Being mindful in a mindless world | Ellen Langer

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Hello and welcome to Philosophy for Our Times, bringing you the world's leading thinkers on today's biggest ideas. It's Ed here.

And I'm Harry.

And today's episode is Being Mindful in a Mindless World, which is an interview with Ellen Langer. And Harry, who is Ellen?

So Ellen Langer is a professor of psychology at Harvard University, and she's the author of The Mindful Body. She's very well renowned, has won an awful lot of awards, and in particular, she has a Guggenheim Fellowship. So Ed, tell me more about this interview.

So over the course of this interview, Ellen discusses her research into mindfulness, meditation, and some interesting phenomena. And without further ado, we will hand over to Ellen now and her interviewer Simon Custer.

So I wanted to start off this evening by talking about something that you probably get asked a lot, which is, what is mindfulness?

Yeah, and, um, and it's a good place to start and an important question because when you use the word mindful, people tend to think about meditation. And meditation, while it's fine, is not mindfulness. Meditation is a practice you go through, hopefully to arrive at post-meditative mindfulness. Mindfulness, as we study it, isn't a practice. It's a way of being that is much immediate. And all you need to do is actively notice. You notice new things about the things you thought you knew, and you come to see that you didn't know them as well as you thought you did. So then your attention naturally goes there. So most people think that they're noticing all the time. But since almost all of us are taught absolutes, when you know something with certainty, you don't pay any attention to it. And so 45 or so years of research has shown me that, sadly, virtually all of us are mindless almost all of the time. So when you're mindless, you're like an automaton, a robot. The past is overdetermining the present. When you're mindful, as you actively notice, the neurons are firing. And all the research shown that that's literally and figuratively enlivening. And if you adopted just one mindset and understanding that everything is uncertain. Since everything is always changing, everything looks different from different perspectives. We can't know. And so if you don't know, then you approach everything as if it's brand new.

So I wanted to ask about some of the surprising discoveries you've made in your 45-year career about mindfulness.

Yeah, well, it started many years ago, and we found that when people were mindful, they lived longer. And so we did several studies where we, in fact, that make people more mindful. And that's the result that seems reliable. Then we went on and I've studied all sorts of illnesses and again find that there are mindful solutions to problems that people tend to think that one has no control over them. There are so many findings, but I'll tell you something, Simon. The thing that meant the most to me wasn't the work on health, which is important, and aging, which is important, and noticing that we can restore many of the functions we think we've lost, improve our vision, our hearing, and so on. It was a very simple realization that behavior makes sense from the actor's perspective, or else he or she wouldn't do it. Now, what that means is that every single time you're being negative, evaluating somebody else or yourself, you're being mindless. And if you just turn it around and ask, what else might that mean? So you don't like me because I'm gullible, which I am. You convince me not to like myself because I'm gullible. And then I keep trying it and I'm going to keep failing. And the reason for that is, from my perspective, I'm being trusting. And as long as I value being trusting, I'm going to appear gullible. So it is for every single negative understanding we have of behavior.

So I wanted to talk about a specific study that you did that you mentioned in the book called Something in the Air. Do you mind just telling us a little bit about that study and what the possible—

Okay, so let me tell you first that when I wrote the book, as I was writing it, I had a chapter that I called the Woo Woo chapter, and that's where this study first appeared. The publishers convinced me to take out many of them, and some remained. These I call them woo woo only because while they work and I found them fascinating, they haven't been replicated repeated over and over again for me to be quite as certain as I am of everything else in the book. But here's something in the air. So what we did, we had people meditating. I don't remember how many meditators in a room. They're just meditating and then they leave. Okay, so we have an empty room and now the participants are going to enter that empty room and we give them all sorts of tests. Versus the participants enter an empty room where there hadn't been meditators before. Okay, so if there's something in the air, will those two groups of participants perform any differently? And we found, yes, that when you're in a room that had just been occupied by people who are meditating, your cognitive and mostly your cognitive behavior is enhanced. You remember more, you're faster, your attention is greater, and so on. And that is pretty way out there, right? But what that suggests, if that finding holds up, is that mindfulness is, in a sense, contagious. And that if you wanted to change a whole school, an organization, a whole community, you don't have to reach each and every person, a certain number, and then it'll spread on its own. And if you think of thoughts in some sense is energy, then there's a way of understanding how that can be. Now, I want you to replicate it, but we didn't have the funds or the time. And then what I probably would have done is put fans in the room after they meditated to get rid of whatever residue might be there and to see if you still get the effect.

So you just said you should think of thoughts as energy. I was wondering if you take the results of that study to undermine maybe not just the medical model, but the materialist worldview altogether?

