In this 18‑minute talk Ellen Langer argues that most of our daily actions are performed either mindfully or mindlessly, and that the consequences of mindlessness are profound. She begins with a playful demonstration of how our automatic calculations can be wrong, illustrating that we often operate without doubt. Langer defines mindlessness as rule‑driven, automatic behavior where the past over‑determines the present, and mindfulness as the simple act of noticing new aspects of familiar situations, which brings attention to context, perspective, and variability. She claims that mindfulness is energizing, enjoyable, and leads to better health, cognition, and social outcomes. The core of the talk is a series of experimental studies she and her colleagues have conducted: (1) an “elderly mindfulness” study showing increased longevity and improved attractiveness; (2) a “counterclockwise” retreat where 80‑year‑olds lived as if they were younger, resulting in improved hearing, memory, grip strength, vision, and perceived youth; (3) a chambermaid study where re‑framing cleaning as exercise produced weight loss, lower waist‑to‑hip ratio, reduced BMI and blood pressure without any change in actual activity; (4) an eye‑chart experiment where reversing expectations improved visual acuity; (5) diabetes and sleep‑lab experiments where perceived time (fast, slow, or real) altered blood‑sugar responses and cognitive/biological performance, indicating that perceived rather than actual time drives physiology; (6) chronic‑pain monitoring where frequent symptom‑variability checks reduced pain perception. Langer uses anecdotes (e.g., a horse eating a hot dog) to illustrate how accepted “facts” can be wrong, and she invokes Schopenhauer and Einstein to emphasize that novel ideas are first ridiculed, then opposed, then accepted. She proposes a heuristic mind‑body unity: treating mind and body as a single system explains placebo effects and spontaneous remission. The talk concludes that embracing uncertainty—recognizing that we often do not know—keeps us tuned in, promotes mindfulness, and opens possibilities for health, happiness, and vitality.
Chapters
Hello. Today I want to talk to you about the power of uncertainty and show you all of the possibilities that just realizing you don't know potentially open up for us. But I want you first to play along with me. So I'm going to show you numbers, and I want you to add them out loud. All together. 1,000. 1,040. 2,040. 2,070. 3,070. 3,090. 4,090. 5,000. Okay, I was educated at Yale, and at Yale they taught us if you're adding 4,090 and 10, You get 4,100. OK. What I'm going to show you is that our mindlessness leads us to be frequently in error and rarely in doubt. I'm going to give you an easier one. How much is 1 and 1? Usually people are scared to answer at this point. But it turns out 1 and 1 isn't always 2. If you're using a base-10 number system, 1 1 2. If you're using a base-2 number system, 1 1 is written as 10. Easier, though. You take 1 wad of chewing gum, you add 1 wad of chewing gum, 1 1 1. 1 pile of laundry plus 1 pile of laundry, 1 1 1. In fact, 1 1 probably doesn't equal 2 as often, maybe even more often in the real world, as it does equal 2. For those of you— there probably aren't many of you out there— but who are, let's say, over 45, and for those of you who are younger, I want you to ask this of your parents and grandparents. You're driving along, and the car starts to skid on snow. What do you do? And what they'll tell you is that you gently pump the brake to regain control. Well, that made sense years and years ago before there were anti-lock brakes. Now what you need to do is firmly press on the brake. And the point of this is that at time 1, you learn something for safety's sake, you hold it still because you know. Meanwhile, everything is suddenly changing, and you end up coming up short. Right? I was in this store, and I made a purchase. I gave the cashier my credit card. She saw it wasn't signed, so she asked me to sign it. I signed it. She then ran it through the credit card machine, gave me the credit card slip to sign. I signed it. She then compared the two signatures. Having just signed both of them, it would have been odd if they didn't match. But what that suggested to me was that when we're not there, we're not there to know we're not there. And 40 years of research has shown me that virtually all of us aren't there most of the time. We think we know, but we don't. Everything is always changing. Everything looks different from different perspectives. Actually, before I tell you that— So the argument I want to make is that no matter what we're doing, we're doing it either mindfully or mindlessly. And the consequences of being in one state of mind or the other are enormous. First, let me tell you what I mean by these concepts. Mindlessness: we're acting like automatons. The past is overdetermining the present. We're oblivious to how behavior changes based on perspective or context, and our behavior tends to be rule and routine governed. Mindfulness: you'll be surprised at how simple this is when I show you all of the changes that result from this very simple way of being. It's the simple process of noticing new things. That's all. You're looking at things you know well, notice how it's new, that puts you in the present, makes you sensitive to context and perspective. It's the essence of engagement. And as a result, it's energy begetting, not consuming. And it's fun. Right? Now, you can have rules and routines, but they should guide what we're doing. Not overly determine what we're doing. So after years and years of testing this, we find that no matter what you're doing— again, whether you're giving a talk, listening to a talk, playing golf, writing a paper— no matter what, you're doing it mindfully or mindlessly. And the consequences of being in one state of mind