One
day in the fall of 1981, eight men in their 70s stepped out of a van in
front of a converted monastery in New Hampshire. They shuffled forward,
a few of them arthritically stooped, a couple with canes. Then they
passed through the door and entered a time warp. Perry Como crooned on a
vintage radio. Ed Sullivan welcomed guests on a black-and-white TV.
Everything inside — including the books on the shelves and the magazines
lying around — were designed to conjure 1959. This was to be the men’s
home for five days as they participated in a radical experiment, cooked
up by a young psychologist named Ellen Langer.
The
subjects were in good health, but aging had left its mark. “This was
before 75 was the new 55,” says Langer, who is 67 and the
longest-serving professor of psychology at Harvard. Before arriving, the
men were assessed on such measures as dexterity, grip strength,
flexibility, hearing and vision, memory and cognition — probably the
closest things the gerontologists of the time could come to the testable
biomarkers of age. Langer predicted the numbers would be quite
different after five days, when the subjects emerged from what was to be
a fairly intense psychological intervention.
Photo
Langer
had already undertaken a couple of studies involving elderly patients.
In one, she found that nursing-home residents who had exhibited early
stages of memory loss were able to do better on memory tests when they
were given incentives to remember — showing that in many cases,
indifference was being mistaken for brain deterioration. In another, now
considered a classic of social psychology, Langer gave houseplants to
two groups of nursing-home residents. She told one group that they were
responsible for keeping the plant alive and that they could also make
choices about their schedules during the day. She told the other group
that the staff would care for the plants, and they were not given any
choice in their schedules. Eighteen months later, twice as many subjects
in the plant-caring, decision-making group were still alive than in the
control group.
To
Langer, this was evidence that the biomedical model of the day — that
the mind and the body are on separate tracks — was wrongheaded. The
belief was that “the only way to get sick is through the introduction of
a pathogen, and the only way to get well is to get rid of it,” she
said, when we met at her office in Cambridge in December. She came to
think that what people needed to heal themselves was a psychological
“prime” — something that triggered the body to take curative measures
all by itself. Gathering the older men together in New Hampshire, for
what she would later refer to as a counterclockwise study, would be a
way to test this premise.
The
men in the experimental group were told not merely to reminisce about
this earlier era, but to inhabit it — to “make a psychological attempt
to be the person they were 22 years ago,” she told me. “We have
good reason to believe that if you are successful at this,” Langer told
the men, “you will feel as you did in 1959.” From the time they walked
through the doors, they were treated as if they were younger. The men
were told that they would have to take their belongings upstairs
themselves, even if they had to do it one shirt at a time.
Each
day, as they discussed sports (Johnny Unitas and Wilt Chamberlain) or
“current” events (the first U.S. satellite launch) or dissected the
movie they just watched (“Anatomy of a Murder,” with Jimmy Stewart),
they spoke about these late-'50s artifacts and events in the present
tense — one of Langer’s chief priming strategies. Nothing — no mirrors,
no modern-day clothing, no photos except portraits of their much younger
selves — spoiled the illusion that they had shaken off 22 years.
At
the end of their stay, the men were tested again. On several measures,
they outperformed a control group that came earlier to the monastery but
didn’t imagine themselves back into the skin of their younger selves,
though they were encouraged to reminisce. They were suppler, showed
greater manual dexterity and sat taller — just as Langer had guessed.
Perhaps most improbable, their sight improved. Independent judges said
they looked younger. The experimental subjects, Langer told me, had “put
their mind in an earlier time,” and their bodies went along for the
ride.
The
results were almost too good. They beggared belief. “It sounded like
Lourdes,” Langer said. Though she and her students would write up the
experiment for a chapter in a book for Oxford University Press called “Higher
Stages of Human Development,” they left out a lot of the tantalizing
color — like the spontaneous touch-football game that erupted between
heretofore creaky seniors as they waited for the bus back to Cambridge.
And Langer never sent it out to the journals. She suspected it would be
rejected.
After
all, it was a small-sample study, conducted over a mere five days, with
plenty of potentially confounding variables in the design. (Perhaps the
stimulating novelty of the whole setup or wanting to try extra hard to
please the testers explained some of the great improvement.) But more
fundamental, the unconventionality of the study made Langer
self-conscious about showing it around. “It was just too different from
anything that was being done in the field as I understood it,” she said.
“You have to appreciate, people weren’t talking about mind-body
medicine,” she said.
