Living mindfully, following one's interests

Excerpts from an intriguing article that shares refreshing insights from a most inquisitive mind - how we see ourselves certainly influences (or, should we say, even governs?) what we are and become!

The rewards of her open and independent mindset is a reminder of the truth of 'Abdu'l-Bahá's statement,

If a man would succeed in his search after truth, he must, in the first place, shut his eyes to all the traditional superstitions of the past.
(PT 135)

The Art of Living Mindfully

Nothing is ever certain, says the psychologist Ellen Langer. We should make the most of that.

Richard Howard for The Chronicle Review

Ellen Langer believes that in creative endeavors, and in life, "We're often better off not knowing the rules."

By Jennifer Ruark

Cambridge, Mass.

...
Most of our actions, Langer has shown, are mindless. Mindfulness requires reconsidering everything we think we know. If we did that, she says, all of us could be more effective, more creative, and healthier.
 
Her research on the effects of mindfulness on physical health, in particular, has had such surprising results that, she acknowledges herself, it "teeters on the edge of believability for some." ...

Langer's most recent book [is] Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility (Ballantine Books).

"I am not arguing against medical tests," [Langer] writes. "I am arguing against mindless reliance on them and the mindless state they lead to."

She is now emboldened to offer an explanation for the results of the...study: that the subjects' mental states had direct, physical effects...

Take eye tests. In a group of studies soon to be published in the journal Psychological Science, Langer and her colleagues showed that people's vision improved when they expected to see better. In one strikingly simple experiment, the researchers reversed the standard eye chart so that the letters became progressively larger rather than smaller. "Now, rather than expecting as they went down the chart that pretty soon they were not going to be able to read the letters," Langer says, "people expected that pretty soon they were going to be able to read the letters." The result: They could read letters that had been too small for them on the standard chart.

Take another scientific given: that to lose weight you must exercise more or eat less. In a recent study, Langer and Alia J. Crum, now a doctoral student at Yale University, got hotel housekeepers who reported doing little or no exercise to recognize the physical nature of their jobs: telling half of a group of 84 that their days spent bending, stretching, and lifting were similar to workouts at a gym. Four weeks later, those 42 chambermaids had lost an average of two pounds each, reduced their percentage of body fat, and lowered their blood pressure—all while reporting no changes in eating habits, even less physical activity during their off hours, and (according to their bosses) the same level of work.

As in the men's retreat and the eyesight study, it seemed that people's states of mind were changing their bodies. "The main idea for all these studies is very simple," Langer says. "We take the mind and the body and we put them back together, so that wherever we're putting the mind, we're necessarily putting the body." ...

Wouldn't following Langer's instructions to notice everything, and question everything, lead to paralysis? Research by Sian L. Beilock at the University of Chicago, for example, has shown that talented athletes perform worse when they start analyzing every part of their particular skills.

"That's not mindfulness, that's evaluating," Langer says. She is very much against overthinking and has written widely about the ways an "evaluative mind-set" can impede creativity and happiness, particularly in her book On Becoming an Artist: Reinventing Yourself Through Mindful Creativity (Ballantine, 2005). Langer took up painting when she was already in her 50s—she describes hearing herself tell an acquaintance that she was going to paint, before she had really given it any thought—and her artworks now command thousands of dollars.

When she began, she had no interest in taking art classes or trying to learn the proper techniques. Instead she focused on doing what interested her, and found that she got great pleasure from the act of painting itself. She says she paints where the strokes lead her, mindfully attentive to the experience rather than worried about how her work will turn out, and is often surprised by the pictures that result. (Many of her paintings depict friends or her beloved dogs in humorous poses.) ...

"If I can make one monkey talk," says Langer, "then it can be said, 'Monkeys are capable of speech.'" She calls her approach "the psychology of possibility."

These days Langer's lack of interest in the mechanisms underlying behavior is what pushes against the tide of the discipline, which in recent years has been keen to identify the biological activity behind thought processes.

"I see the human being as a seven-layer cake," she says. "The sixth layer doesn't cause the fourth layer; they just coexist. That's not to say neuroscientific approaches are not worthwhile, but even if we know all of Johnny's neurochemistry and brain circuitry, we don't know if he's going to read, rape, or run for office."

Students say it's not uncommon for Langer to create experiments out of her everyday life. "She tends to come in with a set of ideas and just throw them out there and see what people think," says Laura M. Hsu, a lab member and a graduate student in Harvard's School of Education. "A lot of her work is out of curiosity. She's so generous—she gives grad students a lot of opportunities to research and publish." ...

She draws an analogy to Pascal's wager, substituting "control" for "God": If you believe you have no control and you truly don't, "no big deal." If you believe you have control and it turns out you do, "that's the big win." And if you don't have control but you believe you do, you are actively engaged in something, feeling alive and effective—and you may just be successful someday. "You can't prove that something is uncontrollable," Langer says, "All you can show is that things are indeterminate." The best gamble, then, is to act as if you have control. ...


Source: http://chronicle.com/article/The-Art-of-Living-Mindfully/63292/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en