The Psychology of Possibility with Ellen Langer

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimize interview series. Today I'm thrilled and honored to be chatting with Ellen Langer, one of my absolute favorite teachers. We featured three of her great books, Counterclockwise Mindfulness and the Power of Mindful Learning. She was the first female tenured professor in the psychology department at Harvard. And she created this psychology of possibility. And that phrase alone inspires me so much. Before we came on, we were chatting briefly about the fact that I wish there was a fourth book I could cover. And Ellen let me know that in fact there is another book coming that may have the psychology of possibility interwoven in its title. But Ellen, thank you so much for who you are, what you've done, and for taking the time to be here.

Thank you, Brian. Just so you know, there are four books already in the mindfulness series, so there's On Becoming an Reinventing Yourself Through Mindful Creativity. It turns out that that book is really about interpersonal mindfulness. But I had started painting not that much before I wrote the book. And I sent the book to the publishers entitled Mindful Creativity. They sent it back on Becoming an Artist. And I was so thrilled to be called an artist that I went along with that. Although people don't know that the book is really about interpersonal mindfulness.

So that's fantastic. Well, I look forward to the fifth in this series. And again, I'm so excited. There's so much we can talk about, but I want to step all the way back and talk about what it means to explore the psychology of possibility. When you think of that phrase and when you kind of coined that phrase, what were you telling me? Tell us what you were thinking.

Well, most of psychology describes what is. And oftentimes people, researchers will see something, then create a theory to suggest that it has to be like that, and then they collect data, which of course is going to support it because that was the first step. And for me, I just keep asking why not? And that may be the title of the new book, you know, why do we assume that you can't live a stress free life? Why do we assume that brain damage can't be reversed? Why do we assume most of the things we assume? And I believe that these assumptions are mindless and they simply start with what is and presume that that's the way it has to be, you know, and I prefer asking why not? See if it can be different. And we've done that. I mean, I've done that my whole career by saying that starting with the work on aging, saying older age doesn't have to be a time of inevitable decline. And there are environmental reasons, situational explanations for why people forget. So in those early studies, we gave people a reason to remember, and they remembered, you know, that in the counterclockwise study, which you might want to talk about in a little bit. But basically these were men in their 90s. And I'll save the punchline in a moment, except to say that in the course of a week, their vision improved, their hearing improved, their memory and their strength, all the things that are not supposed to be. So I think I just take it as a rule that we have to differentiate between something that's uncontrollable and something that's indeterminate. Science, no science can ever prove that you can't. All it can say is the way you tried didn't work. And so when you recognize that even if just a small chance that maybe you can, there's some motivation to try to do it. If you believe you can't, why would you go anywhere near it? So from the studies with aging, virtually all of my studies, you know that many of the studies, I think, introduced mind body medicine by saying that the things that people take as debilitations don't have to become that don't have to be seen in that way. But we can talk more about it as you ask me particular questions, because, you know, I have. I like talking, Brian. And so I can talk for the next episode.

I like listening to. Brilliant. I'm very excited to hear you talk a lot. And it's funny. Not funny, of course. You already mentioned the counterclockwise study, which is just so fascinating. Can you give us a quick.

Yeah. So it stemmed from this theory of mind body unity. Very simple, saying mind, body. These are just words. Let's put the mind and body back together. And if you do that, then wherever you're putting the mind, you're necessarily putting the body. So we've done lots of studies where we put the mind in strange places and see what happens. So in the first of these studies, which is called the counterclockwise study, what we did was to retrofit a retreat to 20 years earlier and had men in their 80s, and that was when 80 was 80, not the new 60, live there for a week as if they were their younger selves. So they spoke about events of the past, but in the present tense. And in all ways it was as if it was 20 years earlier. We had a comparison group also go to the same retreat. Do the same activities, but for them, they were reminiscing. So when they spoke about the past, it was put in the past tense. Now, what we didn't realize was that for this reminiscing group, the comparison group, control group, that they were going to be in a novel environment and we were going to be pushing them. And so surely they're going to improve also, but not nearly as much as this experimental group. So these 80 year olds, as I said, their vision improved, their hearing improved, their strength improved, their memory improved. We took photographs of everybody before we started the experiment and then repeated them five days later, seven days later, and gave those photographs to people who knew nothing about the study to evaluate. And they were also seen as looking noticeably younger. Truth be told, they didn't look 20 years younger, but to look younger in five days is interesting enough.

