279 | Ellen Langer on Mindfulness and the Body

/ Psychology / 23 Comments

For those of us who are not dualists, the mind arises from our physical bodies -- mostly the brain, but the rest of the body has a role to play. And yet it remains tempting to treat the mind as a thing in itself, disconnected from how the body is doing. Ellen Langer is a psychologist who is one of the foremost researchers on the idea of mindfulness -- the cognitive skill of paying to one's thoughts, as well as to one's external environment. Her most recent book is The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health. We talk about how our state of mind can effect the functions of our body, sometimes in surprising ways.

Ellen Langer

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Ellen Langer received her Ph.D. in Social and Clinical Psychology from Yale University. She is currently a professor of psychology at Harvard University. She is also an artist with multiple gallery exhibitions. Among her awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Liberty Science Center Genius Award.

23 thoughts on “279 | Ellen Langer on Mindfulness and the Body”

  1. Andrew C

    I was very excited at the title of this podcast as I’ve been practicing daily meditation for almost a year now and am always eager to learn more. But I did not enjoy the episode.

    First off, I think it is a huge mischaracterization to call her the pioneer or mother of mindfulness. (I followed the wiki citation on where the “mother” comes from and it is https://web.archive.org/web/20100302143428/http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2010/02/27/the-mother-of-mindfulness-ellen-langer/) Perhaps in the context of papers and books by New England academics in the last 45 years, but certainly not in the global history of mindfulness which is much longer than 45 years, more like several thousand. Interestingly, if you read the comments on the archive link above, someone raised a similar objection and the author that coined “mother”, Grohol says:

    “””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.”””

    This might explain some of my confusion. Unfortunately, Langer never defines what her conception of mindfulness is in the episode. Nor does she get to the measures from all the studies. The response also highlights an interesting point in saying “Eastern philosophy” because while I think many people (or at least myself several years ago) think of Buddhism for example when hearing about mindfulness or meditation, cultures all over the world surely had practices related to mindfulness or meditation that are left out of the discourse. I would love to read a book that surveyed mindfulness/meditation practices across cultures.

    Langer opens with the bit about 1 + 1 and we shouldn’t jump to conclusions or think we know everything (or something, not sure I follow or agree), but then proceeds to speak in gross generalizations. And then talks herself in circles realizing the irony at one point.

    I was surprised at the way Langer talks only briefly about meditation, and almost dismissively when mentioned. I think Carroll’s bit at the end “I’m sure that there’s exercises that I can that help me get better at [mindfulness]…” was perhaps a nod in this direction.

    I skimmed the “wound” healing paper https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-50009-3 and it is a paper. The “wounds” are skin marks from cupping and the healing is judged by mechanical turk workers.

    I disagree with Langer’s claim “that there’s no negative side effect” to her mindfulness healing (or maybe she is only claiming symptom relief, but it doesn’t sound like that) because if people choose mindfulness over seeing a doctor, that is a real opportunity cost. Modern medicine is not without its faults, both in implementation here in the US and with what we don’t know because of how complex humans are, but it is a really good option when you are sick.

    I couldn’t help but draw similarities in Langer’s speaking style to a former US president, often rambling on, jumping between topics, and speaking confidently but vaguely.

    I believe the researcher Langer referred to as Mickey with an unpronounceable name is Mihaly “Mike” Csikszentmihalyi. There are several YT videos on “how to pronounce how to pronounce Csikszentmihalyi” which is Mee-high Chick-sent-me-high. I think it is courteous to be mindful of how we pronounce others’ names.

    I hope there can be future guests that are approaching the mind body connection at a quantitative or biological direction because the topic is very interesting. And further explorations of mindfulness would be great too.

  2. Victor Buciuc

    The almost miraculous results of some of her research makes me wonder if there’s independent duplication.

    Also there must be a reason we’re all virtually mindless all the time. If there are so many benefits to mindfulness and no drawbacks you’d think we’d do it more.