Langer
did not try to replicate the study — mostly because it was so
complicated and expensive; every time she thought about trying it again,
she talked herself out of it. Then in 2010, the BBC broadcast a
recreation, which Langer consulted on, called “The Young Ones,” with six
aging former celebrities as guinea pigs.
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.)
“Family recipe?” I asked of the dinner.
“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.
Langer
came to believe that one way to enhance well-being was to use all sorts
of placebos. Placebos aren’t just sugar pills disguised as medicine,
though that’s the literal definition; they are any intervention, benign
but believed by the recipient to be potent, that produces measurable
physiological changes. Placebo effects are a striking phenomenon and
still not all that well understood. Entire fields like
psychoneuroimmunology and psychoendocrinology have emerged to
investigate the relationship between psychological and physiological
processes. Neuroscientists are charting what’s going on in the brain
when expectations alone reduce pain or relieve Parkinson’s symptoms.
More traditionally minded health researchers acknowledge the role of
placebo effects and account for them in their experiments. But Langer
goes well beyond that. She thinks they’re huge — so huge that in many
cases they may actually be the main factor producing the results.
As
an example, she points to a study she conducted in a hair salon in
2009. She got the idea from a study undertaken nearly a decade earlier
by three scientists who looked at more than 4,000 subjects over two
decades and found that men who were bald when they joined the study were
more likely to develop prostate cancer than men who kept their hair.
The researchers couldn’t be sure what explained the link, though they
suspected that androgens (male hormones including testosterone) could be
affecting both scalp and prostate. Langer had another theory: “Baldness
is a cue for old age,” she says. “Therefore, men who go bald early in
life may perceive themselves as older and may consequently be expected
to age more quickly.” And those expectations may actually lead them to
experience the effects of aging. To explore this relationship between
expectations of aging and physiological signs of health, Langer and her
colleagues designed the hair-salon study. They had research assistants
approach 47 women, ranging in age from 27 to 83, who were about to have
their hair cut, colored or both. They took blood-pressure readings.
After the subjects’ hair was done, they filled out a questionnaire about
how they felt they looked, and their blood pressure was taken again. In
a paper published in 2010 in the journal Perspectives on Psychological
Science, they reported that the subjects who perceived themselves as
looking younger after the makeover experienced a drop in blood pressure.
A
few years earlier, Langer and one of her students, Alia Crum, conducted
a study, published in the journal Psychological Science, involving 84
hotel chambermaids. The maids had mostly reported that they didn’t get
much exercise in a typical week. The researchers primed the experimental
group to think differently about their work by informing them that
cleaning rooms was fairly serious exercise — as much if not more than
the surgeon general recommends. Once their expectations were shifted,
those maids lost weight, relative to a control group (and also improved
on other measures like body mass index and hip-to-waist ratio). All
other factors were held constant. The only difference was the change in
mind-set.
Critics
hunted for other explanations — statistical errors or subtle behavior
changes in the weight-loss group that Langer hadn’t accounted for.
Otherwise the outcome seemed to defy physics. “To which I would say,
‘There’s no discipline that is complete,’ ” Langer responds. “If
current-day physics can’t explain these things, maybe there are changes
that need to be made in physics.”
In the course
of her career, Langer says, she has written or co-written more than 200
studies, and she continues to churn out research at a striking pace.
Just before winter break, in her final meeting with two dozen or so
students and postdocs, Langer went around the table checking the
progress of nearly 30 experiments, all of which manipulated subjects’
perceptions. Some used a special clock that could be set to run at
half-speed or double-speed. In one study, sleeping subjects were fooled,
upon awakening, into thinking they had more or less sleep than they
actually did. She posits that the scores on measures of short-term
memory and reaction time will vary accordingly, regardless of how long
the subjects actually slept. In a yet-to-be-published diabetes study,
Langer wondered whether the biochemistry of Type 2 diabetics could be
manipulated by the same psychological intervention — the subjects’
perception of how much time had passed. Her theory was that the
diabetics’ blood-glucose levels would follow perceived time rather than
actual time; in other words, they would spike and dip when the subjects
expected them to. And that’s what her data revealed. When a student
emailed her with the results this fall, she could barely contain her
excitement. “This is the beginning of a psychological cure for
diabetes!” she told me.
Some
of the new experiments rely on variables that change self-perception.
In a study using avatars, scheduled to take place at the popular gaming
facility Second Life, subjects will watch a digital version of
themselves playing tennis and gradually getting thinner from the
exertion. Langer is exploring whether watching an avatar will have a
physiological effect on the real person. “You see yourself, you’re
playing tennis,” Langer said. “The question is: Will people lose weight?
We’ll see.”
