Dr. Ellen Langer: Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity

27:52And the other experiments that you described, you point to what's possible and I want to talk about those, but maybe if we could just hover on this notion of mind and body as a single thing that there's an us, I don't want to get too philosophical here, but that there's an us. And our body carries us forward in motor behavior, but like how should we conceptualize the self if we don't have a mind body distinction. I don't know why that's a problem. Well, I am who I am, period. How does that change, whether we want to say me as having a mind body and elbows.

28:32Explain to me and then I will explain to you. Yeah, well, what I love is I'm going to first reflect what I love is the flexibility of your thinking around these things. Again, it's like maybe exercise, the effects of exercise or epiphenomena or you know, so in thinking about mind body, I can't get my no pun intended my head around this distinction that if I lose a certain piece of my body, I'm not fundamentally changed. But if I lose a piece of neural real estate, I'm fundamentally different. That's the only thing that anchors me to the idea that they're so. Why is that true? I mean, if, you know, let's say you're an athlete and you lose two of your fingers, you're not going to be performing in the same way that you performed in the past and surely it end up different.

29:18Yeah, that's it. I'll buy that explanation. Yeah, I mean, I'm just, I'm just trying to probe this because I think nowadays people think, oh, you know, if I breathe in a certain way, I'll change my state of mind, which is true. If I think differently, get stressed or relaxed, I'll change the way that I breathe. I mean, I think that we're starting to understand the bidirectionality of these things. I think some of the, even the work with the brain, where to assess this neuroscience now is crazy with FMRIs. And we want, no matter what happens, you want to see what's going on in the brain. And I think that implicitly in a backwards way that leads people away from realizing that whatever you're looking for is probably manifested every place.

30:05You know, I had this experience. I like doing strange things and I was out in Kansas City. And so somebody said, there's an iridologist. What is an iridologist? Sure, if a fund will go to the iridologist. So this person is looking in my eye, my iris. That's the iridologist part. And she said, you have a problem with your gallbladder. I thought, okay, that's great. You know, kids, we leave and have my time. I go back home and I had a problem with my gallbladder. Really. Everything is everywhere. The problem is we don't have the technology to notice it. You know, so when you're happy, your skin is different from when you're not happy.

30:54But who can see such small distinctions? But it's there. All we do is look to see where the brain is different. It's all one. Anything, I believe, anything that's happening on any level is simultaneously, simultaneously, not sequentially. More or less happening on every level. So a teardrop of sadness biochemically is different from a teardrop of joy. And so it's all there. We just have to notice. I have no memory now of what it was you said that led to that on my part. What I said at the end of the week, well, we're probing mind body and their interconnectedness. And so this iridologist, I've never heard that term before, this iridologist, it could be based on what we were discussing a few moments ago.

31:44It could be that the suggestion that there was a problem with your gallbladder led to a problem with your gallbladder, or do you think that she had some or he had some diagnostic knowledge? I hadn't even considered the former, which is strange to me. No, I just assumed that she was seeing something. But your idea, but either way, is fascinating, right? By somebody suggesting you have a gallbladder problem, to have a gallbladder problem? What are your thoughts on things like acupuncture? And when I think about acupuncture, I'm not just thinking about the needles. The few times I've been to an acupuncture, the first thing they do is they ask you to stick out your tongue.

32:27They are able to diagnose tongue texture and color. I think everything is everywhere, although I teach health site at Harvard. And there's some data on it being mostly placebo. And that sounds like a downer. But most of everything is placebo. What does that mean that virtually everything is controlled by our thoughts? And we need to embrace that, to make the changes that most of us desire. So another, it's going to an acupuncturist itself means I want to find answers, and seek any more likely to find. And then you're in a position to improve. I might ask what happened with your mom's mindset or life, or psychological life that you think led to the...

33:22No, it's an end of one. It's very hard to know. I knew that when she got sick, I believed at that point that being anything negative was going to work. Work in the opposite direction. And so I wouldn't let anybody in to see her who wasn't uplifting. You know, that was... There's no way of knowing if any of that mattered or not. I went and got her a very expensive set of golf clubs. She wasn't a big golfer, but my reasoning was that, you know, I must believe she's going to be better or why would I have spent the money. Her reasoning was, my reasoning must be that if I get these, she'll think that, you know, so it didn't work.

34:12We had these golf clubs that were never used. You know, I don't know. I believe that we have more control. At that point, I hadn't done all of these experiments that might have led me to push even harder. It was kind of funny, though, because the way I had cognized everything back then was the importance of perceived control. And so I had these data people living longer and so on. And yet, mindlessly, I, you know, virtually took over her life. You know, just like you can see or what you can do. But I don't know. And I don't think there would have been with just one person any way of knowing what led to the disease going away.

35:01But the fact that it went away was crucial to me. You know, I think that we have to talk about the myths in medicine. That what people need to understand is that all science are probabilities. An experiment doesn't give you absolute facts. And we teach these probabilities as if they're absolute. And give up a great deal of control by doing so. Now, you asked me before about how I came to certain things. Let me go back to an answer. I should have given you many years ago. I was at a horse event. And this man asked me what I watched his horse for him because he wants to get his horse a hot dog. Hot dog.

35:50I'm a straight -e student. What is it crazy? Horse's don't eat meat. Sure, I'll watch your horse. He comes back with the hot dog and the horse ate it. And that's when I realized everything I thought I knew could be wrong. And I thought, what does it mean horses don't eat meat? How many horses were tested? What were they tested with? How much meat mixed with how much grain and what kind of grain? And how big are these horses? And when was the last, you know, and so on and it all opened up. And I said, how could we make such a statement horses don't eat meat? But when you think about science, then imagine if you did the experiment and you're trying to teach somebody what you found.

36:28You say these particular horses who hadn't eaten for three days were given this grain. And under those circumstances, 80 % of them didn't eat meat. That's a mouthful. You can't communicate that way. So you abbreviated horses don't eat meat. So it's not in the telling that's the problem. It's in the receiving of the information. We have to know that these things are just not true to the one. But it's very important because every time you're given a diagnosis, you take the diagnosis as real. Well, it's not the case that they can be sure that all of these symptoms mean you have this disease. And if you have, quote, this disease, we don't know that all of the people who have it are going to follow.

37:18And it becomes very unlikely when you turn it all inside out that way. And so another part of this that we can get into or not is people's understanding, probabilities in general, and that you can't predict. Now people ask for answers all the time, you know, even the how much is one in one. You know, should I have the surgery? What is the disease that I have? And by recognizing that all information that's given is for the group, not for the individual. I have a few examples of this as kind of funny. I say, so Michael Jordan and I are going to have a foul shooting contest. We each get to shoot one basket.

38:08Who's going to win? Well, most people are just going to quickly say Michael Jordan. How much money are you willing to bet on this? One shot each. Million dollars. I'll give you a million dollars if Ellen Langer wins. You give me or I'll give you a million dollars if Michael Jordan wins. You give me half a million dollars if Ellen Langer wins. First, you think you'll take the bet. But when you think about it, no, he sometimes misses. She sometimes makes the basket. Maybe he had a fight with his wife. Didn't sleep well. You know, maybe she is in top form and this is now the moment she's going to make that basket.

38:48Or make it simple. He said to himself, let the older woman win. Why not? Really. You know. And when you think of all the reasons why it could be the case that I could win, all of a sudden you become less certain. Now, certainly if we were shooting a hundred baskets, he would win. I don't think you can give you another example I used to often because I don't know which of these will feel right. You go and to a Mercedes parking lot or pick your favorite car. And I said there are a hundred cars there. You choose one. And if it starts, I will give you a million dollars. If it doesn't start, you give me your full life savings assuming it's under a million.

39:35Cap dead a million. Now, Mercedes is a wonderful car. Nobody is going to take that bet. Everybody knows, you know, sometimes it doesn't work. You know, sometimes the genius gets something wrong. Sometimes the car is a lemon and so on. So what we mean when we say, if you were going to start a hundred cars, most of them are going to start. But you can't predict which one isn't going to. Well, in life, I'm happy if an operation is good for most people. I want to know is it going to work for me? And there's no way to know that. You can never predict the individual case. But Andrew, we don't have to worry about that because you can always predict or control your reaction to whatever is happening.

40:24So it doesn't matter as much. You see, if I can be happy whether this occurs or the opposite occurs, I care less about which way it turns out. But right now we're all brought up in a world where we have these good things, we have these bad things. You've got to kill yourself to get the good things, step over whoever you can to avoid the bad things. Once you recognize that's all in your head, you just be still. My favorite example, this is so, for me, was so funny. I'm doing one of these podcasts over the zone. And I'm trying to explain that evaluation is in your head, not in the things you're evaluating.

41:06I say is an example. So if the internet went out right now, wouldn't be terrible. I'd go have lunch. The internet went out just at that moment. And I did have lunch because I had put the suggestion in my mind. You know, most things don't matter. We don't recognize that. And I think I have a few one liners that if people understand or care about nothing else that I've said, take this to heart. That next time you're stressed, ask yourself, is it a tragedy or an inconvenience? It's almost never a tragedy. And so when you breathe, you know, I failed the test. I got, you know, dented the car. I missed the bus.

41:49Whatever it is. So what? And so, you know, you take a deep breath and come back to yourself and realize that most of the things that make us crazed are unnecessary. You get a lot of this as you get older, but I teach my students this early on. Why wait? You know, why wait to recognize that you're the one who's almost always your worst enemy? I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor, AG1. AG1 is an all -in -one, vitamin mineral probiotic drink with adaptogens. I've been taking AG1 daily since 2012, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring this podcast. The reason I started taking AG1 and the reason I still take AG1 is because it is the highest quality and most complete foundational nutritional supplement.

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44:46So much of our developmental wiring is based on learning how to predict what's going to happen next. I mean, you think about object constancy that kids, you know, of a certain age you put a ball behind your back, they think it disappeared. Eventually, they realize just because you moved your arm and the ball behind your back doesn't mean that the ball is gone. This kind of thing. But sadly, though, then they believe the ball is still there when in fact the ball may be gone. True. Right. There's always a portal portal to a different to a different outcome. And I'm catching on to your mode of thinking here.

45:19This is actually what I'm trying to do. Because I think, you know, the brain is a prediction -making machine. In addition to doing other things, it regulates heartbeat, all the autonomic stuff, heartbeat, digestion, etc. It remembers things and it's a prediction -making machine. At least those three things. I feel like the prediction -making aspect of our neural circuitry is what leads us to this notion of having control or wanting control. Because I think a lot of what's happening in our conversation in the backdrop of these experiments is to what extent do we have control over outcomes? Well, it's interesting because our mindlessness, which results, I think, in part to hold on to things, to have control, is the very thing that deprives us of control.

46:09Because again, things are changing. You're holding it still in your mind. And, you know, so you're living with somebody or you meet somebody and you're right away you decide what, you know, size that person up. So now you can control your interactions with them. But what you're doing is ignoring all the times the person is not like that. And all the ways that the relationship could have otherwise grown. You know, that we, in general, and this is, you know, I have psychological treatment for chronic illness, it's all based on the same idea of change. Things are changing. We're always holding it still.

46:54And so you have the illusion that you're controlling things. You know, but in fact, you're giving up control by not recognizing for yourself or somebody else. You know, all of our statements, we can do or we can do. You can't know whether you can or you can't. The fact that you did it doesn't mean that you can do it again. The fact that you couldn't do it doesn't mean you couldn't do it in the future. I feel like close to the end of each year, which we just, you know, passed recently, these lists come out. Oh, these resolutions are so mindless. And they, but they're more than just mindless. They deny that what we did made sense or else we wouldn't have done it.

47:38That one thing that I've told you is more important to me than anything else that I came to over all these years of studying. So you're going to resolve that you're going to, I don't know, stop drinking. You're going to go to the gym. Whatever these New Year's resolutions are suggests that what you were doing instead of that thing you think you should be doing was not something you should have been doing. And I think that's never the case. I woke up early this morning and the, my first thoughts of the day, I like to think have some importance for something who knows. It's when my mind seems clearest for at least a nanosecond.

48:21And my first thought was that the pattern that I seem to be perpetually in is one of whatever I'm doing unless I'm podcasting or reading a research paper that my mind is constantly flitting to the other things that I think I should be doing. It's sad and it's something I've been working on for a very long time. And I'm able to hold my, for lack of a better word, attention on things to accomplish tasks in my life and to be present with people as it were. Let's go back to stuff because we both said it was sad. Why is it sad? We're reconsidering. That too to be able to think of five different things instead of one.

49:04Could be an asset. It could be an asset. I think that for me, what I realize is most of the shoulds are just total lies. Yeah. And also they don't, they're just lies. They're not actually coming from a screen. I'm not hearing other people's voices in my head. Yeah, you should do this. It's, you know, not parental narrative or anything. It's just, it's just contamination of a, like, a useless type. It's not like listening to the radio, I used to listen to the radio while I'd like make dinner or something. It was so pleasant, right? You know, you're here in an evening discussion about the news or talk, talk, talk show or whatever on the radio while cooking.

49:43And so that kind of, quote unquote, distraction felt really meaningful. I felt like what I lived alone that I had other people in the room with me. This is different. This is, it feels as if it detracts from some essence of the behavior that I'm in. Even if the behavior is just getting out of bed in the morning. Wait, so let me be clear. You get out of bed or start to get out of bed and you have several thoughts. Yep. And those thoughts bother you. And they prevent you from getting out of bed? No, but they feel intrusive. They don't feel welcome. Like, because I know what I'm going to do each day.

50:20I have a policy for myself of doing one work thing each day, maybe in one or two blocks. And I try and really put everything I have into those. It's kind of a recent evolution of not trying to do three things in a day. Maybe it's a function of getting older, but I get so much more satisfaction and get truly so much more done from just doing one thing in my work. I don't even understand the one thing I did. You know, that people talk about multitasking, which is what you're saying and you're better, not to multitask. But you're always multitasking, right? I mean, I'm moving my hands while I'm talking to you and I'm sort of thinking and fixing my back in the seat.