  4. Linda Webber

    Langer is either a hack or a quack or both. It is shameful and irresponsible for her to be a guest on this podcast.

  6. Guy Booth

    Just wanted to say that I Loved the episode, some great ideas and stories.

    Agree with all the other comments posted so far and it is always more fun having independent replication of empirical evidence. But the ideas were great 🙂 We all have our own foibles and ways of going about engaging with different ideas, maybe I’ll look back in a few years and feel like this episode wasn’t the best way forward to engage with these ideas or that there is a lack of consistent independently replicated evidence, or put more of the focus on the many other difficulties and problems there are with people trying to pursue ideas, but I’ll also look back and feel happy to hear the thoughts and feel that the overall framework of thought was a particularly wonderful way to see the world around us.

    I think there’s a lot of great value in this episode, so thanks to Sean and Ellen

  7. Michael

    I have mixed feelings about the episode, enjoying her early discussion about mindfulness and its difference from meditation. However I have concerns with the conclusions she comes to about the mind-body connection, offering credence to supporters of the ‘manifesting’ life changes such as those described in ‘the laws of attraction’ and The Secret. Her use of the data risks telling cancer patients or people of unlucky or poor social standing that they were not mindful enough to change and these tragic and explainable afflictions. I found myself imagining how managed care and insurance industries could reverse coverage for patients if they didn’t think customers were being mindful enough.

  8. Giovanni Giorgio

    Maybe I got influenced by Langer’s mindful/positive thinking… There is no need to be enraged by this episode because it provides a perfect opportunity to precisely debate, expose, think, and reflect on scientific and intellectual activity, and to be more critical. I want to be “mindful” and not immediately reject controversial claims, acknowledging that their chances of being valid are greater than zero.

    However, we should also be mindful enough to understand that even highly prestigious institutions can make mistakes in hiring scientists. Additionally, we should always ask for more evidence when a hypothesis is stated.

    Being as “mindful” as possible, this episode feels a bit awkward for the standard of this particular podcast. It doesn’t feel like listening to the average Harvard scientist on Mindscape, but rather like hearing a self-help writer on Joe Rogan’s show.

    It was interesting that she seemed bothered by the word “claim,” as if questioning things in science were a strange act. She was very vague and anecdotal in describing experiments and results, and she appeared uninterested in understanding the underlying causes of her impressive results.

    Sean wasn’t as mindful as I expected. I think he could have played more of a devil’s advocate role, but it seems he only does that when he agrees with the claims, thus playing against himself.

  9. LGuapo

    I’ll admit, I went into this episode suspicious that it would contain dubious claims, but I left the episode mindfully more suspicious of the dubious claims.

    For a moment, I mindfully felt like I might have stumbled into Joe Rogan’s podcast accidentally.

  10. Ted Farris

    I found Langer’s fundamental point about the unity of mind and body extremely important and one that is often ignored by most thinkers. Philosophy is founded on the idea that the mind and body are separate entities and the self is yet a third entity. Langer quite correctly points out that the mind and body are a single integrated unit. And although she doesn’t address that issue, the self is part of that same integrated unit, namely the human being. This solves most philosophical problems including those of mind/body dualism, the Buddhist conception of non self and the problems of free will and self-interest.

  11. Howard Gary

    Even though I have some reservations about the somewhat extraordinarily positive experimental results she claims for the practice of mindfulness, I agree with a lot of Langer’s opinions expressed in the interview. Including her monistic view that there is no real separation between mind and body. Also, that mindfulness, the practice of gently focusing your awareness on the present moment, being fully present without judgment, observing your thoughts and feelings as they arise is the best approach to minimizing stress and achieving a healthy meaningful existence.

  12. chris

    Yes I agree with many of the commenters re the ‘woo’ factor in this episode.
    Sean, I appreciate your aim is to have a conversation with your guests, but at times you were just totally credulous. A number of claims were made which were obviously questionable, but you remained silent. It’s almost as if you didn’t know where to go with some of the claims. A clear case of ‘Gish Gallop’ – endlessly citing studies and opinions with no analysis or deeper inspection.
    It’s hard enough to battle quackery without it being given this sort of platform, and being legitimised by association.
    Otherwise love your work.

