Ellen Langer Quotes

The hefty price for accepting information uncritically is that we go through life unaware that what we’ve accepted as impossible may in fact be quite possible.

It is not primarily our physical selves that limit us but rather our mindset about our physical limits.

My ideas sometimes get the better of me. Before I clearly explain one, another comes to mind and seizes my attention....

When people are depressed they tend to believe they are depressed all the time. Mindful attention to variability shows this is not the case,

If something is presented as an accepted truth, alternative ways of thinking do not even come up for consideration.

Mindfulness can encourage creativity when the focus is on the process and not the product.

We simply don’t know, which is why scientific research is an almost constant search for better truths and not “the truth.

Social psychologists argue that who we are at any one time depends mostly on the context in which we find ourselves. But who creates the context? The more mindful we are, the more we can create the contexts we are in. When we create the context, we are more likely to be authentic. Mindfulness lets us see things in a new light and believe in the possibility of change.

Our life is what our thoughts make it. —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

It is by logic that we prove. It is by intuition that we discover," said the mathematician Henri Poincare.l

Work/life integration seems to me a better goal than balance. Balance suggests that our lives are in two parts. The more mindful we are, the less we compartmentalize our lives.

By mindfully considering data not as stable commodities but as sources of ambiguity, we become more observant.

If we examine what is behind our desires, we can usually get what we want without compromising: love, caring, confidence, respectability, excitement. Compromising is necessary only if what we want is in short supply.

The more we realize that most of our views of ourselves, of others, and of presumed limits regarding our talents, our health, and our happiness were mindlessly accepted by us at an earlier time in our lives, the more we open up to the realization that these too can change. And all we need do to begin the process is to be mindful.

Boredom can be just another construct of the mind....There is always something new to notice.

Helping feels good to the helper, but over time it may make the helped feel incompetent. Dr.

Second-order mindfulness recognizes that there is no right answer. Decision making is independent of data gathering.

In combating prejudice, then, the issue is not simply how we might teach the majority to be less judgmental, but also how we might all learn to value a “disabled” or “deviant” person’s more creative perceptions.

Mindfulness involves two key strategies for improving health: attention to context and attention to variability.

The successful leader may be the person who recognizes that we all have talents and who thus sees her or his main job as encouraging mindfulness in those being led.

mindful approach to any activity has three characteristics: the continuous creation of new categories; openness to new information; and an implicit awareness of more than one perspective

Mindfulness lets us see things in a new light and believe in the possibility of change. When we feel locked into strict work procedures and rules, we can recognize that these were once decisions made by certain individuals. These people lived at a particular point in history, with particular biases and needs. If we realized this, more of us would consider redesigning our work to fit our skills and lives.

Instead I invite you to consider why you laughed at a joke the last time you did. If the punch line made you realize that the story could be understood in a way other than how you first heard it, you have experienced a moment of mindfulness.

Out of time we cut “days” and “nights,” “summers” and “winters.” We say what each part of the sensible continuum is, and all these abstract whats are concepts. The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes. —William James, “The World We Live In

An awareness of alternatives at the early stages of learning a skill gives a conditional quality to the learning, which, again, increases mindfulness.

Changing of contexts, as we’ve seen in earlier chapters, generates imagination and creativity as well as new energy.

This ability to transcend context is the essence of mindfulness and central to creativity in any field.

in a society concerned primarily with process, the notion of deviance might have much less, if any, significance.

It may be in our best interest to proceed as though these and other abilities might be improved upon, so that at least we will not be deterred by false limits.

Wouldn’t it be more advantageous to recognize that when placebos work we are the ones controlling our health, to learn how to exercise it directly, and to see ourselves as efficacious when we do?

If we describe someone we dislike intensely, a single state-ment usually does it. But if, instead, we are forced to describe the person in great detail, eventually there will be some quality we appreciate.

Regardless of how we get there, either through meditation or more directly by paying attention to novelty and questioning assumptions, to be mindful is to be in the present, noticing all the wonders that we didn’t realize were right in front of us.

