of the psychological benefits. I was just gonna give you an opportunity to tell... How do we measure those psychological benefits? You even mentioned that people are more charismatic, I mean, are they happier? What are the things that we can quantify about when you train them to be mindful they get better at?

0:32:40.1 EL: Well, it depends on the specifics, but, there are lots of nonverbal measures of charisma and happiness and what have you. If you are playing a part in a movie and you were supposed to be sad, you wouldn't be smiling, you'd be slouched over, you wouldn't be making eye contact, so on.

0:33:02.7 SC: Right.

0:33:03.5 EL: I think that maybe in the world of physics that you live in, there are cross context measures. In most of these studies, it really depends that if I'm doing a study with elderly people and I am going to make them more mindful, and we've done this several times, the most, sort of the biggest dependent measure is longevity. So they live longer. Now, you can't do that if I'm doing a study with 20 year olds. Making them more mindful. I'm not gonna live long enough to know if in fact they live longer. So it really is...

0:33:46.6 SC: Yeah.

0:33:48.1 EL: Experiment specific in some ways.

0:33:53.4 SC: Good. Well, that brings us to a very famous set of experiments when we get to the physiological effects here. So tell us about the counterclockwise study, which I bet that some audience members have heard of, but some have not.

0:34:05.9 EL: Yeah. Well, those who haven't heard, and I have to go get a sandwich or something right now, so they won't hear me describe it, just have to tune in to the Simpsons, go to Havana. And in that episode they described as silly. So it's been out there for a while. This was the first test of the mind body unity idea. I spent a lot of time... I'm very sensitive to language, and I don't buy into a lot of the things that other people seem to, for better or worse. And I'm thinking, mind, body, they're just words. And they're words that I think have confused and prevented lots of progress, because if you imagine you have a mind and a body, then the important question is how do you get from this fuzzy thing called a thought to something material, the body? And there's no easy answer to that, but everybody has experienced it. I have fun stories in my new book, the Mindful Body. Started as a memoir. So I have lots of examples. I'm gonna hopefully try to remember how to get back to where I was going, 'cause I wanna give you this example. Everybody, can generate their own.

0:35:21.0 EL: So I was married when I was young. We go to Paris for our honeymoon. I order a mixed grill. On the mixed grill is pancreas. Now, because I was just married, I felt I'm a woman of the world. I felt obliged to eat this pancreas, but the thought of it, was not appealing to me. I asked my then husband, which of these things is the pancreas? He points to something. I eat everything else with gusto. Now the moment of truth, will I be able to eat the pancreas? I start eating it, and I literally get sick. Then he inappropriately starts laughing, "Here, I'm sick. Why are you laughing?" And he said, "Because that's chicken. You ate the pancreas a while ago".

[overlapping conversation]

0:36:11.9 EL: So I'm eating chicken. I love chicken... And I'm literally becoming ill. All right. If you see somebody, regurgitate, you yourself start to feel ill, but how to explain it as a scientist is a whole different thing. I said, okay, I wanna argue it's better just to see, the mind and body as a single unit, which would mean anything that's happening on any level is more or less simultaneously happening on every level.

0:36:39.8 EL: Every thought is affecting every part of your body, even though we know we don't have the equipment, sophisticated enough to measure how your toes, let's say, are different, as you're smiling.

0:36:53.0 SC: Yep.

0:36:54.0 EL: And every moment is affecting your cognitive life as well. Okay, so I said, let's put the mind and body back together. Now wherever you put the mind, you're necessarily putting the body. So the first test of this was the Counterclockwise study where we took a retreat. It was a... Had been a monastery. We got rid of all the religious icons. We decorated it to, same to be 20 years earlier, as well as we could on a little budget. Then we had elderly men live there for a week as if they were their younger selves. So there were lots of discussions that they had every day. Those discussions were about past events, but they were discussing them as if they were just unfolding. So everything was now, for this group, a comparison group, where did everything exactly the same except they talked about the past as if it were the past. They knew now was now, and then was that. All right, so by putting their mind in this younger place, we found their vision improved, their hearing improved, their memory, their strength, and they looked noticeably younger. Now I don't know about you, but I still to this date have never heard of an elderly person's hearing improved without medical intervention.

0:38:23.6 EL: So it was quite astounding. So then when I say they looked younger, measurably younger, because you're a man of measurement, but in all honesty, they didn't look 20 years.