Some
of Langer’s colleagues in the academy see her as a valuable force in
psychology, praising her eccentric intelligence and ingenious study
designs. Steven Pinker, the writer and Harvard professor, told me that
she filled an important niche within the school’s department, which has
often harbored “mavericks with nontraditional projects,” including “B.
F. Skinner’s utopian novels and manifestoes and Herb Kelman’s encounter
groups between Arab and Israeli activists — not to mention Timothy Leary
and Richard Alpert,” who would become Ram Dass.
But
Langer’s sensibility can feel at odds with the rigors of contemporary
academia. Sometimes she will give equal weight to casually hatched ideas
and peer-reviewed studies. She spoke loosely to me of her New Hampshire
counterclockwise study as having been “replicated” three times — in
Britain, the Netherlands and South Korea. But none of these were lab
experiments. They were events made for television. The study that
arguably made Langer’s name — the plant study with nursing-home patients
— wouldn’t have “much credibility today, nor would it meet the
tightened standards of rigor,” says James Coyne, professor emeritus of
psychology at the University of Pennsylvania medical school and a widely
published bird dog of pseudoscience. (Though, as Coyne also
acknowledges, “that is true of much of the work of the ’70s, including
my own concerning depressed persons depressing others.”) Langer’s
long-term contributions, Coyne says, “will be seen in terms of the
thinking and experimenting they encouraged.”
Four
years ago, Langer and her colleagues published in Psychological Science
a study that came closest in spirit to the original counterclockwise
study in New Hampshire. Here, too, the placebo was a health prime, a
situational nudge. They had two groups of subjects go into a flight
simulator. One group was told to think of themselves as Air Force pilots
and given flight suits to wear while guiding a simulated flight. The
other group was told that the simulator was broken and that they should
just pretend to fly a plane. Afterward, they gave each group an eyesight
test. The group that piloted the flight performed 40 percent better
than the other group. Clearly “mind-set manipulation can counteract
presumed physiological limits,” Langer said. If a certain kind of prompt
could change vision, Langer thought, there was no reason, that you
couldn’t try almost anything. The endgame, she has said many times
since, is to “return the control of our health back to ourselves.”
Last spring, Langer
and a postdoctoral researcher, Deborah Phillips, were chatting when the
subject of the counterclockwise study came up. Over the more than 30
intervening years, Langer had explored many dimensions of health
psychology and tested the power of the mind to ease various afflictions.
Perhaps it was finally time to run the counterclockwise study again.
But if they did, she wanted to raise the stakes: Could they shrink the
tumors of cancer patients? Langer often says she has no clue where her
ideas come from — but in this case it was crystal clear: Metastatic
breast cancer killed her mother at 56, when Langer was 29.
Phillips
suggested that perhaps they should start with early-stage cancers, ones
perceived as more curable, but Langer was firm: It had to be a big,
common killer that traditional Western medicine had no answer for. She
settled on Stage 4 metastatic breast cancer. Treatment of such cases is
usually framed in terms of so-called comfort care. “The medical world
has given up on these people,” Langer says.
The
study, which is planned for the spring, is designed to include three
groups of 24 women with Stage 4 breast cancer who are in stable
condition and undergoing hormonal therapy. Two groups will gather at
resorts in San Miguel
de Allende, Mexico, under the supervision of Langer and her staff. The
experimental group will live for a week in surroundings that evoke 2003,
a date when all the women were healthy and hopeful, living without a
mortal threat hanging over them. They will be told to try to inhabit
their former selves. Few clues of the present day will be visible inside
the resorts or, for that matter, outside them. In the living areas,
turn-of-the-millennium magazines will be lying around, as will DVDs of
films like “Titanic” and “The Big Lebowski.” San Miguel de Allende,
which has historically been a place known for its nearby healing mineral
springs, is a Unesco World Heritage Site, and many of its buildings
look as they did a few hundred years ago. “The whole town is a time
capsule,” Langer says. (The other group at San Miguel will have the
support of fellow cancer patients but will not live in the past; a third
group will not experience any research intervention.)
As
with the original counterclockwise experiment, subjects will be tested
before and after on relevant measures — in this case the size of their
tumors and the levels of circulating proteins in their blood known to be
made by cancer cells — in addition to variables like mood and energy
and pain levels. The experimental group will bring with them the same
kinds of primes that the New Hampshire men did, like photographs of
their younger selves. “We won’t make them haul their bags up the
stairs,” Langer says. But otherwise they will be nudged to do all they
can for themselves.