51:00There are always lots of things going on. And I think that also tasks. So let's say you're a kid and you're doing your social studies homework. And then you're doing your math homework. And so, and you go back and forth. So you multitask and it depends. If you see yourself as multitasking, then you're drawing boundaries between your math and your social studies. If you see yourself as doing homework, it's all part of the same thing. And so, there's always a way that the task can be grouped as a single unit or you can see anything as multitasking. When you see it as multitasking, you're suggesting to yourself that there's going to be some conflict.

51:47There's some reason I'm leaving this to go to this. Well, maybe I'm running the script backwards. Let me put it differently. The level of satisfaction that I feel from having, say, worked on a chapter of my book for a couple of hours or even 45 minutes or from going for a run without my phone and just enjoying the run, it still blows me away. How much I enjoy things that would fall under the category of simple things or things that I experience in isolation. As compared to how little I enjoy and sometimes reflect on how punishing, quote unquote, multitasking is. Like being a text conversation while I'm walking on the beach.

52:41No, no, but when you're texting while you're on the beach, probably it's some kind of work text. There's something about it and why are you doing it when you're on the beach? I can easily imagine, I'm on the beach, it's wonderful. Let me text Andrew and say, Andrew, you're right, this time on the beach is wonderful. And texting wouldn't take away from it. My life is much simpler. To me, all you have are moments. That's it. And if you make the moment matter, then the moment matters and you can't make it matter more, it matters or it doesn't matter. And so the question, when you're lost doing or found really, I don't want to say lost when we're writing, I find myself learning writing.

53:28But when you're engaged in an activity, you're making each of those moments matter. But you know, they should matter as much. I had this thought that I would help people who are stressed and I would say to them, okay, so assuming that their vision is reasonable, I would just thread a needle. It's threading the needle. And then I'd ask them how they felt. And everybody's going to feel fine because you're actively engaged and doing something. You're not engaged in what people call monkey brain or whatever, worrying about tomorrow, worrying about, you know, so on. So to go back to your three things, you know, it's like the text on the beach is not, and I love you, texts, because I don't see why that would distract you.

54:24I could imagine being anywhere doing multiple things where I'm sharing what I'm doing, but I'm not seeing them, you know, oh, I have to do this work thing. And then the question is, why see the work thing that way, in a special way, someone like you where you don't need any of this anymore anyway. Well, yeah, that's a discussion on to itself. No, but no, but it's important, you know, and so that if it's all fun, it doesn't matter. You know, I was on this panel in Australia. Well, first each of us gave a talk, some big shots. And then unbeknownst to us, they brought us all out. And so we're sitting there and I'm the last one to be asked.

55:06And the question was, what's on your bucket list? And so the first person answers, what's on the next person, and then we get five. Now it's my turn. So I've had some time to think about this. And you know, my first thought, I don't have a bucket list. But of course, you know that I'm going to say, well, it's good not to have a bucket list or else I'd have a bucket list. So then I'm able to say, why I don't have a bucket list. You know, if you imagine you're like a glass, you know, and the water is full or whatever you've bought in this case, you know, that is full. So it's full. You can't do more than that.

55:43And so if the moment is meaningful, you don't have to be writing that book, being in love on a vacation in Paris. And so I think we have all these crazy notions. Even the idea of, I've talked about this before, work life balance. Oh, that's scary to me. What that says, you know, what life really means is some joy, right, other than just being, you know, doing work 24 -7 or however long people work 24 -7. What is it? Three and a half words. Anyway, that it suggests that we, the work that we're doing has to be aversive. And because it's aversive, the only way to have the good life is to add this fun time.

56:38And I think that said, I think it's sad that people think life has to be stressful, that work has to be unpleasant. And you know, that no matter what you're doing, I believe there's a way of doing it so that it's fun. Well, I love that notion. I mean, I will routinely find these articles just get served up to me in my Google feed or something. Like the five things that people regret most on their deathbed. I think these lists are terrible. I might do too. I think they're terrible because without fail, the number one, two or three is always, I wish I hadn't worked as much. Yeah. I've derived tremendous pleasure from my work, but also tremendous relationships, tremendous love, the tremendous, excuse me, levels of insight into what I think are insights.

57:26I'm clear. You wouldn't be having the experience now. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I mean, I'm constantly in pinch me moments with the podcast that was also true when I was running my lab. And then I decided to transition more to this and other things. But I mean, this notion that one wishes they'd worked less. It's such a sad thing to even think about. But it also implies that, you know, somebody who enjoys their work doesn't enjoy their family or their relationships. And that certainly isn't true either. So there are all these assumptions that are written into these lists. I'm actually quite opposed to lists of that sort in a short media article form because I think it clearly doesn't change behavior.

58:09I mean, people have been talking about, you know, drink less. Well, smoking was eradicated mostly from this country through different mechanisms. But, you know, sleep, sleep more, stress less. I mean, these lists come out and they don't change behavior at all. Not only that, but even a discussion about, let's say, somebody in like sleep. And I find it outrageous. I might even disagree on this here. But when people say how much sleep do you need? Now, to me, if I just ran a marathon, I that night, I probably need a different amount of sleep than if I stayed in bed eating candy watching movies all day.

58:50You know, and my age, everything should play a part in this. If I relax in the two or three hours before going to sleep, especially if I didn't the lights, I actually require a full two to three hours less of sleep to wake up feeling refreshed. Yeah. My criteria is what does it take to wake up feeling reasonably refreshed? So to go back to the mind body unity studies, we have a study where we have people in a sleep lab. They wake up and the clock tells them they got two hours more sleep than they actually got two hours fewer or the amount of sleep they got biological and cognitive functioning follow perceived amount of sleep.

59:32Yeah, this is such an important study. I was going to bring it up later, but I'm so glad you brought it up now. These days, a tremendous number of people are tracking their sleep. I do it through my, you know, my sleep mattress cover. I love getting my sleep score. I like to see what I got. People do with the with the aura ring or the boot band or, you know, pick your favorite technology nowadays, Apple watch, whatever. If I understand the study correctly, the perception of how much sleep people got based on their knowledge of a number, a score, et cetera, dictates the cognitive performance and their physical well -being.

1:00:05I mean, this is this runs counter current till everything in the wellness biohacking movement. It jibes, however, with the data that I'm aware of. I think it was a sleep lab at Stanford that for instance, positive anticipation of next day events reduces your sleep need and improves the quality of your sleep. Just being excited for the next day can make it such that the five hours you got is sufficient. The funniest thing is that if you have to wake up early in the morning to make a flight. Okay, so you have to get up at 4 .30 in the morning to make a flight. What most people will do is go to sleep early the night before so they can wake up early.

1:00:47But they're not going to be able to fall asleep because the amount of sleep they need is generated by the day before not the day to come. Well, I do think that there was a sleep when I'm dead mindset that was diminishing people's health for a while. I do think it's great that books like Matt Walker's, you know, a Why We Sleep, et cetera, came out. Although that book focused more on the bad things that happen if you don't sleep enough. And I think Matt, who's done a series on here about sleep, would now say, you know, it's great that we're now focused largely on the things that one can do to get agency over one sleep.

1:01:19But I think that there's such a thing as creating a sleep need anxiety. And then people can't sleep because we're not going to dissolve into a puddle of our own tears on one poor night's sleep. Yeah, no, but it's also that if you can't, if you're not sleeping, what is the reason for that? And if you're stressed, obviously, it's the stress that's the problem, not the number of hours sleep you're getting. Well, I always say if you're going to get it less than your typical or neat required night sleep, hopefully it's for good reasons. Hopefully you're having a good time. It's when you get a fire alarm in the middle of the night that it becomes, as you said, stressful.

1:01:58I'd like to just briefly go back to the counterclockwise study. Could you describe a little bit more about the practical aspects of that study? So these were people who, let's say we're on average, how old was it somewhere between like 30 and 50? No, no, no, no, the counterclockwise. These were people who were 80. Oh, 80. Okay. Excuse me. Now, but also that was when 80 was 80, not the new 60. They were old. In fact, I remember when we were interviewing, I was interviewing people to see if they could be in the study. So they're down the hall and in my office and I see them. They look like they're not going to make it down the hall because I'm saying to myself, why am I doing this?

1:02:45That I'm taking on too much. I, in fact, had I realized all the responsibility at that point that I was actually assuming I probably wouldn't have done it. I mean, I was in charge of these people's lives, everything about them, for, you know, for this five days without knowing these people, without a full medical support system. I guess one or two of them had died. You could end up in a mess. Yeah, yeah. So I was fortunate that none of that happened. But, you know, so they were old. And it was interesting because you know, they show up and they look, you know, really. Now it probably was somebody 105.

1:03:23Wow. That's the way they, you know, presented. And you'd have, you'd speak to the person and usually the adult daughter would do the answering rather than, you know. So they were coddled. They were presumed to have all sorts of problems and so on. Almost instantly when they got there, they changed. The feeling was almost palpable. Now I did this thing. It wasn't good science, but, um, so the first group that we took there was the Reminiscing Group. This was a group where they were going to Reminiscing for that week. So they always knew now was now and then was then, right? That was a control group.

1:04:07We get to the retreat and I'm in this van. People, you know, people need to understand this study was back before Google, before we had the internet. You know, so when I am playing music in the van going to the event, music from the past, this was a major thing to find this. Now it takes two minutes, you ask, chat lately. You know, give me the 10 best songs back 20 years ago at any rate. So I'm on the bus with them, music playing from the past playing. We get very close to the retreat and all of a sudden I realize that I was sexist at the time oblivious, that none of my male graduate students were with me.

1:04:56That meant I had seven old men and at least seven heavy suitcases. There was no way I was going to carry their suitcases upstairs. So, on platform, we get off the bus and I say, you're in charge of your own suitcase. I don't care if you move it in inch at a time to get it to your room or you unpack it here, assured at a time, however you want to do it. Now imagine nothing else, the difference between somebody who's cuddled, who is not even thought to be able to respond to a question, where the daughter or son would answer for them to now, they're in charge of their whole lives. And that meant that even the comparison group was going to do well, which they did, just not quite as well as the other group.

1:05:48And for me, that was fine because as you mentioned before, my work is all about possibility. I'm not interested in describing what is. I'm interested in seeing what may be. So, if I got one monkey to say, hey, and that's nonsense, that would be fine if we couldn't train the rest of them. But it would lead us to different views of language. I love this approach to science of seeing what may be. I have to say there's this little script running in the back of my mind and now I'm not going to judge it. That's sorts of experiments and the general line of inquiry that you've been involved in for some time now.

1:06:31To me runs countercurrent to my perception of, I'm just going to be honest, because I'm a West Coast guy, the Harvard campus, and the idea that science is done in a particular way. You know, a very brief anecdote, you know, the folks that founded at the Estonian Institute in Big Sur were at Stanford at one point. They weren't professors, but there's a story, and I believe the story that they had proposed at that time, a class on mindfulness and breathing to bring stand graph through and some other people. And this was probably the late 70s, early 80s. And whatever the cultural norms were at Stanford at that time, they claimed they were basically run off campus when started Estonian.

1:07:17I don't know if it's a true story, but I like the story anyway. My lab at Stanford ran a study on particular patterns of breathing along with David Spiegel and how it can be used to, you know, self -adjust stress levels and reduced stress levels. Okay, so nowadays there's grants given for this kind of stuff and meditation. So there's been a huge shift in the academic cultural milieu. But given that you've been running these sorts of, you know, seeing what may be types of studies for a number of years, at a campus that I consider as more kind of like East Coast died in the wool notions of how science is done.

1:07:52I want to know, how was it received early on? Be did you care? See, is it in your nature and has it always been in your nature to kind of test the elements? Because I sense, but I could be completely wrong because I'm not a psychologist that you delight in kind of not poking the bear but playing with ideas that are kind of heretical. Well, I would use the methods of the field. It was just the questions that were different. So they weren't seen to be quite as different as you're suggesting. Did any of your colleagues think like, no? Great. Okay. No, I love hearing that. Because it shatters my notions of kind of East Coast Ivy League.

1:08:38Maybe I mean, perhaps behind my back, but well clearly it's worked out and nowadays, you know, there are multiple labs that are working on happiness, you know, working on mindfulness. And I mean, you've pioneered an entire field and a way, but I'm more interested in the way of thinking that was it. So it's interesting. So like, you rolled a Ellen Lang, like, well, maybe cookies are the nutritious stuff. I don't know, I understand. So I seem to be, you know, come hell or high water. I'm going to do it. I'm not like that at all. Interesting. More now that I'm older. But I tell a story. I don't remember what the point of it, the exact point was in the mindful body where I'm at the dentist.

1:09:19I'm a little kid. I don't remember how old. And I remember my mother came in and the dentist told my mother what a good patient I was. And all I remember was my saying, what were the other kids doing? You know, so it wasn't as if I made a choice. I could do this or I could do it. It never occurred to me. And so lots of these ideas, you know, are not against or what, you know, I don't know where they come from. I know Lee Ross went, you know, so Lee was a professor at Stanford. And I remember having a conversation where you said, Ellen, you know, you're from Mars. And I said, I'm not so different.

1:09:56He says, okay, so you're a normal, not an exceptional Martian, but you're still a Martian. And then a colleague had a conversation with someone. And I was flattered by this, but I think it wasn't meant to be flattering because they were worried what my reaction was. Was that, you know, I'm from a different time. And, you know, so that plays differently if you're aware. You know, so like when I started painting, you know, I was breaking the rules to some people's minds. But no, I didn't know the rule. And so I was just doing what felt natural. Well, I have to introduce you to my good friend, Rick Rubin, who's been on this podcast a few times because he wrote the creative act.

1:10:44He's basically, his life has been spent, you know, trying to pull out the best creative works from musicians. And he's been involved in other things too. And he's just as a, you know, a kind of supernatural level of ability to do this. And he keeps coming back to this thing in our discussions, but also in his book. And elsewhere about how the, the impediment, the greatest impediment to the creative process is to think about the publicity or cultural milieu that it's going to exist in that he really believes that these things are offerings to the, to God, to the universe, to whatever that come through us.