or the other are enormous. These are just some. I wanted to talk to you about all of these, and they told me I only have 18 minutes. The bottom line, the earliest research we did, we took elderly adults, we taught them to be mindful, and they lived longer. When you're mindful, we have research that shows that people find you more attractive, they see you as charismatic, authentic, and trustworthy. The products that we produce when we're mindful are superior to those of when we're mindless. When you're mindful, you can take advantage of opportunities other people don't even know exist. And you also avert the danger not yet arisen. There's no perspective from which I look at this that says it's not to our strong advantage to be mindful. Most of our problems, whether personal, interpersonal, professional, global, are the direct or indirect consequence of our mindlessness. To me, that suggests that even those that seem the most insoluble may have solutions that are easier to come to than most people realize. Again, things are always changing. They look different from different perspectives. There's a tendency to confuse the stability of our mindsets with the stability of the underlying phenomenon. When we notice these subtle changes, we have control that I think exceeds what most of us would imagine. So I want to share a set of studies with you that we did with respect to health. And I— we're doing— let's see, we've done this with pregnant women. Most of these are diseases with pregnant women. We're not talking about symptoms, but rather sensations. We teach them to attend to the changes, the variability in the sensations. They end up with healthier newborns. People with multiple sclerosis, arthritis, chronic pain, stress, all show vast improvement. The caretakers of people with severe disorders, like severe traumatic brain injury or ALS, suffer enormous stress, and when we give them this attention to symptom variability of the patient, they also show great benefit. Basically, it's a very simple procedure. Let's take chronic pain. Most people who are in pain believe they're in pain all the time, and to equal measure. No one is anything all the time. And the very simple procedure of us contacting them repeatedly throughout the day over a couple of weeks to see, "How do you feel now? Is it better or worse than you felt before? And if so, why?" So what happens is, first, "Gee, I thought I was in pain all the time. Now I see maybe I'm not in pain all the time. I feel a little better." Second, by trying to find out, "Why am I in a better place now than I was before?" That's mindful, and as I said, mindfulness is literally and figuratively enlivening. And third, you very well may find the solution. And we're doing this now with new studies on stroke, Parkinson's, and mild cognitive impairment, but I think you can plug in any disorder, and this might be effective. I was at this horse event. And at this horse event, this man asked me, can I watch his horse? Because he wanted to get his horse a hot dog. I already said I'm Harvard-Yale all the way through. I know horses don't eat meat, they're herbivorous. He came back with the hot dog and the horse ate it. And it was at that moment that I realized everything I thought I knew was probably wrong. At least some of the time. How hungry were the horses? How much meat was mixed with how much grain? And so on. These are the things that are left out when we're given facts. Right? Now, when you do science, and it doesn't matter what the science is, science only yields probabilities. And that says that if you were to do the exact same thing, which we can never do, you're likely to get the same findings. These are reported as absolutes. Horses don't eat meat. Right? Now, when you recognize that many of the things we think can't be because of science, which has been misgiven to us as absolutes, a whole world of possibilities open up. And I want to talk to you about a new view of health based on not knowing, essentially. Right? Now, before I do this, I want to appeal to dead white men to give it a certain gravitas. OK? So Schopenhauer said, "All research passes through 3 phases. First, it's ridiculed. Second, it's violently opposed. And third, it's accepted as self-evident." Einstein said, "If an idea isn't absurd to start with, it's hopeless." All right, so what is this idea? It's very, very simple. Mind and body, they're just words. And I say, even if just for heuristic purposes, let's put the mind and body back together. If we put the mind and body back together, then wherever we're putting the mind, we're necessarily putting the body. And this simple idea explains placebos, spontaneous remissions, which the medical world cannot explain. I want to go through a few studies that test out this idea of mind-body unity. And the first one was— it's called the counterclockwise study. So here what we did was we took old men to a timeless retreat that had been retrofitted to 20 years earlier, and had them live there as if they were their younger selves, speaking about past events in the present tense. Now, these men were in their 80s, but this was in 1979, and at that time, 80 was 80, not the new 60. Right. They were old. In fact, I remember when they were coming to the office to see if they could be in the study, and they're walking down to my office, usually with their adult daughter, and I'm saying to myself, "What am I getting myself into? I don't know if they're going to live through the day, no less be able—" But we did the study, and I'm glad I did, because the results may surprise some of you. So we have this group for whom we turned back the clock, We have this other group who's also going to live in the same retreat, discussing the same past events, watching the same old movies and so on, but they're going to be reminiscing for the week. Now, for these people, they're still going