Langer - Mindfulness

Ellen Langers insights span every field of human endeavor, including not least my own.

Atul Gawande, MD, Author of Complications , Harvard Medical School

All of us who write books about psychology for a popular audience are aware that we stand on the shoulders of giants, and Ellen Langer is one of those giants.

Malcolm Gladwell, Author of Blink

No one in the history of psychology has done more than Ellen Langer in showing the power Mindfulness can give us over our health and happiness.

Philip Zimbardo, Stanford University, Author of Shyness

Ellen Langers research changed the face of psychology. Langer was able to take an ancient esoteric concept into our daily life, with endless possibilities in health, learning, and human welfare. And beyond the immediate practical benefits of her research, she also made the cosmos smile.

Daniel Ariely, Duke University, Author of Predictably Irrational

Always ahead of her time, Ellen Langers persistence and willingness to challenge orthodoxy, her attention to variability within population groups, her rigorous studies of the dance between mind and body, and her alternative approaches to regeneration and healing are now being confirmed by neuroscience. I follow her work very carefully.

Bruce Price, MD, Harvard Medical School

A landmark work of social psychology.

Booklist

One simply cant finish this book and see the world in the same way.

Alan Dershowitz, Harvard Law School

Dr. Langers seminal work on mindful behavior has broad implications for aviation safety and the development of proper roles for humans vs. machines.

Clay Foushee, Chief Scientific and Technical Advisor Federal Aviation Authority

A life-enhancing alternative... the antidote to the rigid, reactive, repetitive patterns that keep the best of us sealed in unlived lives. Langer gives scientific heft to a fascinating and undervalued phenomenon. A thought-provoking read that deserves a wide general audience.

Kirkus Reviews

Extremely provocative for students. This book cannot be read mindlessly.

Robert Abelson, Yale University

Even professional colleagues who have long admired Langers creative and ground-breaking research will be unprepared for the bold and startling conclusions that derive from her findings.

Daryl Bem, Cornell University

A Google Ngram search will confirm what every psychologist knows: the concept of mindfulness has skyrocketed in popularity among enlightened people, and that boost can be attributed to the groundbreaking research and book by one of the most creative psychologists alive, Ellen Langer. Theres no better way to appreciate the source of this indispensable idea than to consult the original manifesto in its twenty-fifth anniversary edition.

Steven Pinker, author of How the Mind Works , Harvard University

Langer not only challenges us to reach for our untapped reserves, she also shows ways to make this possible.

Paul Baltes, Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Education, Berlin

Whether youre an educator, homemaker, business person, mental health worker... differently abled or abled, young or old, there is something in this book for you.

Deaf Community News

Langer demonstrates a rare capacity both to see what is extraordinary about human events and to envision even more enlivening human possibilities.

Lee Ross, Stanford University

One is reminded, reading these pages, of Freuds Psychopathology of Everyday Life and of Hannah Arendts The Banality of Evil . Like those pioneering books, this one naturalizes a human scourgeeveryday functional stupidity in this caseand makes it not only comprehensible but also subject to change.

Jerome Bruner, Author of Actual Minds, Possible Worlds

Copyright 1989, 2014 by Ellen Langer

Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book and Da Capo was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed in initial capital letters.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address Da Capo Press, 44 Farnsworth Street, 3rd Floor, Boston, MA 02210

Cover design by Alex Camlin

Text design by Cynthia Young

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Langer, Ellen J., 1947 Mindfulness / Ellen J. Langer. Second Da Capo Press edition, 25th anniversary edition.

pages cm

A Merloyd Lawrence book. Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-7382-1800-7 (e-book)

1. Attention. 2. Consciousness. 3. Thought and thinking.

4. Mental efficiency. I. Title.

BF321.L23 2014153dc

232014018613

Published as a Merloyd Lawrence Book by Da Capo Press

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

www.dacapopress.com

Da Capo Press books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the U.S. by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA, 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail .

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To the memory of my mother and grandmother

Contents

Trapped by Categories

Automatic Behavior

Acting from a Single Perspective

The Mindless Expert

The Sacrilegious Poodle

Mindlessness and the Unconscious

Belief in Limited Resources

Entropy and Linear Time as Limiting Mindsets

Education for Outcome

The Power of Context

A Narrow Self-Image

Unintended Cruelty

Loss of Control

Learned Helplessness

Stunted Potential

Creating New Categories

Welcoming New Information

More Than One View

Control over Context: The Birdman of Alcatraz

Process Before Outcome

Mindfulness East and West

Control and Survival

Reversing Memory Loss

Outgrowing Mindsets

Stretching the Limits of Age

Growth in Age

Putting Age in Context: An Experiment

Mindfulness and Intuition

Creativity and Conditional Learning

Distinctions and Analogies

Welcoming the Glitch

Second Wind

Innovation

The Power of Uncertainty for Managers

Burnout and Control

A Patient by Any Other Name

The Painted Cast

Mindfully Different

Disabling Mindsets

Discrimination Without Prejudice

Dualism: A Dangerous Mindset

The Body in Context

Addiction in Context

The Traditional Placebo: Fooling the Mind

The Active Placebo: Enlisting the Mind

In the 1970s, as social psychology was experiencing what was called the cognitive revolution, studying the kinds of thoughts people were having, I began to wonder whether people were thinking at all. Decades of research later, I have found that the answer is a resounding NO. Mindlessness is pervasive. In fact I believe virtually all of our problemspersonal, interpersonal, professional, and societaleither directly or indirectly stem from mindlessness. The current social psychological literature on priming shows how often certain cues in the environment, unbeknownst to us, trigger our reactions. Our emotions, intentions, and goals can be evoked with minimal stimulus input and virtually no cognitive processing. We may dislike someone simply because she or he shares a first name with someone we once disliked. Without realizing it, we mimic others so that our motor behavior unintentionally matches that of strangers with whom we work on a task. Beyond that, there is the vast literature on stereotyping, which shows that single cues like gender or race can activate a whole series of assumptions and overshadow countervailing information. These and myriad other studies show that people are passively responding to cues in the environment rather than actively making choices.