The
staff will encourage the women to think anew about their circumstances
in an attempt to purge any negative messages they have absorbed during
their passage through in the medical system. This is crucial, Langer
says, because just as the mind can make things better, it can also make
things worse. The nocebo effect is the flip side of the more positive
placebo effect, and she says that one of the most pernicious nocebo
effects can occur when a patient is informed by her doctor that she is
ill. The diagnosis itself, Langer says, primes the symptoms the patient
expects to feel. “You change a word here or there, and you get vastly
different results,” Langer says. She told me about a yet-to-be-published
study she did in 2010 that found that breast-cancer survivors who
described themselves as “in remission” were less functional and showed
poorer general health and more pain than subjects who considered
themselves “cured.”
So
there will be no talk of cancer “victims,” nor anyone “fighting” a
“chronic” disease. “When you’re saying ‘fighting,’ you’re already
acknowledging the adversary is very powerful,” Langer says. " ‘Chronic’
is understood as ‘uncontrollable’ — and that’s not something anyone can
know.”
Of
course, the subjects hope to get better, and everything about the setup
is nudging them in that direction. So the study becomes a kind of open
placebo experiment. Langer has long believed it’s possible to get people
to gin up positive effects in their own body — in effect, to decide to
get well. Last fall, she tested that proposition, but in reverse: She
recruited a number of healthy test subjects and gave them the mission to
make themselves unwell. The subjects watched videos of people coughing
and sneezing. There were tissues around and those in the experimental
group were encouraged to act as if they had a cold. No deception was
involved: The subjects weren’t misled, for example, into thinking they
were being put into a germ chamber or anything like that. This was
explicitly a test to see if they could voluntarily change their immune
systems in measurable ways.
In
the study, which is ongoing, 40 percent of the experimental group
reported cold symptoms following the experiment, while 10 percent of
those in control group did. Buoyed, Langer ordered further analysis,
looking for more concrete proof that they actually caught colds by
testing their saliva for the IgA antibody, a sign of elevated
immune-system response. In February, the results came in. All of the
experimental subjects who had reported cold symptoms showed high levels
of the IgA antibody.
Placebo
effects have already been proven to work on the immune system. But this
study could show for the first time that they work in a different way —
that is, through an act of will. “As far as we know today, the placebo
responses in the immune system are attributable to unconscious classical
conditioning,” says the Italian neuroscientist Fabrizio Benedetti, a
leading expert in placebo effects. In Benedetti’s experiments, a
suggestion planted in the minds of test subjects produced physiological
changes directly, the way a dinner bell might goose the salivary glands
of a dog. (In one study, healthy volunteers given a placebo — a
suggestion that any pain they experienced was actually beneficial to
their bodies — were found to produce higher levels of natural
painkillers.) “There’s no evidence that expectations play a role as
well,” Benedetti says. Langer plans to further analyze the subjects’
saliva to see whether they actually have the rhinovirus and not just
elevated IgA.
The
implications of the open placebo — that is, we know the sugar pill is
just a sugar pill, but it still works as medicine — are tantalizing. If
placebo effects can be harnessed without deception, it would remove many
of the ethical issues that surround placebo work. In a study published
in the journal Plos One in 2010, Ted Kaptchuk, a professor of medicine
at Harvard Medical School, and his colleagues administered a placebo
labeled “placebo” to a test group of patients suffering from irritable
bowel syndrome. Their symptoms declined significantly as compared with a
no-treatment control group. “At some level everybody realizes they
themselves are the placebo,” Langer says.
Langer’s
cancer study has had to clear the hurdles of three human-subjects
ethics boards — one from Mexico, one from Harvard’s psychology
department and, for a time, one from the University of Southern
California’s medical school, where until recently Debu Tripathy, an
oncologist who is recruiting subjects for Langer’s study, was a
professor of medicine. In June, progress stalled when the board at
U.S.C. asked that the language be tweaked. “There’s so much stuff that’s
totally outrageous in this world,” Langer told me at the time. “They
want me to add a consent form for the people to sign saying there’s no
known benefit to them. But that just introduces a nocebo effect!” (The
study now has to clear the ethics board at the University of Texas M.D.
Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, where Tripathy presently works.)
Like
the men in New Hampshire, Langer’s cancer patients in San Miguel will
pass a richly diverting week. In this case, art classes, cooking classes
and writing classes will help distract them from the brute dread of
their circumstances and re-engage them in life. The terror of late-stage
cancer can be as debilitating as the physical reality, Tripathy says.
Some sufferers, he says, show symptoms akin to PTSD. There’s strong
evidence that the support of other people boosts the quality of life for cancer patients. There’s less evidence that it improves their health prospects.