0:38:35.2 SC: Okay, sure.

0:38:35.3 EL: So now... Okay, so then we went on in the Mindful Body I report a host of these Mind Body Unity studies. I'll give you the next one in the series because it speaks to something really interesting that just occurred to me recently.

0:38:53.7 EL: All right, we take chambermaids, and we first ask these chambermaids these are people who are cleaning hotel motel rooms, whatever, how much exercise do you get? Well, because the surgeon general describes exercise as what you do after work, and they just too tired, they don't think they're getting any exercise. All right, so we take lots of measures, the study is very simple. We divide them into two groups, and one group we teach them that their work is exercise, making a bed is like working at this machine at the gym, and so on. So we have two groups there. One group that knows their work is exercise, the other group that is unaware of it. We want to make sure they're not eating any differently, they're not exercising any more, they're not working any harder, everything is the same except for they change in their mindset. Now that they saw their work as exercise, they lost weight, there was a change in waist to hip ratio, body mass index, and their blood pressure. Which is remarkable, right?

0:40:00.6 SC: Oh, yeah.

0:40:00.8 EL: But I've recently been thinking okay, so everybody knows about placebos, which is probably the strongest validation of the mind body unity idea. You take a nothing, a sugar pill, it's got to be a nerd, or else it's not a placebo. You take it thinking that it's going to make you better, and it makes you better. This study with the chambermaids was a test of the nocebo effect. The nocebo effect is something that would have a positive effect, but not knowing that or believing that it's harmful gets rid of that positive effect. I don't remember who it was, but somebody did a study with Ipecac. Ipecac is supposed to make you vomit. You give it to somebody who's just ingesting poison, accidentally, presumably. Well, so people who are vomiting were given Ipecac, remember, designed to make you vomit, but they were told it would stop your vomiting and it stopped the vomiting. Very powerful. All right. The new thought was that I've been spending so many years, so much time each year, trying to persuade people of mind body unity. I realize people don't even have a sense of body unity.

0:41:23.7 EL: What I mean by that is that anything, to my mind, that you're doing for any part of your body will affect your whole body. But I think it will only as with the chambermaid and the exercise affect your whole body, if you believe it will affect your whole body. So we're doing a little study now when we have people lifting weights to shape their arms and increase their biceps where they either are taught about the whole body is connected or they're not taught that. And then we'll measure their stomach muscles, the calves and so on. So there's something very... Think about it, Sean, that if you're given medication, let's, okay, will make you very depressed, you're seeing a therapist, the therapist gives you antidepressants, that if the antidepressants don't work, what the therapist is likely to do is either change the medication or up the dosage. When it's probably, or possibly the case, all they need to do is to tell you how you need to be an active member of your own healthcare.

0:42:40.5 EL: And so at any rate. So let me... I'll give you just one. There's so many of these studies, but the most recent, this is a study Peter Engel and I just did where we inflict a wound, a minor wound, and we have people in front of a clock. And I know Peter contacted you about this study early on. You were very sweet to respond. I don't remember what he asked you or what you said. So I'm assuming it was brilliant and certainly helped.

[overlapping conversation]

0:43:08.4 EL: Anyway, okay. So we have people, we have three groups of people. Unbeknownst to them, to all of them. For a third of them, the clock is going twice as fast as real time. For a third of them, the clock is going half as fast as real time. For a third of them, it's real time. The question we're asking is, will that wound heal based on perceived time, what the clock tells you, or real time? And the answer is perceived time.

0:43:41.3 EL: We have people in a sleep lab, they wake up, we fool again with the clock. It tells you you got two hours more sleep than you did, two hours fewer, or the amount of sleep you got. And biological and cognitive processes seem to follow perceived amount of sleep. We have many of these studies, all suggesting that we have far more control over our health than people realize.

0:44:08.8 EL: And it's interesting because most people think even with something like fatigue, it's only humanly possible to do whatever before you just can't take it. Which may be the case, may not. All I know is we're nowhere near, nowhere near where I think we can be physically. It's interesting because there was a fun study that Frank Beach did back in the 50s, I think. He'd take a little boy rat, introduce a little girl rat, and they'd copulate. And then a little boy rat, as you can identify, just can't take anymore. He needs a rest, a refract. Okay. Now, if instead of giving him that rest, immediately he's introduced to a new little girl rat. So a whole different context, right? He was with Mary now, he's with Susan. He's ready to go right away. And a way of thinking of this is imagine you're word processing all day long, backwards, and you're exhausted, and then you go home and you play the piano. Doing the same thing, but it's not the same thing. At any rate. Where was I headed with this? Oh, yes. I asked about fatigue as a psychological construct, rather than we have mind bodies, so you know, it's physical, it has nothing to do with your mind. I asked my students how far is it humanly possible to run?

