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

welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine my guest today is Dr Ellen Langer Dr Ellen Langer is a professor of psychology at Harvard University and one of the world's leading Pioneers in the Mind Body Connection more specifically how our thoughts impact our health Dr Ellen Langer was one of the first people to systematically explore the mindbody connection with scientific rigor her laboratory has made a large number of truly fascinating findings for instance today you'll learn about a study that Dr Langer did in which she brought quite old people into her laboratory or rather she designed a laboratory such that people lived in this laboratory but the laboratory itself was designed to resemble the environment everything from the types of furniture the types of dishes the types of music Etc that those those people had lived in 20 years prior when those subjects lived in that laboratory for less than one week the change in the environment and their interaction with that environment LED them to have far more Mobility better cognitive function and a large number of other markers of biological aging reversed which is absolutely remarkable and speaks to the incredible power that the mind has over our biology that's just one example of the sorts of experiments that Dr Langer has done again with a tremendous amount of scientific rigor so today Dr Langer and I talk about how the acquisition of knowledge just simply learning about certain biological mechanisms as well as your mindset about various aspects of your health and well-being can powerfully dictate your health and well-being we talk about longevity we talk about exercise and weight loss we talk about infectious disease in fact we also talk about how mindset can impact cancer outcomes or rather overcoming cancer we discuss examples mechanisms and practical application of those mechanisms by the end of today's episode I assure you that Dr Ellen Langer will change the way that you think about the mindbody connection the way you think about your health and I assure you it's not all just about positive thinking in fact Dr Ellen Langer gets us to think differently about scientific questions our health and just about everything else in the world you'll soon see she has a quite unique way of thinking not just about science and health but also about life in general and what makes for a truly good life Dr Ellen Langer is a true luminary and Pioneer in this area of Mind Body health and she's a fabulous teacher as well before we begin I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford it is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme this episode does include sponsors and now for my discussion with Dr Ellen Langer Dr Ellen Langer welcome thank you Andrew so great to have you here there's so many topics that you've worked on and shed light on that impact our daily lives and our internal world and our external world and how they interact I want to know your definition of mindfulness and it could take on practical forms theoretical forms and make it very simple that when most people hear the word mindful sadly they think of meditation meditation is great but it's not mindful you meditate in order to result in postm meditative mindfulness okay uh so it's a practice mindfulness as I study it is a way of being it's not a practice it's the simple process of noticing now you can get there in one of two ways bottom up actively notice three new things about the person you live with walk outside notice three new things each time you do this you see that you didn't know the thing you thought you knew as well as you thought you knew it you can also do it top down um top down is recognize that everything is always changing everything looks different from different perspectives uncertainty is the rule it's not the exception so when you know you don't know then you naturally tune in so one of the things I've said this so many times maybe this will be the L Les um one of the things we think we know best is how much is one plus one Andrew I'm going to assume it's still two two not always if you add one watt of chewing gum to one wat of chewing gum 1 plus 1 is one you add one Cloud to One Cloud 1 plus 1 is one um you this is interesting somebody sent this to me the other day you take one pizza and you add one pizza one plus one is two you take one lasagna and you add one lasagna 1 plus one is one it's just a bigger lasagna right you take one puddle and you add yeah let's say I have two puddles there and you add some more order in between now you have 1 + 1 + 1 is 1 okay so the point of it is that in the real world 1+ one probably doesn't equal two as a more oftenness it does and since you're an educated individual you might know that 1 + 1 equals 2 if you're using a base 10 number system if you're using a base two number system 1 plus 1 is written as 10 oh my goodness somebody asks you how much is 1+ one should you say one two 10 um and um the point is that when you know you don't know then you pay attention in this context let me see I'll be a smartass and I'll say one um or in this context I know the person wants me to be obedient and I'll say to so on and so forth so when you don't know you pay attention when you pay attention you have choices that otherwise you're blind to it makes a very big difference so in your mind ful you don't know you actively notice as you're noticing the neurons are firing and 50 years of research has shown that it's literally and figuratively enlightening and if you're going to do something show up for it now the problem is that most people are Mindless almost all the time and they're totally oblivious to it when you're not there you're not there to know you're not there and most people are just not there now you want to ask me how does that happen well we taught that schools I think are the biggest culprits schools are teaching us absolute answers 1 plus one is two virtually everything that we're taught is as if the world is constant and going to stay that way and the answer today is going to be the same answer as tomorrow um and so that certainty leads us not to notice how did you come to realize this thing that we call mindfulness I mean it certainly in the last 20 years the notion of meditation as a valuable practice has has become pretty common common sure um and prior to that it was considered a little bit uh alternative hippy let me answer okay so it's very funny I I'm glad in some ways I don't remember who this person was but I started studying mindlessness and and I found myself I'd walk into a mannequin I'd apologize you know all sorts of things like that and I well this is kind of interesting to me I'm speaking to somebody we don't know who it was anymore who said to me you know you are what you study I said okay so then I switched it around from being mindless to being mindful at that point then I found out about um me know meditation and Buddhism and all of this and started to learn about um another way of being what was exciting to me was that I had gotten through this Western Scientific mode so to speak to the same um many of the same consequences as the Buddhists had talked about for thousands of years it's interesting how um now in Western Society we Embrace this idea of presence but it gets merged with these um kind of more rigid