1:11:19And that the, the barrier is the, it's almost like the self awareness is the barrier. So one of the earlier titles of the mindful body was who says so? Love it. And, you know, realizing that everything that is was at one point a decision made by people with different motives, different histories, different needs. And when you put people, I say back in the equation, everything becomes mutable, everything. You know, so, and so there are things here's where I am different from, from many other people, from better or worse. I think in this case, for better, you know, that I, everything can be changed.

1:12:00You know, you tell me and meet this, you know, this woman and she's too heavy weight can be lost here, can be grown. Everything can be changed. So I give a talk when I was very young. And I'm here on the stage and, you know, the audience is all the way back here. And I knew that was going to make me nervous. So what I did was move all the chairs to be closer to me. Now, if you said to anybody, can you move the chairs? Everybody would say, of course, but mindlessly it doesn't occur to you. It doesn't occur to you that what is doesn't have to be as it is. And it, you know, on the older I get, the more malleable everything seems to be.

1:12:44Even a thing, you know, to go back, I don't know why this comes to mind, but it does. If an insurance company is making a decision about what drugs to ensure. Now, who said that this disorder is better or more worthy than that? I say, so these are people making this decision. So I imagine that you have a group of nuns, they are the committee making a decision, versus a group of lusty 50 year old men. And they're deciding whether people should be reimbursed for biagra, for example. And that's what it's all about. You know, that when you recognize that whatever is could be different as meetings.

1:13:24And I deal with this when I give lectures, you know, at some point I might say, look in the audience and see if there's usually a man. Is there a man here? It's about 65. Somebody always there, I don't know why. 65 men find me attractive. I don't know what. Anyway, invite them to the stage and then we look ridiculous. I'm 53, he's 65. And I asked him to put his hand, he puts his hand up, his hand is three inches larger than mine. And then I just raised the question, should we do anything physical the same? And it's ridiculous. You know, but one of us is teaching how to do it. You know, so the more different you are from the person who wrote the rule, the more important it is for you not to mindlessly follow the rule.

1:14:13So you don't hold the tennis racket like this. If your hand is half the size of the person who worked twice the size or you don't or anything else. And people don't realize it. That everything that is was a decision for something to be a decision means there was uncertainty. As soon as the decision is made, we forget all that uncertainty and act as if this is the way it's supposed to be. An example I often use in tennis. So you have, and everybody, when you think about this, nobody's going to argue that, of course, the rules to tennis weren't handed down from the heavens. Somebody decided it should be two serves.

1:14:53And that's fine, but for me, three serves would be better. The first time I kill it doesn't go in. Now I'm afraid to try to kill it again and learn from that because I don't want to double fold. So I have a little whoosh second serve, three serves. I kill it. It doesn't go in. Now I learn from that. I kill it again, but I'm getting a little better. And I still have my backup third serve. All right, so what is the point of that? That if I wrote the rules to the game, I would be a better tennis player. You would be better at whatever you're writing the rules to. So you think differently about yourself.

1:15:28You don't feel bad about it. In fact, you know, when people play tennis with me, we often play three serves. Why not? You know, everything about it is up for grabs. And, you know, so what happens is the lower down you are on the totem pole, the fewer of these things, games, ways of being that you yourself have created, the more you're trying to fit yourself into some form, that done isn't so comfortable. So we need to appreciate that rules, laws, everything was just somebody's decision about how things should be. And, you know, don't violate them purposely, but if they don't fit, you know, legality is not the same thing as morality.

1:16:16You know, by law one was not allowed interracial marriage. By law one was not allowed to be gay. By law, you know, so on and so forth. One wasn't allowed to drink at one point. And so on. These are not moral issues. These are a group of people who are making a decision for the rest of us. If it doesn't hurt, fine. But, you know, if it does, fight it, deviate, at least live life you want to live. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Function. Last year I became a function member after searching for the most comprehensive approach to lab testing. Function provides over 100 advanced lab tests that give you a key snapshot of your entire bodily health.

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1:18:22Function currently has a wait list of over 250 ,000 people, but they're offering early access to huberman podcast listeners. Again, that's functionhealth .com slash huberman to get early access to function. I feel like one of the major detriments to living the way that you're describing, which, by the way, has tremendous gravitational pull in my mind. It's such a better way to go through life, right? And I subscribe also to this notion that pretty much everything was made up besides the laws of nature, right? To me, physics is real and chemistry is real. Biology gets, biology is real. It gets tricky because they're all real, but it's our understanding of that varies.

1:19:11So we haven't worked out all of physics yet or biology or any of these other things. So I don't think that we should set these aside and say those rules, we should follow com hell or high water. Right. I mean, you know, seeing what may be, I mean, I could say listen, because of the laws of gravity, objects fall down, not up. But of course, they're create exceptions to that. But that humans make up all sorts of rules, culture dictates, group thing dictates. And it seems that one of the major detriments to living in this freer way, this more exploratory way that we're talking about today, is this whole thing of theory of mind.

1:19:54You know, that we are able for better or worse to get into the minds of others. And in some cases, create ideas, true or not, about how we will be judged if we do a, b or c. And in doing so, we give up, we give up some real estate. We give up some... See, that's the... Okay, so that's perfect. Yeah. And because we think we know, but are oblivious to the fact that every single, every single, is a big statement. Behavior can be understood in equal dimensions, equal potency as good or bad. Now, so that I can control what you're thinking. So you think that I'm gullible. You could persuade me that I'm gullible.

1:20:37I can try my hardest not to be gullible. But I'm going to eventually be gullible. And the reason for that is that I value being trusting. And as long as I value being trusting, I'm going to be seen as gullible. As long as you value being flexible, you're going to be inconsistent. As long as you value being stable, you're going to be seen as boring, and so on. And so this is what I said to you before in different terms that with all that I've studied found, found interesting overall these decades, the thing that meant the most to me was the realization that behavior makes sense from the actor's perspective or the actor wouldn't do it.

1:21:22Now, if you think about that, that means every single time you're demeaning somebody or yourself, or you're coming up with a New Year's resolution, what you're doing is denying the sense of what you were doing, and saying, oh, you should have done something different. Okay. Once you realize that your behavior makes sense, you like yourself more when you're realizing that, in any relationship, anything that's difficult is difficult because one of you thinks there's a right way and is denying the other person's perspective. We did this thing so many years ago. I gave people a list of, I remember, two or three hundred behavior descriptions.

1:22:09I said, circle those things about yourself that you keep trying to change, but you keep failing it. So for me, I'd circle impulsive, gullible, but I won't tell you the rest. Okay. Then you turn the page over, and in a mixed up random order are the positive versions of each of these. Now people are asked, circle those things you really value about yourself, my spontaneity and my being trusting. And as long as I value being spontaneous, I'm going to appear impulsive and so on. And so now that I have more respect for myself because what I did made sense, I carry myself differently. I'm not doing what you were just suggesting before where I'm tormenting myself and so on.

1:23:01And the people I'm with, there's a lot in the mindful body that deals with language and only a fraction of the sensitivity I seem to have to language in a different way from way linguists would study it. But you have things, you know, let's say forgiveness. We have all these terms that seem good. And you know, because you figured me out now that if you say it's good, I'm going to find a way it's bad. If you say it's bad, I'm good. Okay. So this is one of those. I don't want anybody, certainly not the person closest to me to ever forgive me. I want to be understood. And if you understand, there's no reason to forgive me because my behavior will make sense or else I wouldn't do it.

1:23:53Okay. So how did this come about? I was asked to give a sermon. I'm a servant. I'm Jewish. I have to go to this church because I say yes to everything. And I'm going to give a sermon. What am I going to talk about? I know nothing about religion. Forgiveness. It's not religion, but it sounds religiously. I'll think about forgiveness. So I think about forgiveness. And what I came up with was sacrilegious. If you ask ten people, is forgiveness good or bad? What are they going to tell you? It's good. If you ask ten people, is blame good or bad? What are they going to say? It's bad. But you know, you can't forgive unless you first blame.

1:24:33So our forgives are our blamers. That's interesting. Now do you blame people for good things or bad things? You blame people for bad things, but things in and of themselves aren't good or bad. So what happens is the people who see the world negatively, who blame, then forgive, hardly divine. Now if you blame, it's better to forgive than not forgive. But if you understand why the person did what they did, it obviates the necessity for blame, which then obviates the necessity for forgiveness. I'd love to bypass blame. Yeah, well, that's, you know, I think that's the way to do it is to recognize in a more open -minded way the motivations that people have vary, the consequences.

1:25:22You know, no matter what you do, whatever negative thing it seems, there are positive things will follow if you allow them and you look at it that way. Can I ask you now? Oh, that's right. It's your podcast. Yes, you can. Definitely not my podcast. We're here together. Could I ask you for any reflections that come up around this recent thought train I was on? I was laughing at the fact that our species for whatever reason seems to keep wanting to build technologies. And that much of our effort these days is focused on trying to undo some of the ills of the technologies that we've developed. So I use smartphones and I love them and I use social media and I think it's terrific for certain things.

1:26:14But of course these things have issues just like the automobile created issues, the television created issues and on and on. Okay. Fossil feels all of this. People debate fossil fuels. But anyway, you get the point. Every technology brings with it some convenience. Or some way that humans have been able to overcome nature in some way or work with nature. Right. You know, we can't fly. So we'll plane to be okay. And I just decided to look at this through a different lens. Like, like, this is amazing. We're sending rockets into space. We'll probably colonize Mars not too long from now. If Elon figures it out and I get the sense he probably will.

1:26:51We got AI just this last week. There's this whole thing. I think. And so then I started thinking like, you know, at what point do we just kind of stop? And the answer is pretty clear. It's unlikely that humans are ever going to stop this kind of itch to develop technology. And I thought, wow, you know, we're the only species that does this. Like, you know, if the raccoons get together and they think, okay, like, let's figure out how to pick locks, like actually how to pick locks as opposed to just go in through crawl spaces. If they've been working on that, they're still failing miserably, right?

1:27:24As far as I know. So it's something so unique to our species among the old world primates to develop technologies. Other animals do it. Crows do it. Other primates do it. But we special, I mean, we are really the utmost example of this. And I just wondered, like, what do you think the human compulsion is to develop technologies? I don't think there is a compulsion to develop anything in particular. I think there's a compulsion to develop. There's a compulsion. I wouldn't call it compulsion because that sounds negative. But I think that drive. Yeah. All mindfulness says is noticing new things, creating new things.

1:28:05With that creation, we're maximally alive. And so if we happen to be on the technology train, you know, Venice technology that's going to get our attention. The people who are in other areas, whether it's creating music, doing what you, you know, you and I do, it doesn't seem to me any different in principle. What do you think that's about? I'm not asking us to go into evolutionary psychology. But what do you think it is that humans have this generative spirit in their mind body, the same thing, to express and to create things that have some durability and time or that are just an expression of where we are.

1:28:47I mean, it's so unusual. But I don't think that its durability is what matters. I think that becomes a social construction. You know, what is the group, the Asians, you know, monks who are going to create art. And you know, as soon as it's finished, then you bring it down to the water and, you know, to show that nothing lasts. San Castle, no selfie. I call it, you know, San Castle, no selfie. You're just doing it to do it. I actually do a lot of writing these days that I like in my brain. I've always called San Castle, no selfie. Like it's, you're, it's getting washed away. And then someone says we could take a photo of it.

1:29:24It's like, no, actually, I just do it just to see. It's just a practice of getting out what I feel I need to get out. Well, so for my mindfulness book, which I wrote way back when the secretary I had then was wonderful guy, but didn't know anything about computers and I knew less. And so I would give him something and I'd say, you know, insert this page 20, whatever. And he would just sort of randomly, because he didn't know what he was doing either. And then at some point, he lost an entire draft of the book, sort of imagine, you know, and my first thought was probably more typical than my second thought, which is to go crazy.

1:30:09Oh, my God. You know, and then I said to myself, what makes me think that that draft was better than the next draft that I can come up with, you know, in some sense, a version of your who cares. And then I just started working on it again, you know, at some point when you're writing these research papers, I think most people come to the point where first numbers count, right? How many publications? Then at some point the game changes and you don't care about the number. And that's freeing. And so it seems, seems a little similar. I think that for people to recognize that that excitement can be gotten the threading of the needle, as I said before, would make much of life feel differently.

1:30:56So we did, this is going to seem strange kind of answer here, but we took people who didn't like rap music, people who didn't like football, people who didn't like art. Okay, so a lot of haters, people don't like anything. One group is just given the activity. The next group is asked to notice one new thing about it. The next group, three new things about it, they're doing it or observing it. Well, if it's football, they're observing. It doesn't matter if you're observing the rear ends of the football players, just noticing new things. And the more you notice, the more you like what you're noticing.

1:31:36And to recognize that that's how simple it is. Now most people, especially when you're younger, you're waiting for something to pull you, something to grab me and get me all excited. And how freeing if people were taught that you could grab it, whatever the it is, just by noticing. You don't have to hold on to the thing you're holding on to when you're recognizing that you could hold on to the next thing. I saw this sign fell. This was so funny, I thought, must have been an old sign fell. After the show, he does a five minute stand -up. And I'm going to not do it as well as he, but nor should I.

1:32:16And he says, what is this thing with appetites? You know, he'd go out to dinner and people say, don't eat the bread, you're going to spoil your appetite. There's so many appetites. You spoil this one. There's another one right behind you. And if you realize that that hide, that total engagement, the passion you were feeling, was not a result of anything particular about the person, the context, the context, how freeing it would be. It'd be easy to let things go knowing that you can have that, you know, a moment later. This is why at some point in my life, I'm going to tell my team six months and I'm done.

