Your perception is your reality | Dr Ellen Langer

Benjamin Hopkins (0:04)

Firstly, just to say thank you for agreeing to have some time with me. I really appreciate it, and welcome to the podcast.

Ellen Langer (0:10)

My pleasure to be here. I'm looking forward to speaking with you.

Benjamin Hopkins (0:13)

Well, Dr. Ellen Langer, you've had a very, very interesting academic career studying. Now, you've dabbled in a little bit of studying in meditation and mindfulness, and I guess this sort of larger intersection of almost your perception can be your reality, and sort of the stories you tell yourself in life are very, very important as a gross generalization of your wonderful work. I'd like to start just quickly with what do you think the biggest misconception around mindfulness is?

Ellen Langer (0:39)

Well, when people hear the word mindfulness, they think of meditation. And for the last 50 years, I have been studying mindfulness without meditation. They're just different processes. Meditation is fine, but meditation is a practice to engage in, to result in post-meditative mindfulness. Mindfulness, as we study it, is the very simple process of noticing. The problem is, when you think you know, you no longer notice. And so all of these decades has made clear to me then, sadly, that virtually all of us are mindless almost all the time. In fact, the definition, the fun definition I use of mindlessness is frequently in error, but rarely in doubt. So when I lecture, I often start with the one thing everybody thinks they know. So Ben, how much is one plus one?

I scared you, right?

Well, one plus one is two.

If you're using a base 10 number system, if you're using a base two number system, one plus one is written as 10, but nobody knows anything about number systems except mathematicians. If you add one pile of laundry to one pile of laundry, one plus one equals one. You add one cloud to one cloud, one plus one equals one. You add one watt of chewing gum to one watt of chewing gum, and I can keep going on like this. In the real world, one plus one doesn't always equal two. Now I've just told you, the next time anyone is ever to ask you, how much is one plus one, you can say one, two, or 10, and maybe others as well. All of a sudden, you have a choice. When you're mindless, you have no choices. You're no different from a robot, no emotions, no choices.

But our parents, our schools, tend to teach us these absolutes. So let me tell you, years ago, I've told this so often, but it was so important to me. I was at a horse event, and this man asked me, can I watch his horse for him because he wants to get his horse a hot dog. Hot dog? What is he crazy? Horses are herbivorous. Okay, they don't eat meat. But I say, sure, I'll watch your horse. He goes, he comes back, he gives the horse the hot dog and the horse ate it. And that's when I realized that everything I thought I knew could be wrong, which for me was very exciting because that opened up all sorts of possibilities. But people don't realize most of our facts come from science. Science only gives us probabilities. So, for example, if I wanted to test your horses eat meat, I'd have to take a certain kind of horse, give it a certain amount of meat mixed with a certain amount of grain at a certain time of day. So when it's after all this, then I'd find most horses don't eat meat. It's too long. So what you're told is horses don't eat meat. Once you know the fact, like one plus one, you no longer pay any attention. And so it's this act of noticing that as you're doing this, the neurons are firing and 50 years of research shows me that it's literally and figuratively enlivening. We make people more mindful, they live longer. You can't be happy as a robot, if you're not noticing new things. So you sort of imagine, I don't know if you like crossword puzzles, but just for argument's sake, you just did a crossword puzzle, you're having fun doing it.

Benjamin Hopkins (3:53)

Is this the words?

Ellen Langer (3:54)

Then you complete it and now you go to do it again.

It's a nothing, right? Because you know all the answers already. That's the way life is for us when we put everything on automatic and act like robots. So now the interesting thing is that everything is always changing. Everything looks different from different perspectives. So what we're doing is holding an image of it still in our heads. Well, it's varying. So let me give you an example. I asked my students when I lecture sometimes, soon we're going to have winter here. I don't know what the winters are like in England, but here you can have a lot of snow and ice. And a simple question, what do you do when you're driving and the car starts to skid? And invariably they tell me you gently pump the brakes. Now, years ago, that was what you should do. Once things change, and things are always changing, and now we have anti-lock brakes, the best thing to do for safety's sake is to firmly hit the brake.