Yeah, I was going to say in a week. Right. So this was 1979, and you brought these men who were in their 80s, some in their 90s, and had them act as if it was 1959. And the environment, from my understanding, had Sports Illustrated from 1959.

Everything, the television shows that they watched, the discussions that they had, you know, for instance, discussing Khrushchev and with whatever, as if these things are happening right now.

So what's happening in that process? How would you describe that unity between the mind and the body?

Well, I'm not sure what it is. People keep asking me to explain what that people want, what's called a mediating mechanism. How do you get from this fuzzy thing called a thought to something material called the body. But if we put the mind and body back together, then it's all happening at once. Now, that doesn't mean there isn't something happening. Clearly something happening on the neurological, physiological level. But those things are not causing or caused by. In some sense, they happen simultaneously. And so we have a bunch of studies, more recent studies, testing the same hypothesis. And the data as they accumulate make me even more certain that we can extend limits far beyond what people believe. So, you know, here we have most people, when we did the study, most people believe that aging was just a time of loss. And the study helps turn it around to show that, in fact, one can grow throughout their lives.

So inspiring. What's another one of your favorite more recent studies?

Well, this is 2007, so it's much more recent than 1979, but I'll give you the most recent in a minute. So here we did a study with hotel workers, so chambermaids, and the first thing we did was ask them, so how much exercise do you get? And because exercise is described by the Surgeon general as what people do after work, because he's talking to white collar workers, they don't think they're getting any exercise, and they're too tired after working all day to actually do exercise. So they don't do any exercise as far as they're concerned. Interesting. If exercise is good for you and these women are working all day long, when we compare them with socioeconomic equivalent others who aren't exercising all day long, they should be healthier. But it turns out they're not. So we take these women, we divide them into two groups, and the important group we basically, all we do is tell them that they work as exercise. We say, making a bed is like this or that machine at the gym, and so on. So all we've done is change their mindset. Now they see their work as exercise. We take many measures before we start. We go back and we want to check on things. Are you eating more different from before? No. We ask other people, are they eating any differently, working any harder? Everything we could think of. And on those sorts of measures, there were no differences. Then come the important measures. Turns out that simple change in mindset that now my work is exercised, that they lost weight, there was a change in waist to hip ratio, body mass index, and their blood pressure came down very exciting. For those who don't feel like exercising, that's particularly exciting. Bring it up to the present. A recent study. So we were looking at people who have type 2 diabetes. So they come into the lab and we give them all sorts of tests. Then we sit them down at a computer individually, and we tell them that we want them to play computer games. All this will become clear. We want them to play computer games and change the game you're playing every 15 minutes or so. And that's just to ensure that they'll actually look at the clock. For a third of the people, somebody is. Sorry, okay, moment. They won't even tell me who. The call is from back to the study. Good, I think we're ready. Okay, so they're gonna play computer games, change the game they're playing every 15 minutes or so, they're looking at a 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, it's real time. The question we're asking is, does blood sugar level follow real or perceived time? The Answer is perceived time. We have a study where we have people in a sleep lab, they wake up, they think they got two hours more sleep than they got by looking at the clock. Two hours fewer or the amount of sleep they got. And again, biological and cognitive functions follow perceived rather than real amount of sleep. We have many studies like this, another one with diabetics, where you're drinking this drink where the label says it has a lot of sugar on it or it's clear it doesn't have any sugar on it. And when you think it has sugar on it, even though it doesn't, again, your blood sugar level spikes. So the bottom line to all of these things is that we have far more control over our health and well being than most people realize.

Again, that's all astonishing. I want to talk about some more of the fascinating studies. Bring it to, like a practical point. So how can we take this research and knowing and change our lives with it?