1:32:57And I'm going to go do art. And I just don't want to scare anybody. But I just, I love the idea of being able to switch venue and possibly to even change identity, which is something I'd like to talk to you about. Well, the art is just kind of interesting, you know, that I started painting when I was about 50 and I was one of those kids who couldn't draw. And I'm going to have someone think of education. What mark might I have made on a page that would have led an elementary school teacher to, you know, to lead me to believe that I had no artistic ability. When you think of a difference between a Mondrian or Rembrandt, you know, I mean, people so different, that it's, it's sinful for people to think they know how things should be.

1:33:48So they know who can do it and who can't as if there's only one way to do whatever it is. And I had this experience. And it was very clear in my mind. So I have this painting and I have a friend who is an art collector. She drinks a little too much. She came over for a visit and she saw the painting very early painting in mine. And she looks at it. Ellen, there's something there. This is the important part just don't go thinking you're Rembrandt. Okay, which wasn't nice, but you had a little too much, but it didn't matter. But my response was so important to me. I didn't say it because I didn't think it would go over well.

1:34:30And I said, and Rembrandt isn't me. Now, I would rather be the very best Ellen Langer than the 500 ,000th, 5 millionth, whatever Rembrandt. And when you recognize that quality is a decision people are making, there is no absolute standard. And if you know anything about art, I mean, you know, let's take even the impressionists where people pay so much money today, they were all rejected in their day. You know, when you realize that in some ways, and my work has suggested this to me, that if you're present when you're doing it, you're mindful when you're doing it, somehow that reveals itself in what you're doing.

1:35:19And whether or not it does, you're putting yourself on that canvas, and it's great fun, it's exhilarating. And, you know, when somebody's, you know, be little is it. It's strange to me, where are those criteria coming from? No, different from in schools, you know, I'm very much in favor of trying to create mindful education, because as I said before, I think that it's our system of education that has caused most of the mindlessness. And, you know, a slide that I put on, but I give some of these talks in my view, that virtually, really mean virtually, I have to say, because I'm an academic, right?

1:36:12All of our, I believe all of our, all of them, Andrew, personal, interpersonal, professional, global are the indirect or direct effect of our mindlessness. So here we have schools all over the country teaching these absolutes, propagated in magazines, newspapers, you know, taught by our parents, taught to each other, all that are limiting us. And causing the problems that we keep trying to solve, and how easy it would be, if we just acknowledge everybody doesn't know something, everybody knows something else, everybody can't do something, everyone can do something else. So when you're grading that paper, and you're so sure that this paper, you know, just doesn't make it, to presume that every smart person in the world would evaluate something, that the same way I find this tasteful.

1:37:17So, Constantine, you give tests in school to find out what people don't know, give tests to find out what they do know. Turns out it's the best way to learn. I researched an episode of a solo episode, this podcast I did, and to figure out what are the best ways to study and learn. It was based on a course that I'd guess lectured in, it's Stanford, it turns out we have to be careful now. I have to be careful of saying things like the best. One of the most effective ways to learn is to self -test for what one knows and doesn't know, but not for sake of evaluation, but for sake of enhancing recall and depth of consolidation.

1:37:53And I think all of us in at least in this country are saying something a little different, you know, is you're saying how to remember, which I agree with that completely. But I'm saying that when we're testing people, we, whoever the way is, decided what is important to know, to see does that student know that ignoring all the other things that student must know. You know, I said this before that, and I was lecturing in South Africa and they put me up in this very fancy hotel, and I had taken a few hours off and I was down by the pool. And I, you know, there was this enormous amount of the hotel space, real estate, that was totally unused.

1:38:38The only person who knew that was the lowly cabana boy, who nobody is going to ask what his opinion is. You know, everybody has a perspective that can add to the, you know, the larger piece. And by having this idea of those of us on top, we really know, you know, people, I'm given this genius award, and you know, shortly afterwards every time you say, and you're supposed to be a genius, I never claimed. The danger of awards that carry things titles like genius or even Nobel. You know, I'm not going to poke at my few friends that happen to have no bells because they've done beautiful work, but it's rare that people who get no bells do much after that.

1:39:20They become great sources of fundraising for universities, so you get leveraged for that. But, and I don't think anyone's going to shed a tear for a Nobel Prize winner here, but this brings me to this notion of labels, not just rankings and performance, but labels. Sure. I mean, labels hide all the ambiguity. So if I, you know, we can use grades. When I give a student an A versus a B, it sounds like they're very different, but imagine, and I've studied this with respect to health, that the person who gets an 89. So you go from an 80 to an 89, you get a B, a 90 to 100, you get an A, nobody in the right mind would think there's a real difference between the person who's gotten the 89 and the person who's gotten the 90.

1:40:15But their worlds become very different. You know, all the ambiguity is hidden. We studied this, it's the borderline effect as we call it. We are so imagined, let's say you and I take an IQ test, and for argument's sake, that you get a 70, so you're normal. I get a 69, so I'm cognitively deprived. I could have sneezed and read the question wrong. I could have come up with multiple answers that could have been better than the one that got the question and person who wrote the question and so on. But now we're put into two different categories. And because I'm cognitively deficient, I'm not given the training that I should be given.

1:40:59I no longer think well of myself. And so if you ask me to read certain things, I'd probably opt out and so on. And in a very short time, the difference between us becomes very real. Well, it's the same thing with a medical diagnosis. There is always somebody who's right below the border, who has it, or we'll say who doesn't have that on above below, and the person right above or at, that has it. Where the two scores are not meaningfully different, but where one then is told they have the disease and the other not, and the difference becomes real over time. And so we have data supporting that and it's almost just a good Duncan experiment, a thought experiment.

1:41:49At some point you have to put a limit in the same thing. But you need to always know that it's made up. So what is the expiration date for this can of food? Well, I mean, there are people who actually go through their shelves and throw these things out because it's two weeks old. Not realizing how did they come up with that date in the first place? Anyway, so I'm going to go back to what you're saying. Let me remind you now, because I'm having the junior moment, that labels, names of things, these categories help us organize things. But more often or as often, hold things still and cause problems.

1:42:41I did that first study way back when I called a patient by any other name. And we had, we made a video tape of person being interviewed and showed it to therapists who were either behavior therapists or Freudian types. And the person on the tape was called either a patient or a job applicant. So the exact same tape. When we called the person a patient, they were seen as having hidden this and problems and that and so on. When the person was called a job applicant, they were seen as well adjusted. I have a friend who was in elite, elite special operations for a number of years. Very smart guy, very philosophical.

1:43:28And he once said to me for reasons that I don't recall. He said, you know, the two most powerful but also dangerous words in the English language are I am. Because anything that follows the words I am will completely constrain your notions of what's possible and what's not possible. And I said, you know, why are you telling me this? Right? Because I pointed out that he was from special operations. He said, you know, that he and his teammates had a mode of refreshing their mindset around particular operations that were because of the division of the military he was in etc. It was quite varied. It wasn't like they were just sort of doing one type of thing.

1:44:06They had to be very adaptive. And he said that they had to completely wipe away this I am component of their vocabulary, except as it related to the word adaptive. It was like I am adaptive. So, but there was never a title to who they were, what they were once they entered the context of a planning execution of one of these operations. Very interesting way of thinking about identity, how it shapes mindset, how it constrains it and opens doors and converts things into action or failure to execute. Yeah. I found it very intriguing, you know, because here's a guy who wouldn't normally think like think of this stuff, but it turned out he said that was a very potent tool for them.

1:44:52Well, I think that as soon as you're learning something and if you have your sense of, as if you're going to be the same person over the next 70 years, for example, we don't actually cognize that. But without literally realizing that you're not going to be the same person and you take in whatever you've just learned and continue doing it the exact same way. You know, we go back to tennis, you learn the game of tennis when you're 15. And now you're 40. You shouldn't be doing any of it the same way. Why do you think we get now you're 80 again. And so what happens is your performance is not going to be as good as it could be because the 80 year old body is trying to do it as if it's a 15 year old rather than taking advantage of their positive things that happen as you get older, they're not all negative.

1:45:49You know that I mean, if I'm playing tennis with, I don't know, 15 year old kid, I'm going to win without having to move very much because they don't know what they're doing. You know, so that you don't need the same skills, the more experience you have with the task necessarily at least. You see what I'm saying is that we freeze, we freeze our own behavior every time you learn something the way we learn everything, it just, it's just, it's, it's, it's, it's the mind. You learn how to drive and then you freeze the way you're learning how to drive when you know the least about how to drive, you know, and that's the way you're going to do it for the rest of your life.

1:46:34A driving thing just as a not really apropos of anything except in the car that if you're driving on ice, what do you do? It starts to skid you're driving on ice, I know what you call a phony, you don't pay. I know what you don't do. You don't slam on the brakes, you come off, you slowly come off again. I'm driven on these coasts a little bit. That's exactly wrong, Andrew. That used to be the case. You see, so you heard this is, this is the way we learn everything. You start on the way things are right now that when you skid, we were told that what you're supposed to do is gently hit the brake and turn into the car.

1:47:16Now that there are anti lock brakes, the only way, the safest way to stop that car is to jam on those brakes. So we just think about it because it's the way we learn everything. You learn, in this case, you're learning how to drive for safety sake. And then you mindlessly continue that and it becomes very unsafe. I didn't get the memo. Now, can no most people don't. That's why I brought it up now, I'm not saying that it was acceptable, it was nothing. But we need to understand that things are changing and pay attention to the way that they're changing and change with it. And the more you hold your sub, you're talking about identity, the more you hold yourself still, the harder that's going to be.

1:48:06I'm much older as most people are than I used to be, but I don't have any sense of age. I really don't. In fact, the other day, the other day now means years ago, I was helping this woman with something and somebody dear to me said, you know, you're probably 20 years older than she is. I had no sense. I thought I was helping this, this old person. Age is just not a relevant factor for me. Sometimes you want to be aware of age. We did some research where we have people who, you know, they're accused in the environment that often tell us how old we are. And those are not always so good. So for example, if I, at my age, I'm in a fancy store and I go to buy, let's say, a dress, it was skirt, okay.

1:49:01It would be inappropriate for me to buy a mini skirt. I'm too old to be wearing almost nothing there, right? So clothing tells you how old the person is. Now we did research, just archival research with people who were uniforms. If you're wearing a uniform from the first day, you start working, you're there 30 years, there's no difference. There's no age -relevant cue. And in those situations are healthier. Really? Yeah, because they're not getting the cue that they're old. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, our place. Our place makes my favorite pots, pans, and other cookware.

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1:50:23Most mornings I cook eggs in it, I cook ground beef in it, ground venison, and the Titanium Pan is also designed in a way that allows eggs and meat to cook perfectly without sticking to the pan. It's extremely easy to clean, and like all our place products, it's nice to look at when sitting on the counter or on the stove. For a limited time, our place is offering an exclusive 20 % discount on their innovative Titanium Always Pan Pro designed to last a lifetime and completely Toxin -free. Visit fromourplace .com slash huberman and use the code SaveHuberman20 to claim the offer. So if one has parents, let's say who are quote -unquote slowing down a bit, and they're talking a little bit about it, so make some pains and there's a stairwell in the house for instance.

1:51:07And they're starting to say things like, you know, at some point we're either going to have to move into a place that doesn't have a stairwell or put one of those chair lifts things or maybe just move into the downstairs. Do you think that in just thinking about that, they're going to accelerate their the demise of their local motor ability? Yeah, I do actually. I think that when we start entertaining these negative thoughts and evaluating ourselves, we're always going to find evidence. You know, as you get older, you start, oh my god, am I forgetful? So you pay attention each time you forget, and that makes it even worse.

1:51:46When I said to my students in this health class, smart kids at Harvard, this is on Thursday, I teach Tuesday and Thursday, I say, what was the last thing I said in class on Tuesday? Nobody remembers. I said, you must be getting dementia. So that when a young person forgets, it's okay, they don't pay any attention to the forgetting. As you get older and you forget, you get less involved in what you're doing. If you're trying to learn something, you have the competing part of you saying, you know, that you're not going to remember this and so on. And independent of all of this, I think a lot of the loss in memory has nothing to do with memory.

1:52:30You know, there, when I was young, and you're introducing me to people, I thought it was important for me to remember their names. Andrew, I know this doesn't speak well. I don't really care. You're going to introduce me to five of your, what do I care if I'm going to need their names, chances are, I will meet them again. Right? So afterwards, if you say to me, remember Jim and I say to you, which one was Jim, it wasn't that I forgot to forget means I had to have learned it in the first place. And so if you don't learn it in the first place because you don't care because your values change as you get older, then it's not a matter of forgetting when you don't know it in the second place.

1:53:16And I think that, you know, if we turn it around, because now I'm doing this, because I know you expected of me, and we say, what if you remember everything, everything? How would you get through, you know, you wouldn't get to experience anything new. So forgetting, you know, serves a purpose. And I used to think, I never tested this. And now I came up with this year's ago, and I think it's probably wrong, but it's kind of fun, that people as they get older, they become hard of hearing. But it also happens that the older you get, the more you realize, nobody is really saying anything. And so being hard of hearing protects you from a lot of that noise.

1:54:03Yeah, my grandfather's just turned off his hearing it. I started where I've always had glasses for reading at night when my eyes would get fatigued or something, but recently I came to my awareness that my vision at a distance is very, very sharp. I'm like an eagle. I can read numbers for you know, very far away. But my vision up close has been diminishing. I find myself straining a bit more even the day. So I started wearing, you know, eyeglasses. I have the book further away. We're sharing the book further away. But, you know, I've just have defaulted to eyeglasses. And then, but I realized that because I understand the neuroplasticity of the visual system that I'm certainly accelerating the demise of my near vision by wearing glasses.

1:54:46And so I'm trying to, you know, balance the two. But do you know our vision study? This is kind of fun. So I'm in the doctor's office and like everybody else, I'm getting the snowy night charge. The letters, the snow and is the letters and numbers. Yeah. Okay. And, you know, but I'm different from most people. And I resent that the letters are getting smaller and smaller because it's creating an expectation that soon I won't be able to see. So I ask what would happen if the letters got larger and larger, which would be to change the expectation that soon I will be able to see. So when we do that, people are able to see what they weren't able to see before.