I
asked Tripathy whether there’s any precedent for what Langer is trying
to do. “Well, there are many examples in medicine where improvement in
the emotional state seems also to bring about some improvement in the
disease state,” he said. “We know, for example, that Tibetan monks can
meditate and lower their blood pressure. People with hypertension, they
embark on behavioral changes, and you can see the improvement in the
medical indexes, like fewer heart attacks. But cancer? That’s a harder
thing to fathom.”
Positive
psychology doesn’t have a great track record as a way to fight cancer.
Indeed, when James Coyne and colleagues followed 1,093 people with
advanced head-and-neck cancer over nine years, they found even the most
optimistic subjects lived no longer than the most pessimistic ones.
Some
cancer patients respond to interventions better than others, Tripathy
notes. “But even with high-dose chemotherapy, you rarely see ‘complete
response,’ which is total disappearance” of advanced breast cancer. “So
if we saw anything like that, boy, that would hit the medical journals
in a hurry.”
One day in
Puerto Vallarta in February, Langer sat on the patio of her hillside
home. An iguana the length of a celery rib scooted across a high
railing, and the dogs went bananas. “That’s Ada,” Langer said. “Or is it
Ida? There are two — it’s hard to tell them apart.” When the iguanas
first appeared and began devouring the hibiscus, Langer was startled.
Now she and Nancy feed them petals for lunch. “That’s the way it is,”
she said. “You can be scared. You give it a name, and then it’s a pet.”
Langer
peered out over the deep blue sea, in the direction of a lagoon, where
early in her career she conducted experiments on whether dolphins were
more likely to want to swim with mindful people. In the last few days,
she had been exchanging emails with a writer who wanted to come stay
with her for a couple of weeks, taking notes for a screenplay for a
Hollywood biopic.
Langer
told me that she chose San Miguel for her new counterclockwise study
primarily because the town had made “an offer I couldn’t refuse.” A
group of local businesspeople, convinced of the value of having Langer’s
name attached to San Miguel, arranged for lodging to be made available
free to Langer. They also encouraged her to build a Langer Mindfulness
Institute, which will take part in research and run retreats. (A local
developer donated a beautiful casa, next to his Nick
Faldo-designed golf course, to serve as staff quarters for the
institute.) Starting sometime next year, adults will be able to sign up
for a paid, weeklong counterclockwise experience, presumably with a
chance at some of the same rejuvenative benefits the New Hampshire test
subjects enjoyed.
Langer
says she is in conversation with health and business organizations in
Australia about establishing another research facility that would also
accept paying customers, who will learn to become more mindful through a
variety of cognitive-behavioral techniques and exercises. She has
already opened a mindfulness institute in Bangalore, India, where
researchers are undertaking a study to look at whether mindfulness can
stem the spread of prostate cancer.
Langer
makes no apologies for the paid retreats, nor for what will be their
steep price. (This, too, is calculated: In the absence of other cues,
people tend to place disproportionate value on things that cost more.
Dan Ariely, a psychologist at Duke, and his colleagues found that
pricier placebos were more effective than cheap ones.) To my question of
whether such a nakedly commercial venture will undermine her academic
credibility, Langer rolled her eyes a bit. “Look, I’m not 40 years old.
I’ve paid my dues, and there’s nothing wrong with making this more
widely available to people, since I deeply believe it.”
Medical
colleagues have asked Langer if she is setting herself up to fail with
the cancer study — and perhaps underappreciating the potential setbacks
to her work. It’s also possible that subjects who don’t improve could
feel more demoralized by the experience. In her memoir, “Bright-sided,”
the journalist Barbara Ehrenreich wrote scorchingly about the sunshine
brigade that bombarded her with “positive thinking” as she suffered
through breast cancer. Under those conditions, patients who don’t get
better might feel as if they themselves were somehow to blame.
After
a lecture in 2010, in which she’d discussed how when we talk about
“fighting” cancer we actually give the disease power, a man buttonholed
Langer and laid into her. His wife had died of breast cancer. “He said
she had fought it, and I made it seem that it was her fault,” Langer
told me.
Langer
apologized to the man. “Those are good points, and I’m sorry I didn’t
address them,” she said. “But let me explain to you that it’s the
culture that teaches us that we have no control. I’m not blaming your
wife; I’m blaming the culture.” Langer imagines a day when blame isn’t
the first thing people reach for when things go awry. Instead, we will
simply bring to bear the power of our own minds — which she believes
will turn out to be far greater than we imagined.
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