Psychologists Michael Scheier and Charles Carver found a correlation between optimism and recovery from coronary artery bypass surgery.15 Others have studied how attitudes affect recovery and found that this improvement is not a function of a patient’s tendency to deny that he was ill.

From a mindful perspective, however, uncertainty creates the freedom to discover meaning. If there are meaningful choices, there is uncertainty. If there is no choice, there is no uncertainty and no opportunity for control. The theory of mindfulness insists that uncertainty and the experience of personal control are inseparable.

This parallel form of human automatic action is aptly demonstrated in an experiment by Harvard social psychologist Ellen Langer. A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we provide a reason. People simply like to have reasons for what they do. Langer demonstrated this unsurprising fact by asking a small favor of people waiting in line to use a library copying machine: Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I’m in a rush? The effectiveness of this request-plus-reason was nearly total: Ninety-four percent of those asked let her skip ahead of them in line. Compare this success rate to the results when she made the request only: Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine? Under those circumstances, only 60 percent of those asked complied.

In the classic demonstration of the illusion of control, the Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer had students guess the outcome of a coin toss, heads or tails. They were then told whether they were correct or not in their guesses. In three separate setups, the outcomes were predetermined in a specific order: they could be distributed in an intuitively random pattern, there could be more correct guesses clustered near the beginning, or there could be more correct guesses clustered near the end. In each case, the absolute numbers were the same. The only difference was the order. But the results couldn’t have been more different. After the guesses concluded, Langer asked each participant a series of questions: Did they feel they could improve on this task? Did they feel they were particularly talented at it? Did they need more time to get better? Would they be better with limited distraction? And so on. In each case, the obvious answer is no: to answer otherwise is to classify something that is the outcome of chance (a coin toss) as being in the realm of skill. But the obvious answer is not the answer she got. When students had a random progression or one where the accuracy clustered near the end, they did indeed answer in the negative. But when the correct answers were clustered up front, they developed a sudden myopia. Why yes, they said, they are quite good at this, and yes, they would improve with time. Success led to an abject failure of objectivity: suddenly, they were in the throes of the illusion of control. They thought that they could actually predict the results of a coin toss. If we lose early, we have a shot at objectivity. But when we win at the start, that’s when we see the illusion of control playing out in full swing. As Langer titled her paper: “Tails, I Win. Heads, It’s Chance.

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. ALBERT EINSTEIN

A painting is never finished—it simply stops in interesting places. PAUL GARDNER

If you don’t know where you are going, you keep doing something because you enjoy it. You keep doing it, making choices, and noticing the consequences until it’s pleasing to you and you want to stop.

Mindful or Mindless? When we last met Harvard professor Ellen Langer, she was astonishing the psychology world by sending seventy-year-old men into a time capsule and bringing them out seemingly younger. But time travel isn’t applicable to everyday life. Having proved her point in spectacular fashion, Langer took up a larger cause: mindfulness. We’ve been using this term also, showing how being mindful reaches beyond the word’s old association with Eastern spiritual practices. Langer has totally Westernized mindfulness with the following definition: Mindfulness, she said before a medical school audience, is the process of actively noticing new things, relinquishing preconceived mindsets, and then acting on the new observations. Our goal here, of unfolding a healing lifestyle, includes the same things. Langer was very blunt—everyday behavior is mindless most of the time. One of her favorite examples, she said, comes from personal experience: “I once went to make a purchase and I gave [the cashier] my credit card, and she saw it wasn’t signed.” Langer dutifully signed the card, and the cashier ran it through the machine. She asked Langer to sign the receipt. “[The cashier] then compared the two signatures to make sure they were the same person,” Langer recalled. She paused, and it took a moment before the audience caught on and started to laugh. Why would two signatures need to be compared when you’ve just witnessed the same person signing both? Small instances of mindless behavior tie us to the past and block the possibility of being alive in the moment, alert to possibilities we will never see. In fact, Langer calls her pursuit of mindfulness “the psychology of possibility.