1:55:30Now, most of us have trouble around two thirds of the way down the chart. So what we did was start the chart a third of the way down. So letters are smaller than on top. So now two thirds of the way down, that starting point, the letters are really small. And what happens again, people can see what they couldn't see before. Awesome. Yeah. So the idea that your vision has to get worse. I don't, I think there are many, many instances where that's not the case. But also the whole test of vision is bizarre. How often in your life are you looking at letters that make no sense? You know, if I don't want to see you, I'm going to see you a lot soon to be able to run away from now.

1:56:19If I'm hungry, I can see the restaurant sign much quicker than if I'm not hungry. I see things in color that are different in black and white, you know, so on and so forth. And to lose all of that with a two dimensional eye test seems to me. And again, you know, we haven't touched on this, but it's probably important with respect to vision is true with everything. You know, I'm in fact, I tell people you're wearing glasses. Try it without glasses. You want to see when you can see and when you can see. With almost everything, we again hold things still when they are varying. Now, what I mean by this is that let's say with vision, my guess is that 11 o 'clock in the morning, my vision is better than at 7 o 'clock at night.

1:57:18The data is, yes. Okay. I mean, it'd be hard for it. So what does this say? This said, maybe I should either have a nap. I don't nap. So I should have an energy bar and even an energy bar is cute. It's just a candy bar, but you call an energy bar and you're allowed to eat it. It's like you take a piece of cake, put it in a muffin, and it's cold and muffin. It's healthier than the piece of cake. And you'll be that as it may. That control, a great amount of control over a physical well -being comes about by attention to variability, which is just a fancy way of talking about mindfulness. My mindfulness is noticing change.

1:57:59That's what it means to be variable. So if you took your glasses off and you saw for yourself, what are the times? What are the moments that you're having? I'm not talking about people who are almost blind, where I can see and when I can see. And then you ask yourself why? And then it may be the case that it's a particular font or more likely that you're tired and then you have other options. But once you start wearing them, it's like taking a laxative. Take a laxative once it's fine. If you're taking a laxative all the time, you're teaching your body to depend on the laxative. You teach ourselves by some of these things that are supposed to be helpful, then we teach ourselves to need them in ways we otherwise wouldn't.

1:58:48And so we did this attention to symptom variability with big diseases. So when you have a chronic illness, first, we most people understand chronic illnesses that there's nothing that can be done about it. The other word, chronic implies that. Exactly. But all it means is the medical world doesn't have a fix. It doesn't mean there's nothing can be done. Now, you have your symptoms with the chronic illness. The presumption most of the time I would think is that the symptoms are going to stay the same or get worse. Nothing only moves in one direction. Sometimes it's a little better, sometimes the stock market, it's going up.

1:59:28It doesn't go up in a straight line, it goes up down a little, you know, and so on. So when it's better, why is it better? So we do this. We call people periodically and we simply ask them, how is the symptom now? Is it better or worse than the last time we called? And why? Several things happen. The first, by engaging in the whole process, people feel less helpless and that turns out to be good for your health. Second, once you start noticing that now it's a little better, like it can even be a little worse, you feel better because you thought that it was, you know, always maximally, I'm always in pain, I'm always stressed, whatever it is.

2:00:11Third, whatever I'm up to. By asking the question, why now is it better or worse than before? You engage in a mindful search. And I have decades of evidence that that mindfulness itself, the neurons of firing, that itself is good for your health. And then finally, I believe you're more likely to find a solution if you're looking for one. So we've done this with multiple sclerosis, chronic pain, Parkinson's, stroke, and biggies. And in each case, have very positive results. And the good thing about this sort of thing is that there are no negative side effects. And it doesn't mean that you have to stop doing any medical procedures you may be doing.

2:00:55But you're asking, you're back in charge of your own health care. Why does this hurt now? You know, stress, there are some people who think they're stressed all the time. Nobody has anything all the time. So I call you, Andrew, and I say, how stressed are you now? And why? And we go through this over time. And then you find out, you know, you're stressed when you're talking to Ellen Langer. Well, then the solution is easy. Don't talk to me. I've been thinking about deadlines a lot lately. And we hear stories of, you know, people being told, I need this done in 15 days. And if people are forced to do it in 15 days, somehow, they're able to get it done in 15 days.

2:01:39Or it's certainly their limits to this. If you told me I need to write a thousand pages in five minutes, I would be very little on each page. But staying within the bounds of reason of what we're talking about when we say there's a deadline in X number of days, why do you think it is that our perception of what's possible tends to scale with a what's been done before, so precedent or no precedent, the four minute mile, for instance, until banister broke it, you know, no one else broke it. He broke it. Lots of people have broken it since and did immediately afterwards. So what do you think about this notion of what's possible in terms of preordained human decision constraints?

2:02:20Like no one can break the four minute mile, so I'm breaking the four minute mile. Now we reset to a new reality in time and in sort of capability because I feel like much of what we believe about ourselves is also constrained by our beliefs about the outside world. And as you pointed out earlier, all of that's just a human script that is the play we're all in. Yeah, I think that the first part is what guides most of us is what's been done before. And the fact that nobody has done it to me means nothing but to a lot of people. People create theories working backwards, you know, which is they often take what is and then derive rules to explain why it has to be like that.

2:03:08Once you believe it has to be like that, then it doesn't occur to you to do anything other than that. But if we start off with the notions of science that I was talking about before that it's all just possibility, no absolutes, then it wouldn't occur to you to stay within the rigid boundaries. Not the best answer, but the only one that came to mind. No, it's a great answer. I'm trying to think about the use of the scientific method, which is what you use in your lab and in your research. And why it is that you haven't, it seems, challenge the scientific method itself except at the level of like what hypothesis you're going to test.

2:03:56I mean, in order to do great science, I mean, at some point you need statistics, you need sample size to be sufficient. The rigor of your studies is as important as the originality of the questions you're asking. And so it seems that you've embraced the scientific method as it is. At least useful. Yeah, that's the key. That to me, it's a means of speaking to certain people. And it carries with a certain gravitas. But I by no means feel that it's giving answers that are any more absolute words. I said before that all of the answers are probabilities. So it's just a language to use. You know, the counterclockwise study was criticized because I didn't publish it in a standard journal because my assumption of the comp, you know, it's very hard.

2:04:52If you're doing something over a week's time to control every possibility. And what I was trying to do in that study was to show that vision, for example, can be improved. That lots of the things that people presume a wired in as you get older, it gets worse and worse, that just doesn't have to be that way. But I'm having trouble remembering now because I know that I was going to write a paper taking the whole science of science apart and never did. And if I had written the paper, I'd probably remember what I was going to say and answer your question. Well, it's a good one, but I don't think that there's anything that is described as absolute that's going to be right, whether it's physics, even physics, biology, psychology, anything.

2:05:55You know, that our methods can only take us so far. And the people who get beyond that are the people who don't presume that that's as far as you can go. And if you can go this way, you can go a little further. I was a chemistry major when I was an undergraduate. And the problem was I practiced Jewish chemistry, which was a little as good, a little more as better, which is not the way to do chemistry. But I don't know what it is that leads some people to be rigid and to take everything that is told to them as if it must be. And what it is that led me to a different way of being and testing it or just thinking that some of the things that people say just made no sense to me.

2:06:47Not long ago, we went through one of the biggest public health crises of at least my lifetime. And at least two major controversies arose. One was the extent to which masks should or shouldn't be worn and are useful or no. The other is about the so -called vaccines. And this is. Yeah, and I think those are beautiful examples because one can make an argument that you should wear a mask. But the other side also makes sense. The way masks were preventing even nonverbal communication, which is very important. And important to people's health, right? Your relationships are not an inconsequential part of your well -being.

2:07:32And vaccines, you know, there is no treatment that's going to be good for everybody. Somebody very close to me, if given Dexadrine puts her to sleep. Dexadrine is basically speed. Yeah, yeah. And so when we recognize the uncertainty inherent in all of these things, I think we don't mandate things in quite the same way. Now, you can mandate that people wear masks, but it shouldn't be that people wear a mask because we're absolutely certain that masks should be worn. There are other arguments to be made why people should wear a mask. Or not wear masks. Or not wear masks. Whatever the case is going to be.

2:08:20And I think it's important that in the medical world that I think I gave this talk at one point. And I thought I was talking to the 5 ,000 women with breast cancer. And it turned out there were lots and lots of physicians there. If I had known that, I might have spoken a little differently. And then that's interesting. And I said, you know, oh, my goodness, because I was not flattering. You know, I have respect for most of these people. But then I found it afterwards that they were thrilled because they know they don't know. And, you know, operating on the world with an awareness that you can't be sure leads to a different humility, a different way of appreciating other people when they disagree with you.

2:09:14And so on. And I don't know how you do that at the higher level, you know, government and so on. But, you know, this is maybe a silly example. But meaningful to me. So I spend a lot of time in Mexico. And there's this very busy intersection. And there are no stop signs. There are no traffic lights. And there are no accidents. Because everybody knows there's no traffic light. There's no stop sign. You have to pay attention to what's going on. So lots of these rules and laws divert attention to as if there's only one thing that matters. So when you're told to drive 60 miles an hour, what does that mean?

2:10:05And you know, that if you drive 70, you're going to get a ticket. Okay, so if you're not afraid of getting the ticket, but there were other considerations to how fast you might go. The quality of your car, the quality of the roads, is it raining at the moment? How uncomfortable or comfortable the passengers are. And all of this gets, and much more, gets lost by having the rule. 60, as if that, you know, somehow is an absolute truth. Yeah, an experience matters, at least in my view, because so for instance, going back to vaccines, right? I'm not trying to create unnecessary controversy here, but it's absolutely clear to me that there are people who believe that for instance the COVID vaccines were immensely valuable on the whole, it saved lives, et cetera.

2:10:55And there are other people who are absolutely convinced that the vaccines caused injury, perhaps to them or to people that they know. And both sides, as it were, seem to know a lot about their side. And so the discussions aren't really discussions, because the people that felt that they had a vaccine injury know an immense amount about that injury, the context, and others who had it. The people who had a different experience of the vaccines, or have a different stance of the COVID vaccine, know a tremendous amount about the statistics and mass of what the general outcomes were as a consequence.

2:11:33So it's futile, right? Like it's not a, it's not a meaningful discussion. And then what ends up happening? But it didn't have to be that way. You know, that we go back to the beginning and in school, you're asked a question and expected to give a single answer. Life would be so different for us as we grow up if you gave multiple answers to whatever the question was that immediately would make clear that they're alternative perspectives. So just a very simple, simple change in schools. Well, then I'd like to challenge an idea since that seems to be a challenging assumption. One of my ideas, no.

2:12:11No, not one of your ideas. I'd like to challenge the assumption that as people get older, they become more set in their ways. Because many times today, I'm hearing that as one, and I'm getting older, I'm now can say I'm so happy I can say I'm almost 50. I'm really, I actually love getting older. I feel better now. I feel better now at almost 50 than I did in my 20s. And psychologically and physically. And I felt great then. So I challenge the assumption that we get worse with age. Yeah, no, I'm with you and I'm much older than you are. So do we get set in our ways or we maybe we're more flexible?

2:12:46Yeah, I think that the older you are, let's say you've tried different ways of doing something. And there's a particular way that works for you. And it doesn't matter if the other way is faster, is prettier, is whatever this works. And so you can be seen as set in your way because you've made it because you know it doesn't really matter. I could do it that way, that way or this way. I'm going to continue to do it this way. I think as you get older, presumably you've had more mindful experience because if you're a robot, you're not going to be learning anything and getting more set or less set as an irrelevant question.

2:13:30I remember, you know, this goes back to the pancreas. You know, am I not eating the pancreas? Like I really believed I had to eat that pancreas to show that I was all grown up. So you get a little older and you realize, you know, I wrote this blog once a long time ago where you're two years old and you fall and you're screaming bloody murder because you scraped your leg. And then you're seven years old and Johnny or Jani didn't send you a Valentine and you're distressed, you know, distressed. And then you're 13 years old and you have a pimple and oh my god, you know, no one's ever going to find me a tractor.

2:14:09And it goes on and on. At some point, this was all kind of silly. And you know, and with that you become easier. But sometimes that easier can be misunderstood by others. So let me give you an example. And I talk about this in the book when I talk about three levels. You know, that in the example I use, I have the New Yorkers a wonderful magazine. But let's say we have three levels, level one, people who don't read the New Yorker, level two, people who read the New Yorker, level three, people who don't read the New Yorker anymore. We could have them read it again, but let's just get first. Okay.

2:14:51Level one, not reading and those not reading that anymore are very different. But they're seen as the same by the level two's. Level two people are the being of my existence. All right. So let's say you have your young, you're uninhibited, level one. Then you're like most people, you become very inhibited. Then hopefully you get to a certain point in life is who cares? And you become disinhibited, not uninhibited because you know the rule. You're just choosing not to follow it, but those at the level two will see the level three and think they're level ones, because you can't see beyond your own level of development.

2:15:34When, you know, when I was young, especially if I'm on an important show like yours, Andrew, and we just took a break for a minute, and if I had eaten something and I got a spot on my sweater, I'd sit like this. Not even realizing how stupid does this look, right? But that no one should see that I got you know, God forbid your human you build up his food. Who cares? Who, so I do this thing with my students and it's very simple, but it has a very big effect on them where I tell them you can't come to class next week unless you're wearing two different shoes. It's very hard. Someone will come to class, most come, then a large majority wear two different shoes that look the same, you know, two different black sneakers that are, and then you have the bold wear red and a black sneaker.

2:16:29And we talk about these nobody even notice, and if they notice, what are they noticing? Somebody who knows you is not going to judge you differently because you're wearing two different, they're going to assume there's some reason for it. And those who don't know, you don't know you. So what do you care? So this wonderful young woman, I do this in my seminar as well. That was an lecture class. She comes in just professor Languier, you won't believe what happened. I said, what happened? I'm in the elevator. There's this guy. He looks at my feet. He looks at my face. He looks at my feet. He looks at my face.