0:45:41.1 EL: And they know a marathon's 26 miles, and they know that can't possibly be it. So they say 28. Somebody else says 30. It becomes like an auction until somebody says 50 miles. And everybody groans and then so. Then I play a video of the Tarahumara, which is a tribe in Copper Canyon, Mexico. They're able to run at least 200 miles without stopping. That's a very big difference. I couldn't imagine myself even running a marathon, no less 50 miles. But even if we take 50 and compare it to 200, and that represents the difference that I believe from where we are and where we can be. And part of the way of getting there is to recognize two things. One is that everything is mutable. Now what I mean by that is everything that is was at one point a decision, which means there was uncertainty, which means there were alternatives. So if it doesn't work for you, change it. The other is about stress. And I'm mixing and matching here. I'm probably going to lose people in the process. But you can ask me to speak further about any of these.

0:47:04.2 EL: That years and years ago, a few decades ago, the medical world, the medical model believed that psychology was irrelevant to illness. Now, doctors are nice people, caring. So I'm sure they wanted you to be happy. But the belief was that it's irrelevant to whether you're going to be sick or well. The only way you're going to get sick is the introduction of an in [0:47:27.9] ____ Now everybody knows stress is not so good. My feeling is much more extreme, which won't surprise you now that you know my research. I believe actually that stress is the major killer. And that if I was going to do this research before COVID, and it's never happened, it's too complicated, so it probably won't. But what I wanted to do was to take people, a few hundred people who were just diagnosed with cancer, vary the cancer. And then you have to, if you're given a dread diagnosis, you need a little while to adjust to it.

0:48:08.0 SC: Sure.

0:48:08.0 EL: But let's say we go back after three weeks and measure now every week how stressed people are. My belief, and again, I don't have any data for this. My belief is that that measure of stress will be the best indicator of how the disease will unfold better than nutrition, even better than genetics, better than treatment. And if you read the medical literature, which we've got so many literatures to read, neither of us are fully upon it but. Every other day there's another disease that's found to suffer an enormous impact from stress. And stress is psychological.

0:48:55.9 EL: Events don't cause stress. What causes stress are the views we take of events. If you're mindful now, you have multiple views and can choose how to understand the situation. I have a one-liner for people since my goal is in part to reduce everybody's stress. When next time you're stressed, ask yourself, is it a tragedy or an inconvenience?

0:49:20.4 EL: It's almost... I miss the bus. I didn't get the project done on time. I bang the car. It's almost never a tragedy. So then you breathe and put things back in perspective. Or if people are worried about something and they just said to themselves, remember the last three times you were worried. Because chances are the thing that you were worried about didn't even happen. And if it did happen, if we're talking about it today, you've probably got through it.

0:49:50.0 EL: So it's sort of no worry before it's time. And so the more mindful the less stressed one is, the less stressed one is, the healthier one is going to be.

0:50:03.6 SC: Well as a physicalist, this is fascinating to me. Philosophically, I think that there is not a distinction between the mind and the body. The mind is an aspect of the body. I'm not René Descartes. But you're sort of going way beyond that to say that not only is the mind a manifestation that a physical thing is happening in our body. But there's this feedback loop or this tight interconnection between what we think of as the mind and what we think of as the body. Maybe more than most doctors would be willing to countenance.

0:50:35.6 EL: Yeah. Oh no. I think what I was telling you about the nocebo. Now there's nocebo literature that goes back a long time. But it was only recently that I myself recognized the importance of some of these things. I don't know where to go after that.

0:50:57.5 SC: Okay. Well, I can ask the next question, which is, again, I want to sort of get straight on the mindfulness aspect of it because in the clock study when you had different clocks running at different...

0:51:09.5 EL: Oh, in those clock studies. Yes, I think that's really important. There I'm making use of people's mindlessness.

0:51:18.3 SC: Oh, okay.

0:51:20.1 EL: So let's say the chambermaid study, if you grew up in some place in the world where nobody talked about exercise, nobody had a conception of exercise, then my telling you, your work is exercise is not going to have the effect.