Mistakes are the portals of discovery. JAMES JOYCE

it’s the fear that their creative endeavors won’t live up to some external standard that keeps them from living a more creative life.

No matter how proficient we are at what we do, most of us are able to find a way to draw comparisons with some ideal or existing yardstick that keeps us from recognizing the value of what we are doing.

I am, instead, suggesting that we let rules and routines guide our behavior but question them as we find ourselves in new and different contexts.

As soon as we agree to accept a positive evaluation as reason to feel good about ourselves, however, we open the door for the damaging consequences of perceived failure.

to be positive would be to accept positive statements by others, that is, compliments, but as we’ve seen, to do so sets us up for negative punishment.

We tend to overemphasize how a negative outcome will affect us. In reality, people are much more resilient than they realize, and “bad outcomes” often are not nearly as bad as people thought they would be. In short, we can take more risks knowing that our “mistakes” (if that’s even what they turn out to be) won’t be as negative as we imagine they will be.

when the accomplishments of others seem attainable, they will inspire us; when they seem unattainable, they may be undermining.1

Well-meant protectiveness undermines autonomy... When a will to act is thwarted, it atrophies into a wish to be taken care of.

One day, at a nursing home in Connecticut, elderly residents were each given a choice of houseplants to care for and were asked to make a number of small decisions about their daily routines. A year and a half later, not only were these people more cheerful, active, and alert than a similar group in the same institution who were not given these choices and responsibilities, but many more of them were still alive. In fact, less than half as many of the decision-making, plant-minding residents had died as had those in the other group.

When we systematically attempt to narrow a choice, the perspective we most often neglect is our own experience.

most of us move through the day without recognizing the alternatives we have and actively deciding among them. As a result, we give up the feeling of control and mastery that would be ours were we to mindfully create options and then select among them. When we passively move through our day, we set ourselves up to feel like victims. All too often people feel as though they have no choice in situations where others, although no different except in their outlook, actively create their world. It’s a powerful advantage to feel in control, especially in the face of entirely new and different situations, where uncertainty is likely to be greatest. What is the difference between a guess, a prediction, a choice, and a decision? Each characterizes the same process of considering alternatives and selecting one, although a guess deems the affair unimportant, whereas a decision indicates that the outcome is grave. When we are aware that we don’t know how to choose or if we don’t really care what will happen or if we don’t want the responsibility for the outcome, we guess. “I guess I’ll take the prize hidden under the box on the left.” Consider how odd it would sound if one were to say, “Oh well, I guess I’ll get married” or “What the heck, I guess I’ll get divorced.” Our choice of words also clearly conveys an assessment

The way we first take in information (that is, mindfully or mindlessly) determines how we will use it later.

read On Becoming an Artist: Reinventing Yourself through Mindful Creativity by Ellen J. Langer or The Writer Within You by Charles Jacobs.

Put a frog into a pot of water and gradually turn up the heat. The frog will keep adjusting to the increasing temperature until, finally, it dies. Put a frog into a pot of boiling water, though, and the frog will immediately try to jump out of the pot. We too notice the difference when things change drastically.

the promise of a big payoff diminishes our appreciation of the present situation

Most tasks are not inherently pleasant or unpleasant, but an evaluation imposed on a task carries such a presumption. Virtually any activity can be made into work, and most, if not all, activities can be enjoyable.

When we notice new things, we become mindful, and mindfulness begets more mindfulness. The more mindful we become, the more we see ourselves as white shirts and the easier it is to find the red spot and remove it. Attending

The reason to engage in any creative activity is that to do so is to feel alive and in turn to become enlivened.

Attention to variability in our wants, needs, talents, and skills can result in the greater well-being we seek. Holding things still because we think we know leads us figuratively and literally to be blind to what needs improvement. A small growth, a change in breathing, a change in the color of our urine—these things too often go unnoticed unless the change is blatant. When we do notice the change, sometimes we don’t want to confront it because we feel helpless. But these are signs that something needs attention. And these signs—the first change—appear much sooner than is now recognized. This blindness is not restricted to those of us who are not medical doctors. Physicians too miss minor deviations that could be meaningful.