2:17:04He looks at my feet and he points and he says, was that intentional? You know what I did? I said, no, what did you do? She said, I looked at his feet. I looked at his face. I looked at his feet. I looked, I pointed to his feet and said to him, was that? You know, so good. And when people recognize that everything is sort of in some sense up for grabs, you know, that none of it really matters. It's so freeing. And there's so many ways that we constrict ourselves and to make that an answer to your question, hopefully you get older and you realize that most of this, it just doesn't matter. Now, you can learn that when you're younger, all you need to do is recognize that those people who you think are thinking your ex are there are other people who are going to go, yay, your ex, you know, that you may love me because I'm trusting.

2:18:02You may dislike me because I'm gullible. So, you know, you can't please everybody, not because your behavior is unpleasant, but because all of it is up for their own definition and you can't control the way they're going to see it. It's like our sense of justice kind of gets in the way sometimes. I mean, sense of justice can be very important in society. So don't get me wrong. But for instance, recently I had the experience where a new story came out. It wasn't about me. But, and those are the only ones you read. It came out and the headline was, I'm just going to say what it was that so and so is home, this famous person's home was destroyed in the LA fires had a description of what had happened.

2:18:51It had a photograph of the home before and after the devastation. And I immediately got upset because that was not their home. That was my home. Oh, my goodness. Okay, now I hadn't lived in that home in a while. So there was no reason for them to say it was my home. I wasn't upset that they didn't say it was my home. But there was my Toyota 4 runner parked in the driveway. Wow. Like basically the whole thing was made up. And I actually know the reporter because they had tried to contact me once before they had somehow got a hold of my phone number, which frustrates me in addition to that. And I realized, and I realized they're just making up lies.

2:19:32They they're not even attempting to fact check. Now this was a minor thing whose home it was perhaps. But they made a bunch of issues around this. And then another article came out about this person. And another one. And I basically I don't believe anything that I read certainly from that particular venue. And then I started to realize that probably half or more of what we read in traditional popular press is just made up. And then one's fact checking the stuff because how could they like how could they know? And of course I'm not going to pursue this in any kind of legal. I don't really care.

2:20:06But my sense of justice is what frustrated me. And as soon as I went. But what definitely kind of kind of funny like this reporter so desperate for a story and to capitalize on the horrible events like felt that they needed to do. And I thought this is like ridiculous. And our species is just so weird. This is what I always default to in the end, whether or not it's about technology about something else. I mean real tragedies are real tragedies. And when those happen as the fires were it upsets me. But so much of like what grabs our attention and the drama of things is just humans being ridiculous.

2:20:45Sometimes lying sometimes in service to one thing or pretending it's in service to justice when it's in fact it's in service to themselves or a combination of things. And I think as I hit this like what I hope is a new vista in my life. I'm thinking myself like wow. We're really obvious like we're so obviously silly. Like the game that I bring up Rick Rubin again. He has the saying that he repeats over and over to me. He said like there are only two truths. Nature and professional wrestling. He loves professional wrestling. He watches hours and hours of professional wrestling. And I said, why do you do that?

2:21:23Isn't that he said it's made up and everyone knows it's made up. But it doesn't matter. Which is why it actually is one of the few things that's real. Yeah. Because we all know it's made up. So whether or not they become allies or they become enemies in a given match or whether or not somebody breaks the rules and the ref pretends they don't see it's theater. Yeah. And it's designed to show you the theater that is human nature. Yeah. I never had any appreciation for professional wrestling. I thought, but he's right. It's just. And so once you start looking at it's all made up. It doesn't have to be made up or not.

2:21:56If you ask yourself what difference does it make the wrestling? No, any of it. So it's your house. It's somebody else's house. Exactly. I realized I was the one being ridiculous. I'm upset because there's some injustice because what because I don't want my forerunner in a news article about someone else's home. Maybe that person had a home that looked very similar. But I guess it was the break with my assumption that the traditional media tries to get things right. Yeah. That they at least try. And in this case, the person clearly didn't try. They had access to the real information. They chose to lie.

2:22:29If you say there's something to be learned regardless of whether it's true or not. I thought you were going someplace else with this. So my mind wanted to. I thought you were talking about the tragedy of a fire, which as an example I use in the mindful body to show that events are not good, bad. But rather our view of the event is what makes it good or bad. And so I had this experience. I was at a friend's house for dinner. I come back late, which never happens. And all of my neighbors were outside because my house had burned down. And you know, which is pretty scary. Okay. A couple of funny things happen.

2:23:16They said they were able to save my dogs, which that wasn't funny. That was wonderful. But they couldn't save the parrot. Well, Roger Brown, he was like, gave me this stuff, parrot. That was in a children's home. Okay. It's okay. It's a kid who owned parrots. I was like, writing for a moment. Okay. So now I stay at a friend's house. And the next day I call the insurance company and the person comes over and he said, this was the first time in his 20 year career that the damage was worse than the call. Most people, oh my god, oh my god, it's not so bad here. I had already lost everything. So it didn't make sense to throw my sanity away after it.

2:24:02Okay. So that was the first thing. I move into the Charles Hotel and I'm a site to be seen with my two little dogs. And it's Christmas that all the presents coming in. You know, we're burned. All the ones going out. It's now Christmas Eve. And I go out for dinner and I come back to the hotel room and it's full of gifts. Not from the owner of the hotel. Not from the management, but from the so -called little people, the chambermaids, the people who parked my car, the waiters and waitresses. Andra, I tell you, I could not tell that story for months, maybe years without bringing tears to my eyes.

2:24:46It was beautiful. Every Christmas, I'm reminded of what feels to me the basic goodness of people. And I couldn't tell you, except for one thing, what I lost in that fire. So, you know, one stuffed parrot. No, no, that I don't remember that until right now. No, it was kind of fun. I was teaching going to be teaching. You know, it was soon as school began again. A large lecture class and all my notes were burned. So, oh my god, what am I going to do? And so what I did was I called a student who got an an the course. I was the year before borrowed her notes and admitted those and taught the course.

2:25:31But and it was the best course I ever taught because I was not relying on anything that I would then repeat and you know, in any absolute. I was totally there for each lecture. What do you think it is about about hard events that are life changing that anchor our our mindfulness? I don't know. I don't think that they necessarily are. I think that, you know, if something happens, you know, take advantage of it and learn something from it. And, you know, so there's data not from my lab or yours. But that people have heart attacks and you live through a heart attack or a stroke. All of a sudden you realize, gee, this is not going to go on, you know, forever.

2:26:21I've got to start living. And it's a shame. I mean, I think most people are sealed and unlive lives. And, you know, that you need a heart attack to wake you up or somebody else's death. I know my postdoc advisor, well, all three of my advisors died suicide cancer cancer. So that the joke is you don't want me to work for you. But but in all, and I was very, very close with the middle one and but the last one as well. And he died of pancreatic pancreatic cancer as it were. And we did multiple fish thriffs for him celebrations of life. Right. You know, there's like an academia that can't get enough fish thriffs in this, you know, and and I'll never forget Ben getting up his celebration of life in front of all the big opposite Stanford and all these people and editors flew in.

2:27:14I mean, they were like over 200 people there. President of Stanford was there. And he said, you know, if I had, if I had known that I was going to be so celebrated and that people were going to be so kind to me, I would have died a lot earlier. You know, that was the first thing he said. And the second thing he said is, you know, if I could do it over again, you know, one of these if I could do it over again things, he said, I would have never agreed to review so many papers, review so many grants. And I would have eaten a lot more sushi and a lot more ice cream. And that was it. He had a good relationship with death.

2:27:51I interviewed him for hours, even before I had a podcast. Yeah, I don't think people, he, when people are afraid of death, I don't think it's really death that they're afraid of. They're afraid of pain. Yeah. And that, you know, and having no control at that moment. The old people I know, and studying this for so long, I know lots of very old people. None of them seem to be afraid of death. In fact, I ended my counterclockwise book with a conversation I was having with a friend who was 90 something. And she said, you know, I'm not afraid of dying, but living is such fun. And I think that that's the way most of us should be.

2:28:34But there's something I wanted to say that we touched on before. And I don't think it's not really relevant now, but you'll find a way to, I'll find a way to make it relevant. About spontaneous remissions. And I said that with my mother, there was a spontaneous remission and the medical world can't study spontaneous remissions or doesn't study. So they same in frequent. And I think, you know, that how frequent does something have to be to give people a sense of hope that it's possible. You know, I don't think it has to be in every day occurrence. Of course, the more frequent it is, the more likely.

2:29:16And then, you know, but when I think about spontaneous remissions, I personally think that they're much more common than the medical world was likely to believe. You know, once you're in a hospital, life is very different from the way your health is once you're out of the hospital. I don't mean that you're sick in one case and not sick in the other. But the attention that's given to the degree to which things become self -fulfilling prophecies. You know, I think that if you believe that cancer is a killer, which is what people used to believe, then I think there are many ways that the cancer becomes a death sentence.

2:30:03You know, that the body learns to, well, you don't, even in a very mundane way, if you think you're going to die, you don't do those things that keep you alive. You know, you're not going to go out and get exercise, for example, if you thought that was good for you, I'm going to die anyway. The will to live is a very interesting thing. The super -agers, the people that fall into that category. Oh, I hate that. No, I'm sure it's super -memorizer, super -tasters. As soon as we make a group of people, the super -group, that says that whatever they're able to do is not available to everybody else.

2:30:40And I don't think that there's any evidence for that. Yeah, well, I align with you on that stance. I mean, I use the name only because they're sometimes referenced as such, but a focus of the podcast recently has been emphasized that in that group and others, there's a brain area that's available to everybody because everybody has it, which is this anterior mid -singulate cortex, which is activated when people embrace new forms of learning and challenges. And it does seem to correlate with maintaining cognitive function until later age. And it's roped into, excuse me, nearly it is roped into. It's linked up with the dopamine reward circuitry and other circuitrys in a way that ties it somewhat to this notion of the will to live, being related to the embracing new learnings or at least new challenges.

2:31:27You know, that there was a story way back when, so there's this mental facility and people are on what's, you know, they have a nacula called the hopeless ward. And then they wanted to renovate the ward so they move all of the people. So you're in the hopeless ward. Now you're in a hopeful, you know, without it being called that. Then the renovation is finished and people are returned to their old rooms and many unexpected deaths occurred. This makes me wonder why we have names for hospitals like hospital for sick children. Yeah. I've always been bothered by that title. Sorry for anyone that's been treated there and had a great experience because I imagine it's a great hospital.

2:32:12But did you read the mindful body? I talk about a mindful hospital, which would be different from the ground up. And I'm now trying to in Mexico, Canada and in the state's Minnesota, trying to put up at least start with a mindful emergency ward and then become a whole mindful hospital. Why don't they call it different? You know, I mean, for the reasons that I'm presuming you're getting that, but you know, do you know anybody who's ever walked through a hospital door that isn't stressed? I mean, no, only walking out. Yeah, no, but I believe that stress is by far the major killer. It's a very extreme position, Andrew.

2:32:59I believe I was going to do this work with people in China before COVID. We take, let's say a few hundred people who are just diagnosed with cancer, vary the cancer. And we find out how stressed they are. And nobody's going to be happy being told they have cancer. So we give them a little while. It's going to be three weeks to adjust to it. Then we measure this stress level every three, four weeks. I believe the stress level will predict the course of the disease over and above nutrition, genetics and treatment. And stress is psychological, which takes me back to how all of this can be controlled by our minds.

2:33:42But I mean, see you go to a hospital. The first thing you are stressed, you have the people working in the hospital who's especially during COVID, but it was always the case suffering enormous amount of burnout. Well, what is burnout? You don't get burnout if you're mindful. You know, if I'm seeing you every day and I'm presuming you're the same, Andrew, I've seen before your symptoms are basically the same. You know, how are you, Andrew? I take your temperature. Everything is pretty much the same. It can be exhausting because I'm not getting anything. If on the other hand, I'm noticing all the new things about you, then I'm being fed and my neurons are firing and I'm not going to burn out.

2:34:25Let me have lots of simple things. I was talking to a two -legged one day who did some wonderful work on checklists. And you know, the insurgery, for instance, if they have a checklist, there are many fewer errors that are made. But he had just sent the last draft to the publisher so he wasn't going to be able to change it. We need a mindful checklist. What is a mindful checklist? And you remember, when we used to travel and you come back to the States and you had to fill out these forms and you're bringing in any lives, you have stock notes, you have any fruits and vegetables, you answer three of these and you don't answer any of the other.

2:35:00You just know it's no, no, no, all the way down the list. So a checklist and even the checklist and aviation, you know, the pilot, the copilot flaps off, throttle open, anti -ice off, it becomes mindless. So remember the plane that was going from the Florida flight, going from Florida to Washington, D .C., so that's one warm climate to another warm climate. And they go flaps off, throttle open, anti -ice off, but there was snow in D .C. an unusual event, the plane crashed because the D .I. sir was turned off and people were killed. And the point of it is that a checklist, well better than no checklist, there's a better than better way.

2:35:50We'll talk a lot about that in the mindful body, that the checklist needs to be a mindful checklist. So not is Andrew in bed, yes. What position is Andrew in in the bed? You know, not or and does Andrew have two eyes, but you know, how much liquid can you see? So not yes, no, goes beyond yes, you know, where you can only answer the question if you're actually looking at the person. So then you're noticing now the wonderful thing about that is if I'm noticing you and being mindful about aspects of you, you feel noticed and that's the way you feel cared for and then the relationship grows. It keeps coming back to powers of observation, asking questions, depth as opposed to speed.