0:51:36.5 SC: I see. So you're saying that our everyday mindlessness...

0:51:39.9 EL: So if you had a mindless notion... Exactly, exactly. And that if you right now you're 90 years old and you mindlessly believe that you're... As you get older, everything falls apart, then everything is going to fall apart. So now I put you in a time when everything was quite together and you were healthy and you mindlessly believe that it will play out. The point of those studies is just to show what we're capable of bringing about. But eventually, people can, for instance, give themselves a placebo. But if you took a placebo... If you were in a study where you were given a placebo, which probably has strongest medication, and some really major disorder was now healed, and the medical world told you, hey, look, that was just a placebo. So you must realize you did it yourself. And so that you're capable of doing it yourself. So then maybe we wouldn't need the placebo.

0:52:47.8 EL: So I talked about this treatment we've come up with that makes use of all of this, that you can do... It was my way of giving ourselves a placebo. When you're diagnosed with some dread disorder, chronic illness, most people believe that it's only going... It's going to stay the same or get worse. Nothing stays the same and nothing moves in only one direction. So the stock market goes up. It doesn't go up in a straight line. It goes up and goes down a little bit. It goes up and it's sort of a stepwise kind of thing. So nothing stays the same. But we're holding it the same. We're not attending to when we're feeling better. So what we did across a host of diseases, was simply call people and say, so how is it not saying back pain? It doesn't matter what the symptom is. This thing is called attention to symptom variability, which is just a fancy name for mindfulness. Because when you're mindful, you're noticing change. All right. So we say, how is it now and is it better or worse than before? And why? Well, four things happened with all of this. The first now that you're doing something, you feel good. All right. Because when you have an illness and you're dependent on the medical world, you become helpless and that takes its toll.

0:54:10.2 EL: Second, as soon as you see that, hey, I'm a little better at this moment, that feels good because you thought you're always in the worst possible place. Third is the most important. When you ask yourself, why is it better or even worse now than it was before, you engage in a mindful search for your answers. And that mindfulness is good for your health. Fourth, for me at least, I believe you're much more likely to find a solution if you're looking for one than if you're not.

0:54:41.2 EL: Now, so we did this with people who have multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's, stroke, chronic pain, real feelings. And in each case, we're able to ameliorate the symptoms. And so how is this like giving yourself a placebo? Everybody has or most everybody has it if you have a chronic illness and you don't have get yourself a smartphone. And you set the smartphone to ring in an hour. And then you ask yourself, is whatever the symptom is, better or worse now than before and why? Then set it for two hours and 10 minutes. And you just keep varying it. And what will happen... What I love about some of the things that I do in these studies is that there's no negative side effect. So if, let's say you're doing this and you're feeling better and you don't find the cure to whatever it is, there's nothing lost. And we know that their side effects the operation was a success, but the patient died. When you hear these commercials with these different drugs, and they say and it just these 49 symptoms, very scary.

0:56:01.0 EL: So the success of this has been very exciting. It's also, there are other things that people... I think the medical world needs to realize. When people believe, given a diagnosis for a chronic illness, that plays to them as if it's uncontrollable. Now, what people need to recognize is you can never prove that anything is uncontrollable. All you can prove is that the way you try to control it didn't work.

0:56:33.6 EL: So we need to replace uncontrollable with indeterminate. And when something's indeterminate, yeah, we'll try it, because why not? Now, there are many things we can do for ourselves when we have chronic illnesses separate from this attention to symptom variability, which is the strongest, I think. The first is keep ourselves mindful, because as the neurons are firing, that's going to have a positive effect on our bodies.

0:57:01.4 EL: Two, when we recognize that the body is all connected, fix the parts of the body that you can fix. I mean, I think that this is a thought experiment, but if we took an Olympic athlete and a couch potato and they both got COVID, my money would be on the Olympic athlete healing faster. Okay, so now then there's this other thing. I don't know if you remember this from the book, there's people doing research on imagined exercise. It's wonderful. And it all speaks to mind body unity.

0:57:40.0 EL: So you have people who are lifting weights and you have the consequences. Then you have a group of people who are imagining lifting weights, and the consequences are almost the same. So there are all sorts of ways you can improve your healing.

0:57:55.7 EL: And then if we think about the wound study, you know that we're doing this now with different disorders where if you... Let's say you break your leg or something, and you're likely to ask the doctor, how long is it going to be until you heal?