  13. Kamran

    Mixed feelings about this episode, but largely negative. One of the worst episodes of one my fave podcasts. If Langer’s research and “claims” had any real value, why have they not been replicated or had any meaningful impact in the medical/scientific/psychological community?

    I think Sean failed to follow the rule he often mentions that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence – or at least replicated evidence. It seemed as though Sean was out of his depth and hadn’t read up enough about Langer’s work and criticisms of it. It’s possible that Sean may have just wanted to really learn about what she had to say – but if that’s the case then he should still be asking deeper questions – the way that his students no doubt ask him about the things he teaches.

    In this interview, as in many others, Langer relates her well-trodden “horses don’t eat meat” story, which sounds good, until you think about it “mindfully”. Questioning this “horses don’t eat meat” belief isn’t being “mindful”, it’s just Science and Philosophy 101 – all good scientists and philosophers since the dawn of homo sapiens always think about the source of their information and are willing to challenge assumptions in order to re-write, or improve upon, older knowledge or beliefs or assumptions – that’s how we made progress over the last 300,000 years. Who told you “horses don’t eat meat”? Is that person a reliable source of information for that particular proposition? Is it possible for me to test that proposition? Is it worthwhile to test that proposition? What would I or my community gain by me spending time on that enquiry?

    One section which raised an eyebrow was when Sean asked [at around 18 minutes] ” how do we measure it? How do we know how mindful versus mindless people are being?” Langer’s response was that we shouldn’t let things become second nature, such as when asked to read a sentence and not spotting that one word is repeated – “Mary had a a little lamb”. Langer suggests that if we are more mindful when reading, then we should be able spot that “a” is repeated in that sentence. But this seems fundamentally misguided, and ignores the widely accepted science on System 1 and System 2 thinking – or “thinking fast and slow”, as Daniel Kahneman’s famous book described it. System 2, or slow thinking, can be thought of as “mindful”. It’s widely accepted that it’s useful for almost all people in almost all situations to be able to think fast, and intuitively, and that it’s a waste of effort to think slowly about everything. We train ourselves to read fast and skip or ignore errors because it doesn’t matter 99.99% of the time to 99.99% of humans (unless you’re a proof reader, editor or lawyer). To read slowly and mindfully more often, as Langer seems to suggest, just because we might, once in a while, come across a repeated word isn’t mindful – it’s a mindless consumption of mental bandwidth.

    When Langer says “you don’t want to put yourself on automatic pilot” – this is also plainly wrong. Automatic pilot works for all of us almost all the time because it saves time and energy to do 99% of our daily tasks by habit, and to unquestioningly accept low value information from probably-reliable sources – that allows us to save 1% of our bandwidth for stuff that we want to think about in more detail (such as the feelings and emotions of people around us, or important social issues, etc). Langer doesn’t seem to grasp that no one really cares whether a horse ate a hot dog, or whether a sentence had a single word repeated. Langer would do well to pay heed to what Kahneman says – we’re almost always better off in terms of decision making to using intuitive fast thinking, but there’s no way to tell in advance when we’d have been better off using slow “mindful” thinking.

  15. Teodor Tarita-Nistor

    The comments about cancer and mindfulness show arrogance, lack of empathy and complete ignorance about this terrible disease.
    She should stick to 1+1 and hotdog eating horses.

  16. Howard Lovatt

    Seemed like magical thinking to me. A big red flag was that it seemed to be a cure-all. Also no replication of studies. The 1 + 1 != 2 in binary (10) also irked. Think this is the wrong podcast for this, plenty of new age-podcasts cover this stuff with equally little challenge from host.