2:36:42Yeah, these seem to be the kind of basic contour for the. Yes, but it all follows from recognizing you don't know. So how do we get people to actually look for the changes in people? When I was talking about attention to symptom variability, and I said before imagine you're with somebody who is, you think they're losing it, they're forgetting. Now, if you think they're forgetting, you become intolerant every time they forget something because you forgot that it's not willful, they really just don't remember number one. Number two, you only time you're paying attention is when they're forgetting.

2:37:19So you've not attended to all the times they're remembering. So the problem seems worse, but if you were in fact attending to when are they misremembering, what are the circumstances, you know, and you catch it early, you say that the person doesn't forget everything they forget. I don't know questions about restaurants, for example. Well, then you know, probably they don't care. I'm going to be happy. I'm going to be happy wherever we go. And so unless we're going to some place that's phenomenally expensive or we have to travel agree, whether we went to restaurant A, B or C, I might not remember.

2:38:01For you, since you're very discerning, you're going to know you had a wonderful meal here and a horrible meal in the other three places. So for you, it matters. The point is when somebody doesn't know why don't they know. And if you immediately assume it's because of dementia, you have a catch all and are missing all of the subtleties that in fact lead to different diagnoses. And so if the, you know, the same thing in the nurse or doctor attending to the patient, if they're attending to the changes and asking themselves why the smaller changes and the things that are not changing. I had a student many years ago who had MS and when somebody would ask her how she is, she's great.

2:38:50And then one person then said, but how could you be gracious? My arms work, my head is working. And went through all the parts of her that are not suffering. So you can always attend to what's wrong. You can't attend to everything. You're playing tennis. You could attend to the wonderful shots. You can attend to the folds. And that's going to lead to very different states, right? If I attend to every time I hit that ball in a way I didn't think I could hit it, I'm going to learn something from it. I'm going to be motivated to try it again. If I attend to every time I screwed up, I'm going to be embarrassed.

2:39:27I'm going to be afraid to expand and experience new things. I feel like I've just combined 12 different areas. And masterfully. And masterfully. And what I realize is that we're always to some extent in choice, as they say. And I think to some people that will feel freeing, like, you know, I'm always in choice. I can, my house to burn down. Well, you know, who knows what newness that will bring these kinds of things. But to some people, only if they believe that there's a right answer. If you don't believe there's a right answer, if you believe there's a right answer, you want something, give me that answer.

2:40:09Which surgery should I have? Oh, my God. I'm supposed to have a house, the house burned. You know, life is over. But if you realize that any experience is only experienced through you and provides opportunities. I can certainly adopt that. I also can feel the parts of me that I assume are what other people experience as well. Which is that when one has so many degrees of freedom over how to respond, that itself can feel a bit overwhelming. No, of course. So when Eric from wrote Escape from Freedom, it was that same idea that you can be paralyzed by so many choices. But I think that's wrong. I think you're only paralyzed by the choices if implicitly you believe there's a right and a wrong choice.

2:40:59And when you recognize that they're all equal, it just doesn't matter. It's easy to choose them. So it's choose your own adventure. Exactly. Yeah. And then or make whatever you're doing in an adventure. And if I can't be near the one I love, I should love the one I'm near. At one time that was considered okay nowadays. Well nowadays there are a couple things that are more complicated. I would I would argue. One earlier you mentioned coddling of people that are you know aged elderly. I hate that word now that I'm 77. Well, you are what no one would know would guess that you're that you're 77 and yeah, your your vitality is undeniable.

2:41:40This notion of coddling, you know, Jonathan Height wrote the coddling of the American mind, anxious generation. I have to wonder what it's like for kids growing up nowadays and teenagers constantly being told about this disorder and that disorder and. Yeah. And the idea that you know if you meet five out of 10 of the you know many of criteria that you are you might even be this thing you are blank as opposed to just having blank or struggling with blank. Yeah. Yeah. And we certainly over prescribed medication in this country, certainly compared to other countries. You know the vast amount of antidepressant and anti anxiety medication is consumed in the United States.

2:42:21And certainly those medications can be valuable for people. I would argue. But they are over prescribed. I would also argue. So my question is if one grows up being told that they are fragile. That there's threat everywhere or even that there's threat everywhere on social media. Let's just like push into that into that dent a little bit too because that's Jonathan's idea. You know sitting here talking to you that now has me thinking well maybe my 18 year old niece is perfectly capable of navigating this online landscape. And it's just me who's not capable of and so I'm going to decide that she's that she's struggling but maybe kids aren't getting enough physical activity one could argue but on the basis of data.

2:43:10But do you see where I'm going here when when one can kind of pivot to different lenses to look at something through. It increases the number of options but then at some point we have to decide are we coddling our kids too much or are we or are we not coddling them too much. It reminds me of an argument back. Oh I guess when I was your age and the question was violence on TV and were kids being exposed to this violence becoming more violent. And I never quite understood it because if you were my child and we were sitting there watching this violence like oh and you would see my reaction to it was negative and you'd learn.

2:43:53Not to engage in that or to recognize you know the effects on other people. What I'm saying is that you know rather than the medium being the message the medium it you know people say to me is technology good technology isn't anything the tools. And if they're used mindfully they're good if they use mindlessly you know they're not good. And so I think at silly I you know there's data showing that kids who are college kids for example who use a lot of social media have lower self esteem and all of them you know and I present this to them and I say this is silly. You're not now going to get off Facebook because of these data but let's look at it your Harvard students for God's sakes.

2:44:46Why is it that you're only going to post the picture where you look the prettiest talk about the you know to have the nerve to turn it around. Hey would you believe what I look like last night. You know when you're having that bad hair day or something didn't go well just have the guts to do that so it's not the social media it's the lying that you know or the mistaken assumption when you see all of the successes that that's the more general truth everybody but you was having these successes. Yeah certainly social media gives it a literal score for followers and likes and things of that sort so it's thumbs up thumbs down I mean literally scoring performance in terms of what other people think it's certainly training those circuits very robustly whereas.

2:45:40But if people learn the three levels that I was explaining before then you'd say that what looks like is not very good in fact maybe quite something you know you have people who are poor and they can't spend a lot of money on their appearance and then you have everybody else is spending a lot of money on their appearance. They have some of these very very rich people who yeah I had this editor for mindfulness wonderful woman she's recently died died and the first time we went out this is when you know I was young and it was wonderful how they're going to send me all these free books and they take me out all time to get me to publish with this company is both of that company.

2:46:29And I'll never forget this we go for this meal and she looked poor so I I didn't eat anything. I chose the cheapest thing on the menu because I knew she was paying I found out she was one of the richest people in New England you know so that's the level three where you have so much you hide it and you know this is interesting because you know when I was growing up unless people had money to purchase things they would drive older cars and things like that. With credit that changed yeah and I have friends who like to wear very very fancy watches I also have friends who have far more money than them and choose to wear no watch so it's it's getting harder to discern except at the extremes of course it's getting harder to discern who has what and maybe that's a good thing I think again at the extremes it's obvious you know that the homeless issue in Los Angeles and everywhere in California so I'm sure you know I'm sure you know I'm sure you're not going to be able to do that.

2:47:27So it's so troubling and so sad what what's happening but setting that aside I think nowadays we have less information about people's values even just by looking at them when I was growing up as somebody wore a particular t -shirt with a particular band you kind of knew if you were part of the same group all of that's gone now it's all leveled. But people could be asked at any stage why is somebody in dress this way why is somebody doing what they're doing and when asked now you're only given a single answer when you're given multiple answers you see the three levels you know they're doing it for this wonderful reason for this awful reason it has this meaning that meaning and that's what you want things to be obscured you don't want to be pigeonholed because if you think you know what I'm going to say because of this belief of who I am you're not going to listen to me and then we're not going to have a conversation that's going to be interesting and that's a waste.

2:48:26I know that you're not a fan of particular activities as a way to increase longevity or particular activities as a way to increase mindfulness but could we say that having somewhat of a mindset of playfulness with ideas and one's environment could potentially longevity. So I have these lyrics in the books a friend of mine Zoe Lewis wonderful entertainer and she sings a song that I just love you're never too old to be young and sure I think that one should be playful to be playful now a side effect of that is I think you'll be happier and healthier and if you're happier and healthier I think you'll live longer.

2:49:08But the reason to do it the problem with most people now is that everything they're doing is for some other reason I'm taking this medication so that eventually I'm going to the gym so that eventually I think who knows what's going to happen eventually I feel like you that enjoy exercise and always have but if I didn't I don't know what that you get yourself yeah I don't like exercise that's exercise. I was telling somebody the story actually just yesterday so I was visiting friends many many years ago in Virgo Beach and they said in the morning let's go to Captain Jackson think Captain Jackson is going to be breakfast and I'm thinking I have a big breakfast why not take a long walk to get there and you know I'm very excited so get down to the beach and we're walking to Captain Jackson and then there's this stick in the sand that says on it Captain Jackson all it is was the end point to our walk you know well for me if I had known the walk was just for the walk I probably would have enjoyed it much less you know that if I'm in Paris and shopping or window shopping I walk you know 10 miles a day and enjoy myself thoroughly but if you said let's go for a walk of even five miles and it's just to walk now this is mindless I'm not suggesting this is a good thing but you know activities that are meant to be fun and that are easy to engage and are fun are will be good for you and if you see it as exercise if you're doing it for some other reason it's a shame because even the exercise for exercise sage should you know I won't do it if it isn't fun I don't know if that's a privileged position but now that's not that you know I say I won't do it if it isn't fun I think that this is something that I do well is to make and almost anything we fun well that's a great skill yeah I was talking to my mom last night and she was saying you know we not much is happening here and I kept saying no like tell me what do you guys up to have been in while and she said well I don't have this like big exciting life you know and I said what what's going on and she said okay well if you really want to know there's this new plant weed that's growing in the garden and she started explaining to me this really interesting weed as these little yellow flowers and my mom loves gardening it's yeah she delights in gardening and I was delighting in her delight and when she was done I said that's actually the kind of thing I'd love to talk about you know and hear more about because I also know my own experience so I didn't need to talk about like what's going on on the podcast or what's going on in my daily life for the incredible breeds of dogs that I'm considering getting maybe all of them because I was interested in what was going on in her garden and so what was trivial to her was actually interesting to me and represented a really good bridge to a number of things I have to say that we were talking earlier about how one frames passed present in future I don't know if we were talking about it in that way but in thinking about age longevity and what's possible the word that came to mind that I'd like to just pressure test a little bit is nostalgia and I have this feeling and I hope I'm wrong because I've been wrong about most things today in a way that I'm learning from it that nostalgia can be perhaps kind of a dangerous line of thinking this idea that things used to be great oh yeah but now they're not why can't they be like why can't they but what and I thought to myself what a terrible yeah sense or emotion but and it led me to some practical questions like should we go to high school reunions and I thought well no if we're all we're going to do is it you know Embrace nostalgia yes if it makes us feel like we're 19 exactly this kind of thing and here you can substitute reunions with should I look at photo albums yeah like like I don't know how I feel about photos from the past I used to collect them and and and cherish them and now sometimes when I look at them I it just makes me long for something and I'm trying I think I need to learn how to pivot through that so what's your what are your thoughts on the nostalgia and just notions of how we think about our past yeah well they're my don't think they're very different from what you've already covered in that fire I lost all the photos and it didn't occur to me that I lost all of them for years because I didn't look at them here it's all good stuff a lot of that's a good thing I think you know when I was young some of my friends were keeping a diary and I never kept a diary and so then my feeling was I'd rather just be living then recording but it depends on how you record it if you're reliving it while you're recording it then you're living it's the same thing you know one activity is really no better than another if you're doing it mindfully now this is hard for people to accept if I say to you that if you're cleaning a toilet that the distinction you're drawing are no better or worse than if you're trying to come up with a theory of relativity or understand Einstein's theory of relativity a distinction is a distinction is a distinction and so that's why these little little things that you're noticing your mother's weed is no less important although she thought you might see it is less important than you're having just infill in you know interviewed somebody that she thought was phenomenal once you notice you notice and that's the whole ball game and there's always something to notice and if you're noticing it without stress overlay that some people add to their lives which I can't understand it's no different from a game you know I use this example and I think that my students must think I'm crazy and so if I believe that I should come up with a different example but you're flossing your teeth now you can floss your teeth mindlessly in which case you resent being there you're spending the time because you're you're thinking that it's good for you but you'd rather be doing something else you're not there you're flossing but your mind is thinking about a party you're going to go to for example to me make it fun it's so easy I mean you play little games like can I predict how much junk is going to come out as a fun you know and which teeth which part you know everything can be made into a game I had this you can maybe figure out how to bring this product to market but it was called I have so many of these called we go a way of training your child to use the toilet and so it's not very hard you would sell you could sell these little vials of chemicals that when you added a few drops to your in a changes color but so each of these vials will change the color to a different color and the kids would buy that yeah and the kid is you know has to guess either to the parent or just for themselves you know is this going to be yellow green blue you know what it becomes fun game of fine things is one of the great pleasures of parenting yeah you know and earlier you were talking about what what are your grand grandkids call you the cosmic leader cosmic leader like you can play these games with them that and then they reach their adolescent and teen years and they then they claim they don't like those games but as the as a former child and then teen now I delight in some of the games that my parents play with me when I was little because it brings me back to the notions of imagination yeah no I think that one of the worst things that the world teaches us is that we have work and we have play as if these are two distinct categories in fact I think if you were to ask somebody just one question to determine how mindful they are it might be how much do you need a vacation I mean I've never taken one so yeah now you know but need and want to two different things and if I really need a vacation that means my working is being done mindlessly and that's a shame you know if you can't find a way to do it so you enjoy it go someplace else it's not worth the price you're paying and for people that say well that's a luxury I need to work in order to survive and feed my family et cetera how does one reconcile that well then learn how to make a fun you know that anything can be made fun just you make it a game you try to figure out guess what's going to happen see the re you know can you do it differently from the last time can you do it with your eyes closed I mean you know it's fun you know get down on it and not related to your work but you get down on all fours and see the world that you're catter your dog sees you know close the lights and see what it's like being blind tried to get through the day without hearing I wanted to do this thing 50 years ago which was to create a building that simulated old age and so if you took the 50 year old and they spent even a short time in that building where it's colder than usual because it's less oxygen in your blood your field of vision arrows that they would expand each of their abilities at a time that it's easy but the problem with that was a 50 year old doesn't want to imagine being 80 years old.