0:58:14.6 EL: First of all, the doctor has no idea, because all medical science, like all science, only gives us probabilities. We don't know. You yourself, Sean, whether you're going to heal better than everybody, take longer than everybody. We can't predict the individual pace and people, we can talk about decision making because that's why most people end up stressed just to finish this.

[overlapping conversation]

0:58:45.4 EL: Okay, so now the doctor might tell you the average healing time, or the doctor might tell you the longest it takes so you're not disappointed. But the doctor, in doing so, is creating a set of expectations that all the research we've already talked about suggests it will be self fulfilling.

0:59:09.9 EL: So what would happen if the doctors... Again, some people heal really, really quickly. So if the average time, let's say, were four weeks, and the doctor told you, some people may even heal in a week because you can't know. But then people would organize themselves both in this hard to understand, mind body unity way, but then also in a very mundane way. If you're 20 years old and you hurt your wrist, you do things to fix it. At my age, I'm 77. I've been taught, although I don't believe it, that I'm going to fall apart.

0:59:52.9 EL: So if my wrist hurts, I just assume that's what you expect, so I don't do anything to fix it. So when the 20 year old's wrist gets better and the seven year old's wrist doesn't get better, it's not necessarily because of the difference in their age, but rather their mindsets that led them to different ways of taking care or not taking care of themselves. That's my dog.

1:00:22.1 SC: That's good. Cool. Do we know much about the physiological mechanism behind this kind of thing? Is that even an answerable question? How does it literally help us?

1:00:33.0 EL: No. There's no doubt that, as my colleagues would say, there are things going on under the hood, but I'm not looking under the hood, but I am suggesting that whatever is going on under the hood is happening again more or less simultaneously. And you know that everything is being affected. There was some, I couldn't find this study, but I remember learning this a long time ago about how a teardrop of happiness is biochemically different from a teardrop of sadness.

1:01:15.4 EL: There's so much evidence for this mind body unity idea. And given that it gives us such control over our health, it seems to me people should accept it, embrace it as quickly as possible.

1:01:31.9 SC: Well, also, it sounds like there's a lot of papers to be written by biologists or doctors to figure out what is going on when you do that. I mean, in some sense, you're talking about taking a placebo type effect and making it active and intentional. That sounds like something super useful.

1:01:51.3 EL: Yeah. And what I'm saying is, well, just think about the whole placebo setup. You have to seek out a doctor who is going to give you a nothing so that you'll believe you're going to get better. I want to get rid of all of that. Just get better. And a big way of getting better is not to become ill in the first place. And if you take something, this is a very simple example, but let's say you're oblivious and so then you find you've gained 20 pounds. Nobody gains 20 pounds overnight. If you're aware, and you see that you've gained two pounds, it's very easy to take off the two pounds. And so I think that in mindfulness would allow for prevention for many of our ills, and then we wouldn't even have to worry about the cure.

1:02:52.0 SC: Good. Okay. So to...

1:02:52.1 EL: But I was mentioned...

1:02:56.4 SC: Go ahead.

1:02:57.6 EL: And I was going to throw in the decision making because my view of decision making is different from everybody else's and all the Nobel Prize winners and so on. Did you read? You didn't read The Mindful Body, this part? It doesn't matter. But people make decisions to take action. Once you take that action, there's no opportunity to evaluate the other alternatives that you might have chosen. You can never know. Now, when you recognize that every gain is a loss, every benefit is a cost, every cost is a benefit.

1:03:46.8 EL: These are in your heads. Events just happen. They're not good, bad or indifferent. They just happen. And then we understand them mindfully or mindlessly. If you understand them mindlessly and then you want to do a cost benefit analysis, it doesn't really make sense because if the cost is also a benefit, then you're going to add them up and they're not going to tell you what to do.

1:04:15.1 EL: So if you and I go out to lunch and the food is wonderful, that's great. If we go out to lunch and the food is awful, that's great. I'll eat less. It'll be better for my waistline. I'll pay more attention to what you're saying. Everything is a potential benefit.

1:04:30.5 EL: Not only that, but when your people say you should gather information, when do you stop gathering? Because the next piece of information could change the decision drastically. Should I get this house or this house? And then you decide on this house. Oh, my God, you just found out they're going to build a highway right in front of the other house, which, of course then would mean you wouldn't want it and so on. But then you find out they're going to pay big money for the people who own those houses. So maybe you do want it. You can't know.