Yeah, well, there are many answers to that. I mean, you don't need to tell your significant other or best friend to play around with clocks and so on. Those studies really just show you how far we can push this idea. But another whole area of research that we have is on what I call attention to variability. It's just a fancy word for being mindful. And to step back a moment, your listeners should know that mindfulness, as I study it, is a simple process of actively noticing new things. You don't have to meditate. It's very simple. You just notice. And as you notice, you see that you don't know this thing as well as you thought you did. So your attention naturally goes to it as you're noticing the neurons are firing. And we have a host of studies that show that the simple process of noticing is literally and figuratively enlivening. All right, so now most of us are mindless most of the time. We hold things still even though everything is changing. Everything looks different from different perspectives. So with respect to disease, chronic illness in particular, you're given a diagnosis and you assume, okay, it's steady state or it's going to get worse. But nothing moves, only in one direction. There are always little blips, sometimes a little better, sometimes a little worse. And that's what we want to capitalize on. So we call people throughout the day at different times, and we say, how are you now relative to the way you were the last time we called? And then, why? Why are you better? Why are you worse? And by doing this, we get improvements from ms, als, depression, chronic Pain, let's see, Parkinson's disease, arthritis, I mean, just an array of disorders. So it's very powerful. But the takeaway, to answer your question. So what can people do? Well, typically well, you could actually set a little timer. Each time you set it, you ask yourself once it rings your watch or phone, how are you feeling and is it better or worse than the last time? And then you set it for some future time and you just keep doing this. Alternatively, for most people, they only recognize when they experience a symptom. Ow. That hurts. That when you're feeling just fine, you're just being. The key is actually to notice when it doesn't hurt. So however, you can figure out how to notice that, because there will be times it hurts less and less or it doesn't hurt at all. And then you ask yourself why. Now you know that even with things like our senses, everything varies. Let's take vision. Most people, you go to the doctor and the doctor has you read the down the eye chart, then gives you a number. It's ridiculous, you know that what you're doing is talking about letters out of any meaningful context in a stressful environment and say, that's the way you see. You know, for me that if I'm hungry, I can see the restaurant sign in the great, you know, very far away. I mean, things change in the course of the day. Sometimes your vision's a little better, sometimes a little worse, and so on. So let's say, for instance, that I did this thing with vision where I saw one, when is it better, when is it worse? And I discovered that I'm really a morning person and around 3 o' clock my vision is not so good. And then I think why that might be. Well, maybe I'm tired. So then instead of reaching for glasses and then becoming dependent on them, I have an energy bar, I take a nap. Or I just accept the fact that my vision is not as good right now as it was three hours earlier and so on. So everything is changing everything. And our mindlessness leads us to hold it still. Oddly, we hold it still so we'll have some control over it. But that very holding it still is what robs us of control. So as I said, we had these old people, these 80 year olds, having their vision improve. We had a study years ago where I took Harvard undergraduates who, who had the mindset that pilots have excellent vision. So we measured their eyesight. Then we put them in uniforms, Air Force pilot uniforms, and had them in a flight simulator, which is a very real experience. As if they're actually flying the plane and you look out the window and this would never happen. But nobody questioned it. You can see the wing of an oncoming plane, and on that wing was a line from the eye chart that was lower than they were able to see when we tested the. Their vision. But now that they were Air Force pilots, they were able to see better because they believe Air Force pilots can see. So everything, everything can be improved. And to take what is, as a description of what has to be is.

To me, almost sinful in what is possible. Right. That was one of the studies I wanted to make sure we talked about, of simply assuming the identity, if you will, and the perspective of an Air.

Force or somebody who can do it. Yeah. Wow.

Then your vision improves beyond the static test, in which you did not assume that possibility.

Yeah. I mean, you know, I'm a little bizarre. I know most people, they go into the doctor's office and the doctor works down the chart, and they dutifully say, whatever letter they say for me, I. I sit there saying, wait a second, this thing is set up so soon I'm not going to be able to see. So I said, what would happen if we reverse that expectation? Which we did. So we give people eye charts where the letters get progressively larger, and as a result of that, people can see what they couldn't see before. Another thing that we did, most people, when you get around 2/3 of the way down the chart, you start experiencing problems. So what we did is we started the chart a third of the way down, so now 2/3 from there are going to be much smaller letters. And again, people could see what they were unable to see before.

Wow. Simple, subtle shifts of mindfulness. Choosing to see options where, in fact, before, we were kind of stifled by expectations or mindless, as you would say, constraints. You mentioned reversing, which made me think of your reverse Zeno's paradox. Can you talk to us about that?