Well, you know, I think all of these studies actually undermine both of those because by making very simple changes, we're able to produce vast differences for people. Some of the newest studies that were all based on mind-body unity, you know, here the idea was very simple. We take the mind and the body, we put them back together. So it's one thing. Then wherever you're putting the mind, you're necessarily putting the body because it's one. People talk about mind-body connection, but how are they connected? And I think that that has slowed progress. Also, you had before a dualist notion that you have a mind and a body without— and the medical model believing that there's no influence that the mind had on the body. Of course, doctors believed it's better to be happy than not happy. But in order to be sick, the only way you're going to get sick is the introduction of an antigen. Right. By having the mind and body as one, anything that's influencing any part of you is simultaneously influencing all of you. And so then we have studies. The most recent, for example, is one where we have people watching a clock. We inflict a wound and we have people watching a clock. And the clock is rigged. They don't realize this. So for the third of people, it's going twice as fast as real time, a third half as fast as real time, and for the last third, it's time. And the question we're asking is, is that wound going to heal based on clock time, which means perceived time, which means if it is, then we can control the healing. And that's in fact what we found.

How do you think that this is all possible? I mean, do you have an alternative physical or philosophical framework that explains this?

Well, just the idea that when you talk about mind and body, to me, these are just words. We could have had mind, body, and elbows, and then we would've conceived of people differently. And when you recognize that they're just words and that it's all one, then it follows naturally that every thought is going to affect every organ, every part of your body, every movement is going to affect your thoughts. Whether the differences are large enough to measure at this point is a different story, but it all follows from the idea of mind-body unity.

So you said that we could conceive of people differently. So for example, mind, body, and elbows, and then we'd have a different conception of a person, right?

I don't literally mean elbows, but what I do mean literally is just to recognize that these are words. And as the, I guess it was the general semanticist who used to say, the map is not the territory. So we can name things any way we want, but that doesn't in any way make less true the possibility of unity.

So I wanted to ask about the mind-body unity as a concept and whether it's objective or whether it just has pragmatic utility.

Yeah, um, I think that the soft position, the weak position, is yeah, it has utility. So I might say, well, just for argument's sake, let's treat it as one and see how far you can go. Um, and, um, and we've done many studies that I think the results will be very surprising to people. The first of these being the counterclockwise study where we had elderly men live in a retreat retrofitted to 20 years earlier, and they lived as if they were their younger selves. And as a result, their hearing improved, their vision improved, their strength, their memory, and so on. But I think that if you push me, I'd say I think it's more than just a useful way of looking at things. I don't see that we have any reason to divide things up. You know that even when you're talking about the body, we have all of these systems in the body, but the body doesn't come labeled with these systems. People have decided, you know, and what happens then is that we often forget that this was a choice of the way of looking at the body. And we forget that it's still one body. So again, anything affecting any part of it is going to affect every part of it. When you have separate systems, then you think, well, you've affected this system and maybe that's isolated from this other system. So, for example, we're doing some work now. In the book, I talk about, again, this mind-body unity. People don't even have a conception of body unity. So if you were doing exercise to strengthen your biceps. Most people don't realize that that should be affecting your stomach, your toes, your vision, everything, even if only subtle.

Right. So this mind-body unity is more than just a pragmatic, useful thing.

I believe so. Yeah. But I would be happy even if we just wanted to look at it that way and push it as far as we could.

But you do think that it's reflecting some deeper reality, that it's capturing something about— it's carving reality at the joints in a way that the mind-body dualist view does not.

Well, the mind-body dualist view has the major problem of how do you get from this fuzzy thing called a thought to something material called the mind? And because we couldn't bridge that connection, all sorts of useful experiments like the ones we've done and other colleagues, there'd be no reason to do them. And so as soon as you put the mind and body back together, then many more things become possible. I've forgotten the question. Right.

And the question was whether it reflects deeper reality, whether it's an objective.

I don't know what an objective reality really is. I know we have silly things like you might have machine and man-made era, but man made the machine. Sometimes women make the machine. And so to my mind, it's all virtually subjective anyway.

So, hold on a second. So reality is all subjective and there's no way of having an objective perception of reality or an objective category?

Yeah, I don't think so. You know, what you can get are ways of persuading entire populations of one view. I mean, so we have people thinking that this particular face is beautiful, and so then it seems it's objectively beautiful. But if we had a parallel universe where we had people, we might find a different face, one quite different from the one we find beautiful here being held as the best.

But on that view, then, the mind-body unity as a concept isn't an objective concept?

No, no, I, I don't think so. No, I mean, it's, you know, it's as real as any other concept. But, um, sure, you know, so, and your larger point is what?

Well, how do you explain its usefulness as a concept if it isn't objective, if it's not ascribed?

Well, why? No, I mean, you can call it whatever you call it, and then we've used it to improve vision, to help people lose weight, to affect addictions, have people live longer. I mean, those are clearly findings that people applaud in some sense, whether you want to call the basic concept just useful or objectively real. I mean, who decides what's objective? How do you decide something is objective? You get a group of people doing something. And if we got a group of other people doing something different from that, which would be the one that we call objective?

Right. It's hard to say. So just switching gears to your vision of the mindful utopia. So what is that vision?