1:05:03.1 EL: And so it's hard for people to... I've spent a lot of years thinking about this and writing about it. It's probably hard for people to accept instantly, but let me just give people a one liner that I think will be helpful. And I do so for their health, because the stress we experience, again, worrying about making the wrong decision is the major problem, part of our illness, potential illness.

1:05:34.7 EL: So just rather than waste your time trying to make the right decision, simply make the decision right. So I said to my students, okay, don't make any decisions this week until we meet again in class next week. Use some heuristic. You can use the first alternative that occurs to you or flip a coin, whatever it is. But now this cost benefit stuff, and they do so, and they come back, and it was a wonderful, a wonderful week. Stress free. That there are no regrets. I mean, regrets themselves are mindless, because first of all, even in people who are regretting or presuming that the unchosen alternative would have been better than the alternative you selected. Yeah, it could have been worse.

1:06:29.5 EL: It's the same. But in fact, it is neither better or worse. It all depends on how you understand it. And people know this. If I say to people everything is good and bad, yeah, they know everything has cuts both ways, but they really don't know it, because what they're presuming is, let's say there are 10 parts to this and six are bad and four are good. So then on average, it's bad. That's not what I'm saying.

1:07:01.6 EL: What I'm saying, each and every part of those 10 things is simultaneously good and bad. And when you fully understand this... Right now, people kill themselves to get that thing, kill themselves to avoid the negative. And the more mindful way of being is just just to be. It doesn't matter if our...

1:07:26.7 EL: I'm serious. No, it's very real, Sean, that not only do I make, for me, almost everything is a game, but that if our Internet goes out right now, I know some people. Oh, my God. We ruined the whole podcast. For me it's great. I didn't have breakfast. I'll go eat.

1:07:49.8 EL: Most of these things really just don't matter. And there's a way as you get older, you achieve a certain wisdom that I don't see why you have to wait. All you need to do when you're younger is recognize that everything is changing. There are multiple ways of looking at things. Everything is was a decision. So if it doesn't work for you, change it.

1:08:15.5 EL: I've talked about this a lot, but maybe it bears repeating when I'm giving talks on this in person, and I'll look in the audience to see if there's a very tall guy. Almost always there is. And I'll ask him to come to the stage. So here I am at five three. There he is at six five. We look ridiculous. And then I just raise the question, should we do anything physical the same way? It's absurd.

1:08:41.6 EL: Now, just sort of imagine if he's writing the rules and I'm trying to play by the rules he wrote, most of the time, they're not going to fit. So the more different you are from the person who created whatever it is, the game, the rule, the routine, the more important it is for you to deviate from it. One of the titles that I was going to use for The Mindful Body early on in the writing was, Who Says So? And I think we need to remember in a more mindful way than possibly when we were three years old to ask, who says so? Because it's the people that have put everything where it is, and different people might have put it elsewhere.

1:09:28.2 EL: So an example to make this come alive is, imagine an insurance company. And should insurance cover Cialis or Viagra? Well, for these sorts of things, there's no rulebook. The answers don't come from the heavens. Now, imagine that the people who are making the decision are a group of lusty 50 year old men versus a group of nuns. And that's the way every decision is made.

1:10:02.7 EL: It's meeting some people's needs and not others. And when you realize that it's mutable, as soon as something doesn't work, change it. And the more mindful you are, the more possibilities you have available to how you can change it. And just knowing that. That you're not a victim of circumstances again, reduces your stress. So there you go.

1:10:26.4 SC: It sounds good. I'm gonna try. That's all I can tell you, Ellen. I will try to become mindful. I'm sure that there's exercises that I can that help me get better at this, but it does seem to have a good...

[overlapping conversation]

1:10:36.9 EL: No, I think. No, my guess is. My guess is that you're probably very mindful to start. Your profession as a physicist, we start out not knowing anything or looking deeply would suggest that your whole manner suggests to me that you're already mindful. But even though I've been studying this for 45 years, there are still times that I'll find myself saying or doing something that's totally mindless. The difference between us, though, is that when I find I've been mindless, I say, yes, I'm right.

[overlapping conversation]

1:11:19.7 SC: I think that's the perfect place to wind up. So, Ellen Langer, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape podcast.

1:11:27.7 EL: This was fun. Thanks for having me, Sean.

[music]