Sure. So Zeno, if for people had a paradox with respect to distance, if you always go half the distance from where you are to where you want to be, you're never going to get there. So let's say, for argument's sake, so you're an inch away, then you're a half an inch away, then you're a quarter of an inch, then an eighth, you never get there. I thought, gee, Zeno is a cynic. So I developed the positive version of this, the reverse of Zeno's paradox, which is there's always the distance you can travel from where you are to where you want to get. You can't go from here to there. Then go, you know, let's say you eat too many cookies, so you eat half as many. That doesn't work. Eat a quarter as many. You keep going down until you find a place where you can be successful. Everybody can eat one crumb less. So now you're starting at a different point and you just keep repeating it. And after a while you find you can do things that you didn't realize you could do.

I love that for so many reasons. And I think that that's such a beautiful way to connect the possible, the unknowable, indeterminate possible, us with this moment by simply taking the next smallest micro step in pursuit of that which leads me to think of when we go back and push the outlying possibilities. Can you tell us about the question you often ask your students about how far we can run in a single burst?

Yeah. What happens is people presume because the marathon is what, 26 miles, is it 25 or whatever it is.

26, yeah.

That, you know, these are Harvard students. They know I wouldn't ask the question if it were just 26 miles. So they say 30, some say 28, some say 32. And then I show them a video about the Tarimora of Mexico, who can run 250 miles. Quite different, a magnitude different. And we did a study a long time ago where we gave people a task. It was so long ago, I don't remember what the test was. But we said them do as many of whatever it is as you can. And then what we did was to take the best of that performance and added five and then had the next group do whatever that best performance was, plus five. Nobody had any trouble doing it. There's a way this might be a little complicated, I'm not sure, but that I believe that fatigue is a psychological construct. So if I ask you to do let's say 100 jumping jacks, you're going to get tired probably around 67, 2/3 of the way through. If, on the other hand, I asked you to do 200 jumping jacks, you wouldn't get tired until you're around 130, 134. So there's some way that we build in our exhaustion, I think in part to be able to get out of the task. But you know that if you keep changing the context, then I think one can keep going. It was a wonderful study long time ago by Frank beach, and he took little boy rats, paired them with little girl rats, and they would copulate until the little boy rat couldn't take anymore. Now what happens for half of the little boy rats? He would immediately add another little girl rat, and they were able to go as if nothing had just taken place. So a version of how Context. And you can have somebody who is on the computer word processing all day long, you know, is getting exhausted, and then they go home and they play the piano the same. The same movements, but a different context Anyway, so things like fatigue, I'm suggesting maybe we can push the limits far beyond what most people presume.

Yeah. Again, so inspiring. What are some examples of how you engage in these practices over the course of your career and these days, etc.

Well, it's interesting, you know, people ask me a version of that frequently, like, how did the results of the study change my behavior? And so on. But typically the studies come from my behavior. You know, I do something, it seems odd. I look around, I see, gee, other people aren't doing that. And then I want to understand it better. I mean, when I started to paint, I found that I had made a mistake, which was an interesting idea for me, because the idea of a mistake in a work of art is just kind of silly. It wasn't a photograph that I was trying to replicate. I had just used the wrong color and it acted. Oh, my goodness. Anyway, so then I started paying attention to it, more attention to what I was doing. And it turned out that the painting ended up better. And so there was a way that I thought that mistakes, if. When you make a mistake, you go forward and incorporate the mistake into what you're doing so you'll necessarily be mindful, you end up with a better final product. So because that happened to me, then I went ahead and I did the study, and it turned out to be true. And then I guess the question you're asking, so what future influence? So I don't think I ever really worried a lot, except for the first oh, my goodness. No sustained worry about making mistakes. And now the oh, my goodness is even shorter. And then I go on and improve on what I'm doing. People have to remember that whatever you're doing was initially a decision. And for it to be a decision means there had to be uncertainty. If there's no uncertainty, there's no decision. The problem is, once we make the decision, we act as if there was never any uncertainty, as this, the alternative we selected was somehow handed down from the heavens. In which case, deviating from that would be costly. You say, gee, I don't know which Way to go. Oh, you know, what the hell, I'll do it this way. And then that not working out seems less egregious, you know, so we want to hold on to uncertainty and that. That carries its way through. Most of my work is people run from uncertainty, and instead I think we should be exploiting the power in uncertainty. Since I said everything is always changing, everything looks different from different perspectives. Certainty is mindless.