  17. Lisa

    As a Psychologist, Iam simply sad, that somebody who studied Psychology promotes content like this. As with many, who on first glance seem to have a point, sparks of concepts that could be scientifically interesting are mixed with some ‘ professional’ vocabulary and easy to grap metaphorical examples ,- and then sprinkled all over the inappropriately researched, simply inaccurate or even dangerous constructs to cover up that they smell a little bit culty.

    Several times I found myself reminded of the incredibly upsetting ideas found in Anthroposophy (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthroposophy), which is not something I want to be reminded of, when expecting to enter a scientific discussion.(even if I am simply a listener)

    I was confused about some of the guests before (like that Sir, who talked about suits, but at least he stated that what he said was more of an opinion), but this time, I was disappointed. There is so much nonsens being spread in the name of Psychology, that sometimes I am just tired from witnessing the damage it does.

  19. Ruslan Sokolovski

    This lady is not even trying to be credible. Some meak Sean’s attempts to find out how she knows what she claims were dodged or rebuffed. Her Harvard affiliation is not a credit to the institution – another stain on Harvard reputation.

  20. Michael Lehmann

    I am a big fan of Sean’s work and his podcast. However, I have to agree with those who found this episode incredibly disappointing. I understand that Sean is very busy and may not have had the time to properly research his guest, or maybe he just wanted to be polite. I am sure, as a science communicator it must be one of his goals to foster critical thinking. In this case, he left it to his listeners to voice the skepticism. As someone else already commented here, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence! Unfortunately, Ms Langer’s claims are based on incredibly weak or non-existing evidence (or results that she claims she has but never published for some unexplained reason). Andrew already provided a link to a critical discussion of Langer’s work and I would like to add another here that nicely summarizes the concerns: https://www.skeptic.org.uk/2024/06/hotels-and-houseplants-why-we-should-doubt-ellen-langers-mind-over-matter-miracles/. To the best of my knowledge, none of her studies has in fact been successfully replicated. This is especially worrisome in view of the notorious “replication crisis”, especially in psychology research (it would be great if Sean could invite Stuart Richie on his podcast to talk about this). A tell-tale sign that Ms Langer does not care much about the validity of her studies was her remark “There’s no doubt that, as my colleagues would say, there are things going on under the hood, but I’m not looking under the hood”. Obviously, she is not interested in the mechanistic underpinnings of her alleged “findings”. To top it all off, she is shameless enough to assert “And I did some early research where we gave elderly people choices and they live longer”. No, they did not as she herself acknowledged in an erratum to her paper (see the links provided here and by Andrew). This is a very sad example of hype and, at the very least, gross negligence in the sciences.

  21. Anthony R. King

    Oh dear. 1+1 is a weak illustration, put this way (or any way perhaps). After all, there is an implied context of base 10 almost universally. Any variance from that accepted norm should be mentioned at the outset. You might expect a mindful person to have found a more incisive example.

  22. Johnthehillboy

    Oh my goodness these comments are filled up with people who need this episode more than the average.
    First let’s start with a lack of evidence.
    How about the placebo effect?
    THOSE CLAIMING TO BE MINDSCAPE LOYALIST WHO ARE SO OFFENDED I would like to as,
    Was one of those moments when she was talking about Decision Making because you heard her say “My view…….is different than everybody else’s” ???
    BECAUSE IF YOU ARE SUCH LOYALISTS you would relize that in Sean’s FIRST MINDSCAPE EPISODE with Carroll Tavris she exclaimed that the #1 thing out of the book that people have said helped them the most was he metaphor of:
    The Pyramid of Choice.

    Yes more studies are needed but 2 things to consider:
    1-Judea Pearl’s about human studies and the need to rely on human studies.
    2-Michael Muthukrishna’s explanation of Cultural Evolution you will realize that you will never be able to replicate human experiments about human judgements b/c human judgment is evolving with every nanosecond that passes. To bring Peal back into i, this is also his point when he says a robot will never be human because humans have a billion years worth of experience within their judgements.

    We need more Humanities.
    We need more math/physics people on here that understand in their bones how different biology is. Ex/ causation between levels. I can hear Sean’s sighs at these points and all through these comments.

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