Well, I think now people don't realize, and I said this when you asked me what mindfulness was, that virtually all of us are mindless almost all the time. 45 years of studies where we make people more mindful, we improve virtually everything. And so now we look at the way our society is set up, and you notice that it's almost always fostering mindlessness, which means that people are not reaching their potential as a group or as a society. We're not anywhere close to our full potential. So we have schools, and in schools, people are taught absolute facts. But absolute facts are rarely absolute. So for example, I guess I'll tell you the story. I've told this so many times that I was at this horse event and this man asked me to watch his horse, if I'd watch his horse, because he wanted to get his horse a hot dog. Well, I'm Harvard, Yale all the way through. I'm the A student that you disliked in school. I know horses don't eat meat. This is ridiculous. Good, right? He came back with the hot dog and the horse ate it. And that's when I realized everything I think I know could be wrong. And that pleased me because that opened up a world of possibility. So we teach people, you know, it's gotten so— another one that I use frequently, Simon, I might ask you, how much is 1 in 1?

Well, I've read your stuff and I know that 1 might be plausible answer.

Okay. But you're going— so everybody else who's listening is going to say 2. Interestingly, I asked ChatGPT 4 or 5, whatever the number, how much is 1 and 1? And it said 2. And I said, what else could it be? And it said 1 plus 1 is 2. It was sure of that, right? Because it had been taught in the same schools, mindlessly educated in the way all of us are. But if you add 1 cloud plus 1 cloud, 1 plus 1 is 1. One pile of sand plus one pile of sand equals one pile of sand, and so on. And so 1 1 isn't always 2. Now imagine a system of education that was based on an understanding of multiple answers to questions, of us not knowing. And not knowing is good because when you know you don't know, again, you sit up and you pay attention. So now we have the teacher who asks Little Simon, Little Simon, how much is 1 1? And Little Simon Says 1. What does the teacher in the current system do? She looks at you, scans in such a way that the rest of the people, students in the class, now look down on you and so on. In this mindful school, what would happen is if little Simon said 1 1 is 1, she'd say, how did you come to that? And then Simon would say, you add 1 watt of chewing gum plus 1 watt of chewing gum, and 1 1 is 1. All right, so you end up in a very different world. Right now we have a world that's hierarchical. We have a normal distribution where some people are dreadfully awful, most pretty average, and a few extraordinary. And people buy their place in that as if it has to be without asking again, who determined the criteria for one thing? And some of this, I think, is very harmful. So we have now— I just read about these supertasters, and you have super memorizers. As soon as you have a category super, it makes it seem that the rest of us can achieve that. And we can't know that. You can't prove that you can't. All right, so the mindful school is one where the teachers are mindful. Mindfulness is taught to the students indirectly and directly. Everything given is conditional, that there's an assumption that everybody doesn't know something, but everybody knows something else. You know, just sort of think about the way we give exams, which is to find out what you don't know. Isn't that strange? Why not find out what you do know? You know, there's a way that everybody should be feeling good about themselves rather than just resign yourself to where you are on that curve, on that normal distribution. So that's one thing. Hospitals. Hospitals haven't been changed since, in important ways, since they were first created. I mean, the machinery, the machines and what have you in the hospital are different, but the place still looks as it did before. Now, it's very funny because I argue— I'm not going— we don't have time here— that stress may be our biggest killer. Tell me who you know who's ever walked into a hospital. And you go to a hospital because you're sick. You walk into a hospital, you become stressed. Everything about it is stressful. And the doctors, all medical people tend to suffer from burnout because they don't see the uniqueness in you and your symptoms. They're taught to look at the general category. So the doctors are mindless, the patients are mindless, the staff is mindless. You have things, even a simple thing like changes to be made on every level. I mean, the simplest, when you walk into a room and you see a person on an IV, that's a little scary, so we stand back. Imagine if that IV were painted like a candy cane. It invites you to— everything about it is different. I think at the least we should take all our hospitals and make the hospital rooms more like the children's ward. So, I mean, I suggest that Everything that is created now, all of our businesses, all of our institutions foster mindlessness in part to maintain the status quo. Yeah.

So are there a number of ways of being mindful, or is it limited by some sort of external reality constraint?

Yeah. Well, I'm suggesting that the way to be mindful is to actively notice. And so that's one way. But what you notice is enormous, is potentially enormous. Before I started to paint, and if it weren't in the fall and you said to me, what color are leaves? I'd say green. Then I started to paint and I started to look at leaves. My gosh, there are hundreds of different colors of green, and they each change as the sun moves around the sky and so on. And so looking just at the color of a leaf can create a great deal of mindfulness. And so, yeah, there are many ways of being mindful, but it all stems, or mostly stems, from knowing you don't know and knowing that nobody knows. So you don't have to feel bad about not knowing. And everything is new and becomes exciting again.

Alan, thanks so much for being here. It was a real pleasure.

Thank you ever so much for listening to this interview. I hope you found it interesting. Be sure to check the podcast next week for another episode and iai.tv for more interviews, talks, debates, and articles from the world's leading thinkers on today's biggest ideas. Thank you for listening.

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