That's amazing. Let's go back to that. So then how do we embrace the power of uncertainty?

Well, I think. Okay, so right now, most people, when they don't know, make a personal attribution for not knowing. I don't know, but it's knowable. Maybe you think I'm going to, you know, then I know. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to pretend or I'm going to avoid the situation and so on. It all changes when instead of a personal attribution for not knowing, you make a universal attribution for not knowing. I don't know. You don't know. Nobody knows. Nobody can know because it's constantly changing. So then it's okay not to know, and then you can reap the benefits of not knowing, you know? And so another way is that in this act of noticing of things you thought you knew, people you thought you knew, you notice new things about them. You see, gee, you didn't know as much as you thought. And that feels good. And so because it feels good, over time you do more and more of it, everything becomes easier.

Yep. And there's a freedom and a true control and a joy as we just spiral up with more and more clarity and that freshness and, as you would say, open to the, you know, new experience.

Lots of people, when they do that, think that the pursuit is going to result in an answer, you know, sort of a final answer, and then they stop. That's the difference, for instance, between mindfulness and curiosity. You know, when you're curious about something, implicit in that for most people is that there's an answer, and I'm going to find out what that answer is. And when you're mindful, you know, that answer changes always depending on context and so on and the way it's asked. So you don't get a final answer, which means asking the question over and over again is fun.

With the right mindset, it's fun with the incorrect mindless mindset. It's torture, right?

Yeah, right. Exactly. No, when you think there's a right answer and you can't get it? Yes. And then you hide and pretend and do all those things that are self defeating. Now that I think definitely what people don't understand. So sometimes I'm asked, you know, because I say you should be mindful all the time, all your waking hours. I say, oh my gosh, that would be exhausting. Say, no, it's exhilarating. Mindfulness is energy begetting, not consuming. And the way to understand that might be to recognize that humor relies on mindfulness. You know that something is funny when you hear it one way and all of a sudden you realize, ah, it could have been understood in this other way. And then if you imagine, would you enjoy laughing all day long? You know, it doesn't seem like a hard thing to do. So what's, what's hard about thinking for people is not the thinking itself. It's the worrying about what happens if I can't get the right or if I can't meet this deadline or whatever else. Stress basically is mindless.

Okay, so then how do you shift that? What's the.

Well, you have to recognize that events, the understanding of events is in our heads. It's not in the event. Evaluation is in our head. Events aren't good or bad, events are just events. And that the way we understand it determines the way we're going to respond to it. So if something happens and you see, oh my God, that's the worst thing in the world, of course you're going to be stressed and unhappy. If instead you thought about the advantages to whatever happens, you know, you and I go out to eat, if the food is wonderful, wonderful, the food is awful, wonderful, I'll eat less. So there's so a way to get over stress. I think stress relies on two things. First, an assumption that something is going to happen, and second, that when it happens, it's going to be awful. So you attack both of those. The first is give yourself three five reasons why it might not happen. Then. So now it went from oh my God, it's going to happen to maybe it will, maybe it won't. Then let's assume it, it does happen. Now what are three or five ways? This is actually an advantage. So you go from this terrible thing is definitely going to happen to this thing may or may not happen and when it does, it'll cut both ways and it makes it much easier to live with. Most of the things that people worry about never happen, which is sad, wasting all of that time. So, you know, a nice one liner is no worry before it's time. A Better one liner is no worry.

Pure joy. When we have the right. And you use the word reframing to describe that.

And I believe so what happened. It's interesting that. So in making the transition from somebody like most people who's mostly mindless to. To living this more mindful way of life, the way to do it is the reframing, as I've just said. But then, you know, after a while, and don't ask me how long, you know, depend on the person, circumstances and so on. But at some point it just happens naturally. So for my positivity doesn't result from reframing. I just see it positively in the first place.

Love it. Work and play. Tell us about your research on that.