Negative stereotypes about aging, as we have seen, may directly and indirectly prime diminished capacity for older adults. Similarly, the absence of these cues may prime improved health. The general hypothesis examined here was that if we are in contexts that prime older age, we will age more quickly. We examined the effect that our clothes may have on us given the age-appropriate stance we take on clothing. Imagine a sixty-year-old woman trying on a miniskirt. In most cases, she’d be well advised not to make the purchase, but we would think nothing of a sixteen-year-old wearing the same skirt.

when new technology for cardiac surgery was introduced, those medical teams with leaders who minimized concern for status differences—in other words, were willing implicitly to admit they didn’t have all the answers and take advice from underlings—had the most effective communication, learned the most, and found the transition the easiest.

Instead of one big problem to be killed with pills, we could interpret pain simply as sensations. There may be an advantage to not naming our sensations but merely to experience them. If we did, we would see that they don’t stand still. They change. A headache may throb at one point while the sensations are barely noticeable the next. To notice the changes gives us a chance to control the sensations. Noticing the changes may also lead us to not need to exert any control. After all, the pain may subside on its own.

Atul Gawande writes in his book Complications, it is instead “an imperfect science, an enterprise of constantly changing knowledge, uncertain information, [and] fallible individuals.” Every individual is different, every pathogen is different, and therefore it should necessarily follow that every treatment strategy should be different. Yet, in modern medicine, this is rarely the case; Western medicine is embedded within institutionalized and standardized health care.

In 1979, the Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer recruited two groups of elderly men from nursing homes in the Boston area to live for a week in a monastery in New Hampshire and take part in a groundbreaking study on the power of belief and its effect on aging.

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William James claimed that almost all of us use only the tiniest fraction of our potential.11 Only under certain circumstances of constructive stress or in certain states—great love, for example, or religious ardor, or the courage of battle—do we begin to tap the depth and richness of our creative resources, or the tremendous reserves of life energy that lie sleeping within us.

The Medusa and the Snail,

The most common reason we hesitate when presented with the opportunity to express ourselves creatively is our fear of other people’s negative opinions.

To not make a mistake we have to err on the side of caution and not try anything new. Such a life would be deadening, literally and figuratively. What’s more, we limit ourselves if we play it too safe.

It’s harder to begin something new if we focus on what it is going to be, and in doing so cut ourselves off from the possibilities that arise in the doing.

If we don’t begin with a rigid plan, it is hard to make a mistake.

Rarely will we be able to make it just as we thought it would be. But by struggling to do so, we often miss what it is—or could have been—if we had just left it alone, without trying to fix our mistakes, and went somewhere new and off plan.

One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.

When we are first learning to do anything, we ought to expect to make mistakes and we should see our mistakes as steps along the way to competence.

The same situation of stimulus called by a different name is a different stimulus. Roller coasters are fun but bumpy plane rides are not!

Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To invent. To leap. To fly. To fall. SUSAN SONTAG

Data don't make decisions, people do - either with ease or with difficulty. Ambivalence about a decision, ... becomes a problem if we are convinced that more information can resolve the ambivalence

As Harvard psychologist Dr. Ellen Langer explains, 'If there are meaningful choices, there is uncertainty. If there is no choice, there is no uncertainty.' If you're unwilling to face and interact with uncertainty, then you've greatly limited who you are and what you've become. You've limited your ability to make choices, because all choices involve uncertainty and risk.

Florida Scott-Maxwell, a Jungian analyst who did not begin her training until midlife, began writing a private notebook at the age of eighty-two, in which she recorded her impressions of old age. Her experiences, mindfully observed, did not fit her expectations: "Age puzzles me. I thought it was a quiet time. My seventies were interesting and fairly serene, but my eighties are passionate.... To my own surprise I burst out with hot conviction." I I

Mindfulness, as I’ve studied it for more than thirty years, is the simple process of actively drawing distinctions. It is finding something new in what we may think we already know. It doesn’t matter what we notice—whether it is smart or silly.