If age is nothing but a mind-set?-II

Bruce Grierson, New York Times :(From previous issue)The stars were squired via period cars to a country house meticulously retrofitted to 1975, right down to the kitschy wall art. They emerged after a week as apparently rejuvenated as Langer’s septuagenarians in New Hampshire, showing marked improvement on the test measures. One, who had rolled up in a wheelchair, walked out with a cane. Another, who couldn’t even put his socks on unassisted at the start, hosted the final evening’s dinner party, gliding around with purpose and vim. The others walked taller and indeed seemed to look younger. They had been pulled out of mothballs and made to feel important again, and perhaps, Langer later mused, that rekindling of their egos was central to the reclamation of their bodies.The program, which was shown in four parts and nominated for a Bafta Award (a British Emmy), brought new attention to Langer’s work. Jeffrey Rediger, a psychiatrist and the medical and clinical director of Harvard’s McLean Hospital, was invited by a friend of Langer’s to watch it with some colleagues last year. Rediger was aware of Langer’s original New Hampshire study, but the made-for-TV version brought its tantalizing implications to life. “She’s one of the people at Harvard who really gets it,” Rediger told me. “That health and illness are much more rooted in our minds and in our hearts and how we experience ourselves in the world than our models even begin to understand.”Langer’s house in Cambridge was as chilly as a meat locker when we arrived together, having walked from campus, last winter. The back door had been left open all day so that her aging, coddled Westie, Gus, could relieve himself in the yard. (Langer’s partner, Nancy Hemenway, who normally would be at home, was away.) Gus has a brain tumor. “He was supposed to be dead over a year ago,” Langer said. “But I think he might outlive us all.”In the kitchen, Langer began laying out wide noodles for a lasagna she was making for an end-of-term party. It was the last time she would meet with her students for a while; they were about to scatter for the winter break, and she was leaving for a sabbatical in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where she and Nancy have another home. (Langer planned to Skype into weekly lab meetings.)”I don’t follow recipes – you should know that,” she said. She piled on an immoderate amount of cheese. “Besides, if I blow it, what’s going to be the cost?” Langer said. “Is it anyone’s last meal?” She added, “My students aren’t going to love me if my lasagna’s no good?”Langer was born in the Bronx and went to N.Y.U., becoming a chemistry major with her eye on med school. That all changed after she took Psych 101. Her professor was Philip Zimbardo, who would later go to Stanford and investigate the effects of authority and obedience in his well-known prison experiment. Human behavior, as Zimbardo presented it, was more interesting than what she’d been studying, and Langer soon switched tracks.She went on to graduate work at Yale, where a poker game led to her doctoral dissertation on the magical thinking of otherwise logical people. Even smart people fall prey to an “illusion of control” over chance events, Langer concluded. We aren’t really very rational creatures. Our cognitive biases routinely steer us wrong. Langer’s notion that people are trained not to think and are thus extremely vulnerable to right-sounding but actually wrong notions prefigured many of the tenets of “behavioral economics” and the work of people like Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize in economic sciences. But unlike many researchers who systematically work out one concept until they own it, Langer’s peripatetic mind quickly moved on to other areas of inquiry. “I was never – and maybe this is a character flaw – the type of person who is going to take one idea and beat it to death,” she said. “Part of that is that I have so many ideas. If whatever it is I’m excited about now doesn’t happen, it doesn’t matter, because there’s always the next possibility.”By the 1970s, Langer had become convinced that not only are most people led astray by their biases, but they are also spectacularly inattentive to what’s going on around them. “They’re just not there,” as she puts it. When you’re not there, Langer reasoned, you’re very likely to end up where you’re led. She set up a number of studies to show how people’s thinking and behavior can easily be manipulated with subtle primes.In one, she and her colleagues found that office workers were far more likely to comply with a ridiculous interdepartmental memo if it looked like other official memos. In another, created with her Yale mentor, Robert Abelson, they asked behavioral and traditional therapists to watch a video of a person being interviewed, who was labeled either “patient” or “job applicant,” and then evaluate the person. The behavioral therapists regarded the interviewee as well adjusted regardless of whether they were told the person was a patient or an applicant. But the traditional therapists found the interviewee labeled “patient” significantly more disturbed. Even trained observers “were mindlessly led by the label,” Langer says.If people could learn to be mindful and always perceive the choices available to them, Langer says, they would fulfill their potential and improve their health. Langer’s technique of achieving a state of mindfulness is different from the one often utilized in Eastern “mindfulness meditation” – nonjudgmental awareness of the thoughts and feelings drifting through your mind – that is everywhere today. Her emphasis is on noticing moment-to-moment changes around you, from the differences in the face of your spouse across the breakfast table to the variability of your asthma symptoms. When we are “actively making new distinctions, rather than relying on habitual” categorizations, we’re alive; and when we’re alive, we can improve. Indeed, “well-being and enhanced performance” were Langer’s goals from the beginning of her career. Martin Seligman in the past two decades has come to be recognized as the father of positive psychology. Tal Ben-Shahar, who taught a popular undergraduate course at Harvard on the subject until 2008, calls Langer “the mother of positive psychology,” by virtue of her early work that anticipated the field.To be cont’d