Well, you know that those are just words. So what we do is we have people do tasks where half of them are led to see it as work, half of them as play. When they. It's the exact same thing that they're doing. But when they see it as work, their minds wander, they're not happy and so on. And when they see this play, they just enjoy themselves. And nothing stops us from seeing things in this playful way. You know, there's a whole movement now, I think it's called playfication or gamification, to make everything into a game, which I'm, you know, very supportive of. But the problem is for people to think they have to wait for somebody to come along and tell them how to make it a game. Everything can be a game. So there's this wonderful video. I don't know if you've ever seen piano stairs. These people, I think it was in Stockholm, I'm not sure, but they went to a subway station where there's an escalator and there are stairs. And first they film it, and everybody is taking the escalator, no one taking the stairs. Then they laid down a piano keyboard. So as you go upstairs, it's making sounds, which is great fun. So now, after a very short period of time, and everybody is taking the stairs. But what I tell my students is they could have imagined it as a piano and had fun going up the stairs without any intervention by anybody else. So if we get rid of the idea that there are things that are fun, there are things that are awful, you know, then we don't have a problem. We recognize that by mindfully engaging with whatever it is we're doing, by recognizing that evaluation is in our head so we don't have to worry, did we do well? Not do well? You know, these sorts of evaluation apprehension that people suffer from, then everything just becomes a pleasure, you know, And I don't mean to misread your. Mislead your listeners into thinking that overnight, you know, you take this magic pill and then you're joyful all the time. But what happens is that when you experience yourself as unhappy, if then you stop and ask yourself a few of the questions, things that I've been suggesting, you'll see how easy it is to actually turn it all around.

And then again, to use another circumstance, the study you've done, or I'm sure was many studies with the individuals going to the hospital, you encourage them to think about it one way vis a vis another way. And all of a sudden.

Right. And as a result, they needed fewer pain relievers and sedatives and they left the hospital sooner, you know? Yes, it affects everything. You know, we have a series of studies where we take older people in particular for obvious reasons, reasons that will become obvious in a moment. We teach them to be mindful and they live longer. Younger people, you know, for diseases heal faster. Yeah, it's really almost endless. And people need to understand that it's not the power is not in the activity you're engaging in, but rather the way you engage the activity. So anything can be done mindfully or mindlessly. And 40 years of research that we've done makes clear there are very strong advantages for your health, happiness, relationships, for how the task itself is completed, and so on. By doing it all mindfully is the word.

Almost. It almost feels like for you, the default of mindful has become joyful, where there's almost just this celebration of what is. And then you jump in and splash around in whatever it is, whether it's the wrong in quotes, color of paint. It's just mindfulness is.

Everything is fun. Yeah, I think that's right. And, you know, maybe I should start studying joyfulness because I got a call not that long ago from this person from someplace in the world, I don't remember if it was from the States, who was doing a dissertation and wanted to know, was mindfulness a fad? And I said, what, like the hula hoop? I said, you know, look, if somebody comes into you, you have toast every day and you burn the toast and somebody comes in and shows you how. Just change the dial on the toaster a little bit and then the toast is good. Are you gonna go back to burn toast? I mean, most people. Not unless you really preferred it burnt, in which case you wouldn't have had them come in and advise you in the first place. But, you know, it's a way of being. I think that for me it becomes sad in a sense from all this joyfulness for people to not really understand what the meaning of this mindfulness is. It's the act of noticing. I don't want that to get too watered down because, you know, then people won't be able to put it to use. Many people mistakenly think that meditation, for example, is mindfulness, and it's not. Meditation sets you up for post meditative mindfulness. When you're mindful, you're mindful. And it really doesn't matter how you get there. You can meditate and, or you can be mindful in this simple way of noticing. But it's life changing.

So I want to hear that just a little bit more on that. So the simple practice of noticing how, that's it.

So what happens? What happens is when you think you know, you don't pay any attention. So, Brian, how much is one and one? How much is one in one?

Two.

Two. Okay, so now, I mean, if you had an opportunity to end this interview right at that moment, you probably would have. Why is she bothering me with this? Most people think 1 and 1 is 2, but it isn't. Sometimes 1 and 1 is 1. Sometimes 1 in 1 is 10. So if you're chewing, if you're adding 1 watt of chewing gum to 1 watt of chewing gum, 1 plus 1 is 1. You add one pile of laundry to one pile of laundry, 1 plus 1 is 1. In fact, in the real world, outside of mathematics, 1 plus 1 probably doesn't equal 2 as, or more often as it does equal 2. If you're using a base 10 number system, 1 plus 1 can equal 2. If you're using A base 2 number system, 1 plus 1 is written as 10. So the appropriate answer to almost every question is it depends rather than I know. So you think you know. You don't tune in. You know, if you're going to be talking to somebody you're very close to, maybe a significant other or just a close friend, and they start a conversation and you're thinking, oh, I've heard this a thousand times before. You tune out if you recognize that even if it's the same, there are ways that it's different because that person is not the same. Even if they say something that happens the 13th time is not the same as the 12th time, neither to the person speaking nor to the receiver, and so on. So when you know, you don't know, you pay attention. When you pay attention to Other people, they feel cared for and they return it. And relationships improve. When you're paying attention to what you're doing, the product ends up better. And all the while this act of noticing, as you're doing it, the neurons are firing and it becomes, as I said, not only figuratively enlivening, but literally enlivening.

