Your perception is your reality | Dr Ellen Langer

How much of what you think you know is actually true?

In this episode of Degrees of Health, Ben Hopkins sits down with Dr Ellen Langer, the first woman to be tenured in psychology at Harvard and the researcher who has spent fifty years studying mindfulness, almost none of it involving meditation.

Ellen makes a simple case with enormous consequences. Mindfulness isn’t something you sit cross-legged to achieve. It’s just noticing. And the moment you decide you know something, you stop noticing it entirely. Her definition of the opposite state is one of the best lines in the episode: frequently in error, but rarely in doubt.

From there, the conversation moves through five decades of research that keeps arriving at the same conclusion, which is that our beliefs shape our bodies far more directly than most of us are willing to accept.

They discuss:

Why mindfulness has almost nothing to do with meditation

The one plus one question that catches almost everyone out

The horse that ate a hot dog, and why it changed the direction of a career

Why knowing something can be the thing that causes the bad outcome

The counterclockwise study, where elderly men lived as though it were twenty years earlier

The chambermaids who lost weight after being told their work already counted as exercise

The rigged clock experiments, where blood sugar followed perceived time rather than real time