2:59:16You've done some beautiful studies on healing and time perception could you just describe that experiment sure I love this paper I love this experiment so much Peter angle and I did this when graduate student we inflict a wound now it would have been more dramatic if we could really cut you up but we're not say to say to us and even if we were the review committees with my to do it so it's a minor wound but it's still a wound and we have people individually sitting in front of a clock unbeknownst to them for a third of the people the clock is going twice as fast as real time for another third of the people is going half as fast as real time and for the last third it's going real time and the question is most people would assume that wound's going to heal how that wound heals has nothing to do with the perception of time but it turns out that it healed based on clock time.

3:00:11Now when you add that to some of the things that we've already said you went up with a very different picture you broke a wrong and you asked the doctor how long is it going to take to heal how does he know or she know I mean it's ridiculous question lots of people have broken arms you know even if this was somebody who studied broken arms and he stopped studying yesterday today there are new people with broken arms that might have different rates of healing. But people give an answer and depending on the way the doctor gives that answer I think is important the doctor says it's going to take you and I'm making this I don't know how long it take is going to take you a month you organize yourself in such a way that it's going to take a month but I think if the doctor instead which is what I would recommend said we really don't know some people heal fast of another's the fastest healing time that I personally know of is you know say two weeks.

3:01:10You know and you know if you can heal faster than that or that been good for you and if not you know it's fine also because their advantage is to not healing that people don't realize you know if you're broken your right arm and it's taking a long time to heal that means you're using your left arm and if you're using your left arm you're exercising the right side of your brain which is going to be good for many tests. I don't know how we ended up right handed or left handed I'm you ambidextrous I'm right handed I occasionally go into hook righty but I'm I'm a righty my dad was naturally left handed they forced him to be right handed.

3:01:53I'm sort of ambidextrous mostly right handed but people don't realize that if you're using your right hand it's controlled by the left part of your brain your left hand the right part of your brain and wouldn't it be nice to exercise both parts of our brain and so we're doing research where we get people this is really interesting to us not just using so this work was begun. God can't tell you how many years ago and for one reason or another never got finished initially it was just getting people to use their right of a left hand now it's more sophisticated where it's using your left hand with an awareness that you're using it or not and I think that the effect on the brain will only obtain if you're aware.

3:02:43Oh this fits so beautifully I don't want to spend too much time on this but I'm and you're probably aware of these experiments but just for sake of our listeners. You probably know that your colleagues at Harvard David you won't and Torrent Saviso won the Nobel Prize for brain plasticity critical periods of vision et cetera and they had this sort of doctrine that they stated in the 80s and it lasted until the gosh until the early and mid 2000s that there was no significant brain plasticity in the world. So I think it's a very important thing to do is to get people to know that they're not just using the brain plasticity in adult humans that it literally shut down Mike Merzenick and a guy named Greg Reckon zone at UCS after these beautiful studies I'll try and describe this really quickly where they would have their subjects pay attention to little bumps on a rotating drum of different courseness or fineness and then there was a tone playing in the room and if they were told to discriminate when the bumps were changed from course to just slightly less course or more course the subject would signal okay that happened and then over time the area of the brain responsible for touch in adults expanded the map of that so adult plasticity was very interesting however is if they did the exact same thing but they were told to attend to slight changes in the frequency of the tone.

3:04:01It didn't matter what they were doing with their fingers the auditory cortex changed and the and the somatosensory the touch map didn't and so it's proof positive that it's not just a behavior in adulthood but the common behavior and awareness of what of the shift in perception that drives adult plasticity and I find those studies to be well first of all they aren't discussed enough but that feature isn't discussed enough and second of all it basically says that awareness is the gate to brain change. Sure and I think that fits perfectly with everything that you've been talking about. Yeah and I don't see how it could be otherwise actually but you know to go back to the doctor telling you how long it's going to heal it tends to be now self -affilling prophecy so given that doctors have the symphones over us they need to be more responsible in the information they're given and we can't know how long it's going to take to heal on people today or different from people 20 years ago they ate different things the activities were different the air was different and so on and so from where these norms derived in fact whenever I speak to anybody get lots of calls from people who are given these dread diagnosis and we know the first thing I tell them is you know it takes so long to do these studies and then it takes forever to analyze the data and then it takes another forever to publish it and then eventually when you're going to hear about it it's already old news you know so the reason the information you're reading now was true for people who lived you know 10 years ago 10 years a lot a lot of things happening and always with the intention of getting people to be less absolute in their understanding of any of this so that they can imagine all sorts of possibilities but you know even thing that I just said a moment before that it's important for people to realize the advantage in using their you know their left hand if they're right handed or their right hand if they're left handed and then at the same time recognizing that when they break a leg when somebody breaks a leg that forces you to do everything differently and if you attend to that that can be a wonderful thing you know I don't know how I got to see these things or it's very strange to me when I think of what things have influenced me I don't know how old I was Andrew but I'm watching this thing on television and there's this woman who has no arms who's got a knife between her toes who's slicing the tomato and you know it's a lot of years I've seen and done a lot of things but I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do it for me to remember that and that you know even when we're taught to do something we're taught a single way it's so much more fun to be taught multiple ways I mean when I hurt my right arm I'm playing tennis poorly but I'm still playing with my left hand we have such a deficit model of life yes yes and this also fits with the common stuff right that you know people work much harder to avoid a loss than they will for a gain and it seems to be I see now that's interesting because when I go to teach that I have so much trouble keeping track of what's the loss and what's the gain because I don't see the world that way you've transcended the typical notion of loss and you've transcended or not I just think differently and but everybody accepts that and to see the gain in the so -called loss of a loss in the so -called gain you know you just end up with a very different world you know well I'm not as evolved in that aspect certainly others as well as you are but when I started my lab I used to teach my students something which was okay we're going to get a lot more rejections and have to do a lot more revisions than we are going to get acceptances on papers and grants so the best thing that you can do which is what I had to do for myself one of the best things you might consider would have been a gentler way to say but I said one of the best things you can do because that's the way I talk sometimes is to create a long arc of positive feedback loops when something good happens but that when something negative happens let yourself feel acutely and then move on fast if I so far were to plot this it would be it would basically be like an accepted paper will delight me and motivate me for many many months if not years but a rejection or a tough revision where it's we're looking at another year or two of experiments it was I'd allow myself maybe a day and a half of just being you know utterly crushed and then right back to it yeah but another way you know when I say put people back in the equation that's what you need to teach them which is the responses you're getting these reviews are not from a bunch of ages in the sky certainly not certainly not just a group of people a group of people with different biases and so on and and it doesn't mean you were wrong yeah and we use an I learned from my postdoc advisor and I love this is he is to say reviews always make papers better even if you hate them they always make papers where they never make papers were sometimes they make papers a little bit harder to track because like there's this weird figure put in just a sad aspire you're kind of like what is this but everyone eventually realize what that figure is about anyway and so I adopted the idea that reviews red ink critical feedback are just ways of getting back which has also been essential in the podcasting sphere because if I've ever gotten anything wrong believe me I hear about it in the comments and sometimes it can be embarrassing but it's you just look at it as an opportunity to address your human ness and move forward you know correct it and move forward but I think a lot of people trying to maintain this air of perfection like there's some sort of Faberier egg then instead of living life like a work of art where it has dimples and cracks and acne and all the rest and it's human I think a lot of people want to present themselves to the world like a Faberier egg like this just absolutely for all us.

3:10:21The problem with that is going out the next day. You can be that Faberier egg on day one but now you've got to maintain that I mean the first paper that I published came back without a comment without a comment not a correction not a typo what a dangerous thing to have exactly was awful that was not my experience and I think it's going to be a good thing to have a good time. I think it's going to be a good thing to have a good time. I think it's going to be a good thing to have a good time. I think it's going to be a good thing to have a good time. I think it's going to be a good thing to have a good time.

3:11:08I think it's going to be a good thing to have a good time. I think it wasn't appreciated in the way you wanted it to be appreciated and they're guessing at well if you did it this way rather than that way. You know, papers that are not accepted today may be accepted tomorrow the same paper. I mean, you know, I can't tell you how many times people say can't be and then it becomes the standard. You mean in terms of a field and what's acceptable, yeah? Yeah, things have certainly changed and look, you've done a tremendous amount to pioneer that change. I mean, it's not one study or ten study or twenty studies.

3:11:45I mean, there's now a catalog of incredibly groundbreaking work that you've, I don't know if you used intentionally or you're just following your interests, but that have transformed the way that we think about the mind and its role in our physiology and so on. I was hoping to get your reflections on something that I sometimes say that's probably wrong, but that is helpful to me because, and hopefully to other people too, because it, I think, captures some of the circuit dynamics related to reward and reinforcement. And it sometimes resurfaces on the internet that addiction among other things is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring someone pleasure.

3:12:24And I used to attach to that statement, you know, enlightenment if there is such a thing is a progressive broadening of the things that bring us pleasure. And one thing that struck me throughout today's conversation is that it seems like you're able to look at pretty much anything through a bunch of different facets, take on other points of view, so strong theory of mind while holding on to your own perceptions, right? You're not, you're not drifting off from yourself. You're, you're remaining, you know, of, of self in, but taking on other perspectives and, and that flexibility of thinking and that expansiveness, like looking at things as good bad, maybe I don't know, I don't know what's true or what could be true in really challenging preconceived notions.

3:13:09It seems very powerful. Do you believe in enlightenment and was the description I just gave anything is alike what the way you would wish. I'm very flattered. You know, I think that when you're walking around and you don't see and all of a sudden you see, you can say that you're enlightened. I guess in a not so grandiose way that that simple thing that I keep saying, recognizing that behavior makes sense leads you to such a different view of people. You don't have people who are good and bad, people who are addicted and not addicted, you know, you don't have A students and, and failing students.

3:13:58Everything just organizes itself differently and you come to appreciate the individual talents that people have. And when you can do that, I don't know if you want to call the person enlightened, but life just is easier and nicer. You know, it's nicer to walk outside and be trusting of people and not to be afraid of this bastard or that one who's going to come and get you. I mean, I went to with a friend, this was so many years ago, to an AA meeting to see what it was like. And I had left my pocketbook over here, wherever that is, you can say. And we walked over here. And for whatever reason. I left my pocketbook over there.

3:14:50And then I thought, you know, so what? If somebody takes it, they probably need it more than I do. And it was so freeing. You know, just not to care about all these things that somehow we're implicitly, sometimes explicitly taught to care about and always evaluating ourselves. You know, that little song, feeling that, let me sing. I enjoy, I can't carry a tune so much. Why should somebody make me feel bad about singing? And maybe I've become a better singer or maybe I'll sing in some way that'll teach somebody, you know, some new trick that they hadn't thought about before because of my inadequacy.

3:15:36Why are people evaluating themselves at every moment rather than feeling good about the things they know that they can do? And who decides what's important to be able to do? I don't know how to most articulately share it, but it's just a very different life. You know, a life where you don't, I just don't believe that stress is necessary. I don't believe that there's anybody in this world that's better than I am. But I also don't believe I'm better than anybody else. It's very different. Where everything, especially among those of us who are academics, where every minute you're given a grade and even the number of papers you got accepted, determines your picking order and so on.

3:16:25It's also silly. And then you have the money people and I have $20 billion. So I'm better off than people. I'm a better person than people have $10 billion. It's sad to me when in fact, I think all of it is engaged in order to feel good about yourself. That's all. You know, why do I need that money? Why do I need those A's? Why do I need those successes so that I'll like myself? Just like yourself. Recognize that you're likeable. Why not? That may seem simple -minded, but it's gotten me to wherever I am. It has indeed and it's helped a tremendous number of people, both in the form of scientific findings, which are then shared with people through books and through podcasts.

3:17:19And I'm just so grateful that you came here today to share with us. This is really as vast as it's been, you know, just a subset of the discoveries that you've made. So, you know, a couple of things. First of all, thank you for coming here today. It's been my pleasure. I've thoroughly enjoyed this and I love, love, love your work and it's caused me to think differently about things and today's discussion is going to make me and I know so many other people think differently about everything. I mean, very, very few discussions that I'll hold will make me rethink my thinking about everything and that this one certainly will.

3:17:59And also for continuing to do the work that you're doing, I mean, it's clear that you embody and live the discoveries that you make and it's not just an academic pursuit that then allows you to collect all the appropriately, collect all the amazing awards and titles, but that it really serves and that you live it. So, thank you for that as well. Then two more questions very briefly. The first one is, no matter how long the question is, the answer is right. So you asked me the brief question for a long answer. Well, the floor is yours, but would you consider coming back? Sure. Again, to share with us some additional findings is the second and the last question and then I'm just thinking that maybe the last question is so that it sticks in people's minds.

3:18:47Would you be willing to share the song?

3:18:51Oh, Andrew. All right. Yes, I'm going to sing this. Now, you have to remember, though, that I'm singing this because I think singing is fun and it shouldn't matter how good a voice you have. Okay. So here we go. This is to the old, um, Sarah Lee commercial. And everybody doesn't like something, but nobody doesn't like Sarah Lee. Everybody doesn't know something, but everyone knows something else. Everyone can do something, but everyone can do something else. So what have I lost by singing that? I know I can sing. Now you know I can sing, but do you think my not being able to sing means I can't write, think, or do whatever it is that I do better than singing?

3:19:38No, of course not. I love the song. And thanks for saying you'll come back again. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Ellen Langer. I hope you found it to be as fascinating as I did to learn more about Dr. Langer's work to find links to her books and workshops and other resources. Please see the show note captions. If you're learning from Ender and join this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us. In addition, please click follow for the podcast on both Spotify and Apple and on both Spotify and Apple.

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