Love it. What have we not talked about? You want to make sure we talk about.

I'm happy to not talk about anything else or talk about anything you want. I think that, you know, the bottom line. I mean, one of the things that we find is when we have people perform certain tasks. We had orchestras who were performing either mindfully, where they're supposed to make their performance new in very subtle ways that only they know, or repeat a performance that they had given before that they liked. So the mindful instructions were always make it new. Now these people were playing classical music, so you know that the changes were very, very subtle. We record the piece, we play it for people who don't know anything about the study. And overwhelmingly they prefer the mindfully played piece. When we have people interacting with somebody who's mindful or mindless, overwhelmingly they find the mindful person attractive. We have kids who are autistic interacting with a mindful or a mindless adult. And when the adult is mindful, their performance comes up to normal. You know, we have just lots and lots of data. And I look forward to reading my new book, which you can't read until I publish it. So don't ask me anything about it when it's out. Then you'll see lots of these new studies, studies on mindful contagion. You know, when I'm mindful, you become more mindful.

I can't wait. And then it reminded me of another one of your great stories of how you prepare for lectures where your notes are very sparse because you don't want to. I don't want to be of a new insight. And that's been really inspiring for me as I've kind of crafted my talks of general points. Yes. And what's fresh, what's alive.

Good. Because you want to make it new. That's better both for you and certainly for the listener. But for me, some of that was at least underscored by this fire that I had, major fire that destroyed 80% of what I owned. Along with the other items were my notes for a large lecture class that I was going to be given in three weeks time. And so I had note, you know, and I did something that I think was Pretty clever. I got in touch with an A student from a year past, borrowed her notes like a game of telephone and, you know, work from those. But because I couldn't rely completely on the notes, I had to be there. And I think that it was the best course I've given because I was so present. It's very easy. I mean, I think that's a downside of PowerPoint. You know, you put it up and, you know, you just sort of, in a very rote way, repeat way on it. But yeah, novel is fresh. It's good for the speaker, it's good for the listener. I can't find a reason why once somebody hears about this kind of work that they wouldn't want to be more mindful. You become happier, healthier. People see you as more attractive, charismatic, trustworthy. The things that you do are improved by being mindful. You live longer. Seems pretty good to me. All you have to do is start noticing.

I'm sold. I appreciate you. I'm going to go home. Quiz my son on one plus one.

All right. But make sure you tell him that you didn't get it right.

Oh, you're kidding me. No, See, I was raised in a very fixed, mindset oriented, mindless way. And even yesterday in my office at the home office, I've got a pull up bar and he's got this band that he uses to climb up. Usually I pull it down for him. And the challenge last night was, hey, why don't you see if you can figure out a way to do it? And I had fun. I was never encouraged to fail and to make, quote, mistakes. You know, those are negative things in my upbringing. So we had fun of, boy, it's going to be so fun. I wonder how many times you're going to have to, you know, failed in order to figure it out. Reframing the whole experience.

No, that's beautiful. I mean, people mistakenly think that they only want success. And so an example I used, I think I talked about this first in the mindfulness book was that imagine playing a game of golf where every time you hit the ball you got a hole in one, there'd be no gain. So it's the errors, the mistakes, the almost that make it all fun. It's the act of mastering that people seek, not having mastered. And mastering is mindful.

Beautiful. Again, we didn't talk about process vis a vis outcome, but that same idea of just embracing the moment to moment to moment process, of being mindful, being present, and ultimately enjoying living with effervescent appreciation. And joy of life. Thank you for demonstrating that.

My pleasure, Brian. It was fun talking to you.

Likewise.

Alan, stay well.

Thank you.

Bye.