Ellen Langer, a professor at Harvard, is also the mother of the psychological concept of mindfulness. There was a great profile last Sunday of her work in the Boston Globe Magazine.
The article describes how, as a doctoral student, she was intrigued by how people reacted when a poker hand was misdealt:
One round, the dealer accidentally skipped someone. “Everyone went crazy,” Langer recalls. It was out of the question, she learned, to simply give the skipped person the next card and proceed with the deal. She began to wonder why people were so attached to “their” cards even when they had no idea whether they were good or bad.[…]
[She also] ran a study in which she set up a lottery and varied the terms by which people got their tickets. She found that subjects valued their tickets much more when they were allowed to choose them, even though that did nothing to increase their chances of winning. She called this “the illusion of control.”
Langer followed this up by looking at the often meaningless factors that determine how people evaluate information. In one study, conducted with Benzion Chanowitz and Arthur Blank, she had experimenters approach people who were using a Xerox machine and ask to cut in to make copies. They found that people were more likely to let someone cut if offered a reason – but, intriguingly, it did not matter if the reason made sense. People were as receptive to a meaningless reason (“to make copies”) as a valid one (“I’m in a rush”).
“It is not that people don’t hear the request,” Langer wrote in “Mindfulness,” “they simply don’t think about it actively.”
And hence mindfulness was born. She wrote a 1989 book of the same name that lays out a lot of this thinking and description of these and related studies.
The psychological concept of mindfulness is so simple, you might believe you’re missing something — that we simply need to go through life paying better attention to life itself. We need to stop and actually think about what we’re doing, how we’re reacting, and perhaps even reflect on why we’re reacting in the way we are in the moment. We make so many choices in our lives on “autopilot,” we don’t always spend the time actually thinking about what choices we are making.
When we go to pick up our morning coffee, such an autopilot serves a purpose and thinking about getting your coffee isn’t likely to bring you much additional joy or insight.
However, when we hold on to an argument or a position in a discussion with a loved one for no good reason outside of a stubborn belief that “we’re right,” that might be an example of how our mindlessness can be a harmful influence in our lives.
I don’t see mindfulness as simply being optimistic or “thinking will make it so.” Instead, it’s trying to put your thoughts into some sort of context — in the moment you’re doing something. It’s a pragmatic world view, and while not a satisfactory explanation or technique for every situation, it is one that can bring you to become more connected not only with yourself, but with those and the world around you.
Read the full article: Mind Power
10 comments
Very interesting article – I just happened to stumble on to this site this a.m. – I’ll be back, good information. Stephanie
“The psychological concept of mindfulness is so simple, you might believe you’re missing something — that we simply need to go through life paying better attention to life itself.”
Well, not so simple. Because some of the things we might be mindful of are not “nice” thoughts or feelings or memories. It takes a lot of effort to try to become mindful of those too, and think about what they mean.
I understand that you’re trying to say that mindfulness was introduced into *Western* psychology in 1989, but I think it’s dismissive of Eastern psychology and religion to imply that mindfulness was somehow invented in 1989 by a Harvard professor. Both Buddhist and Hindu forms of meditation have long relied on various concepts of mindfulness.
As Langer makes clear in her 1989 book, Mindfulness, the Eastern philosophy and the Western psychological concept share little in common outside of the same name. It’s unfortunate they share the same name, as I think it lends confusion to understanding what Langer’s psychological mindfulness is all about. It’s primarily about embracing creativity and doing away with your existing categorization of information, being more flexible in your thoughts and creating new categories on-the-fly.
While there are some similarities to the two, Langer’s mindfulness is in some ways directly contradictory to some of the theses of the Eastern philosophy.
I think Jon Kabat-Zinn’s work in intoduced this term to western psychology before 1989.
I very much would challenge title of “mother of mindfulness” being given to Langer. As much as she deserves a lot of attention for her work, she is no mother of mindfulness.
To even try and make a claim that mindfulness of today shares “little in common” with Vipassana and eastern traditions of mindfulness is pretty ridiculous and as a MBSR student, I don’t know any mindfulness teacher that would make the claims Grohol makes here. The connection shares far more than a name and some of the most seminal studies on mindfulness have been done on Vipassana meditators and they show that both modern mindfulness practices and eastern meditators show growth and activity in the same areas of the brain’s medial pre-frontal cortex.
Come on, this claim is just ridiculous and incredulous for a site like this.
Claiming Ellen Langer to be , “the mother of mindfulness” is the mother of all howlers!!!!Get a life ,amigo.It has been around for thousands of years in India and in Far East. There are people like Jon kabat-zinn , Goleman & other meditators who introduced and clarified it to Western academic community and poupular culture. Even in America,she can’t claim to be pioneer in mindfulness, but maybe a early entry advantage among white accademic women doing research into technical construction or definiton of the observed phenomenon of mindfulness.
Your therapist has the capacity to recommend options, creative concepts as well as lifestyle adaptations for the sufferer, the seeds that become securely planted.
Interesting coincidence that this website generated, as a top of the page ad, the drug “Concerta” considering the content of this article. If “Mother” implies in this instance, “Creator,” as it seems to, obviously this label isn’t perfect or accurate using this connotation. However, it IS just a label, and more important is illuminating the important work of Ellen Langer. And, as a general question to ponder, I wonder what ends we might reach by “challenging” such a title, and whether this process is destructive rather than constructive.
I think mindfulness is a deeply subversive idea that has managed to sneakily work it’s way into the modern collective consciousness because few in the mainstream have really given it’s implications much thought. Mindfulness starts out by putting the lie to the materialistic world view by implying the existence of an observer in you that is not just your thoughts. It also seems to depart from many older traditions in that it doesn’t classify mind or Ego as aspects of ‘Maya’. I think it’s something wonderful that bodes well for future developments!
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