to spend the week in a novel environment, so we expect some improvement as well, just not as much as the other group. Alright, so for those of you who weren't around, this is what, in part, What did we find? So both groups, their hearing improved and their memory and grip strength. And tell me, when have you heard somebody's hearing improve without a medical intervention? It means that it's possible for all of us. But over and above this, the experimental group— so they had their hearing, memory, and grip strength improve— but their vision also improved, their dexterity and so on. We took measures, we took photographs of people before the experiment started and then at the end, had people who knew nothing about the study evaluate these photos, and they were seen to be younger. Truth be told, they didn't look 20 years younger, but they did look noticeably younger. Now, coming more up to the present, we more recently did a study with chambermaids. Chambermaids, you know, are exercising all day long, but they see exercise as what you do after work, as defined by the Surgeon General. And they're just too tired to work. So we take these chambermaids, we simply divide them into two groups, and we're going to teach one group to see their work as exercise, and the other group stays as it is. They're taught that working at the gym is similar to making a bed, and so on and so forth. So they get to see that the very things they're doing when they're cleaning rooms qualify as exercise. Just so you understand what I'm saying, you see this woman on the bicycle. If she sees herself as socializing the whole time she's at the gym, she will not reap the benefits of exercise. This other woman who's not exercising, but she says to herself she spent the whole day at the gym, so she sees herself as exercising, she very well may reap the benefits of exercise. Now, we took many measures before the study started and measures afterwards, and we wanted to make sure that those taught that their work was exercise were not now working any harder, They weren't eating any less. As far as we could tell, there were no differences between the groups except this difference in mindset. One group saying their work is exercise. As a result, they lost weight, there was a change in waist-to-hip ratio, body mass index, and their blood pressure came down. Okay, you go to the doctor and you're probably like most normal people. The doctor points to a letter, you give the letter. For me, I look at that chart and I say, "Hey, someone's expecting that soon I'm not going to be able to see." So what I did was reverse the eye chart. So now the expectation is soon you will be able to see. And what happens is people can see what they couldn't see before. And most people believe, you know, about two-thirds of the way down the chart, I'm not going to be able to see. Okay, so we start the chart a third of the way down, So now two-thirds of the way down are much smaller letters, and lo and behold, people can see what they couldn't see before. And this is also related to our holding things still. You know, you go to the doctor, they give you a number, and you act as if— most of us act as if that's the way we see. I don't know about you, but if I'm hungry, I see that restaurant sign much sooner, and at a distance. I see better at 11 o'clock in the morning than I do at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, and so on. Things vary. Okay. We did a study with type 2 diabetics. They come in, we give them all the tests, and then what we do is have them sit down next to a computer, and there's a clock next to the computer, and we tell them to play computer games, but we want them to change the game they're playing about every 15 minutes or so. And the reason for that is just to ensure that they'll look at the clock. For a third of the people, the clock is going twice as fast as real time. For a third of the people, the clock is going half as fast as real time. For a third of the people, the clock is real time. What we find is blood sugar level follows perceived rather than real time. We give type 2 diabetics a drink, and the label on the drink suggests it has a lot of sugar in it. Or it doesn't have sugar in it, but it's the exact same drink. When they drink the drink expecting that it has a lot of sugar in it, again, their blood sugar spikes, suggesting again we have a lot more control over diabetes and all our other illnesses than most people assume. We have people in a sleep lab— I must have been clock crazy when I designed these studies— because people in the sleep lab also, they wake up and there's a clock. And some of them see that they got 2 hours more sleep than they got, some of them 2 hours less than they got, and some the amount of sleep that they actually got. And then we give them biological and cognitive tests, and again, your biological and cognitive processes seem to follow perceived rather than real time, real amount of sleep. So, in study after study, we find that Once we allow things to vary, once we recognize that we don't know— see, if you know, you don't pay any attention, because you just know. When you don't know, you tune in, and when you tune in, again, you can take advantage of things that you otherwise wouldn't notice. When we accept that we don't know, that we're frequently in error but rarely in doubt, I think all sorts of possibilities open up to us. So, again, we need to stop confusing, the stability of our mindsets with the stability of the underlying phenomenon. Things are constantly changing, we can't know. Things look different from different perspectives. If we recognize this, we stay tuned in. We start to appreciate uncertainty, and if we exploit the power in uncertainty, remaining uncertain leads us to be more mindful. If we're more mindful, will easily, readily improve our health, our happiness, and our vitality. Thank you.