terms like focus and attention yeah now focus is actually mindless you know um so it's interesting um focus on your finger now if you're concent training focusing what you're going to notice is that your fingers the image is moving around right and so when we try to hold something still that's the wrong thing you shouldn't tell people to focus now instead of focus look at your finger mind mindfully that means you're going to notice new things are that's an ugly little finger and what is that line there and why is this red and when you're doing that when you're actively noticing uh the image stays still so when we give people instructions in school you focus they think as a camera hold it still and whenever we're trying to hold ourselves the image anything still we're going to be performing suboptimally we need to let things vary things are always changing so what happens is we confuse the stability of our mindsets we're holding something still on our heads with the stability of the underlying phenomena so mindfulness as a as a practice exploration presence and exploration is perhaps sure a slightly better perhaps way to think about it it's not a practice you see once you accept that um everything is uncertain then you just tune in you'd only don't tune in when you think you know so if you were going to come visit me in um uh Cambridge you've never been to my house you don't have to practice anything you walk in you'll notice things just did she do that pain what is that you know oh look what she's reading there's two dogs you just exactly exactly you'll you'll notice um without having to do any work and that's the important thing because in the way I keep differentiating mindfulness as I study it with meditation meditation is a practice for some people to sit still 20 minutes twice a day is work mindfulness as I study it is what you're doing when you're having fun you can't have fun unless you're actively noticing right so in fact this act of noticing is energy begetting not consuming so it feels good it's the essence of when you're doing when you're having the most fun it's good for you and it's so easy that you know I can't see any reason why anybody wouldn't embrace it um you know that um it's good for you when you're mindful people find you more appealing charismatic when you're mindful the products you produce enhanced um and it's healthier I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor better help better help offers Professional Therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online now I personally have been doing therapy weekly for well over 30 years initially I didn't have a choice it was a condition of being allowed to stay in school but pretty soon I realized that therapy is an extremely important component to one's overall health in fact I consider doing regular therapy just as important as getting regular exercise which of course also do every week they're essentially three things that great therapy provides first of all it provides a good rapport with somebody that you can trust and talk to about pretty much any issue with second of all it can provide support in the form of emotional support and directed guidance and third expert therapy can provide useful insights insights that allow you to better not just 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match you to a mattress that is customized for your unique sleep needs right now Helix is giving up to 25% off all mattress orders again that's Helix sleep.com huberman to get up to 25% off I think for a lot of people a practice of meditation uh feels like the best or most um you know uh obvious Gateway into this thing that we're calling mindfulness it's one way and I'm not demeaning I did some research you know in the 80s on medic meditation it's wonderful just it's just different and they're not mutually exclusive you can do both and part of the advantage of um meditating possibly has nothing to do with the meditation you know why are you going to meditate you so you want to be a Kinder nicer person you could just be kinder or nicer but now you're going to go to this trouble 20 minutes twice a day you're going to you sit up and take notice and be a Kinder nicer person so maybe it's the time investment as opposed to something um specific about the meditation practice that's a heretical idea in the in the world of well uh Wellness um but of course but but they're not mutually exclusive you know so I'm not denying uh some of the more inherent properties let's say but there's this this other piece to it I love the way that you look at things that we take for granted as operating one way through this different perspective um our mutual friend Ali crumb told me the story that at one point she was in it conversation with you and you said well maybe exercise and all its effects on our health is just an epip phenomenon I could you talk a little bit more about that I think first of all I don't think most people are familiar with what epip phenomena are but this idea of looking at things through a different portal seems so valuable regardless of what the experimental outcome turned out to be and perhaps we should touch on that experimental outcome about uh labor versus um non- labor there's so much there you I don't know where to where go we want to talk about that the research let's talk about the study well before we go to the study though let's go to the reason for the study way back when all right so um there's so many paths I can take here take them all okay we'll start with one so I did some research uh back in the 70s with u people in nursing homes and why did I do that because um I had somebody in the family who was in a nursing home it was very distressing to see people people just sitting there doing nothing and barely existing and so we had the idea that if we gave people choices that might get them more engaged in their in their living and so we did that we gave people um uh encouragement to decide where to see people whether to visit them in your room in the lounge you have to remember you can't go into an establishment and business and turn the whole power structure around but so Within reason we came up with choices people could make we gave them an opportunity to see a movie you could see it on Tuesday or Thursday we gave them a plant to take care of all right the comparison group The Tender Loving Care Group uh we told them you know people will be visiting you and we'll uh set it up so you can uh you'll be visiting in the loung everything was controlled that way you can see a movie um and we'll let you know if you're going to see it on Tuesday or Thursday here's a plant and the nurses will care for it uh for you all right so um we do this we come back um I think it was three weeks I don't remember it's been so long uh 18 months later first we took initial measures come back 18 months later those people who were um given this these choices live longer and that was the beginning of um all of my work on Health in some sense how could it be that making choices results in a longer life all right so what is there about choic making and then the choices were Mickey Mouse choices you know um you can you always have Choice available too you can turn on a light switch you can do it with your right hand your right hand your left hand one finger three fingers lift your foot like so many choices that you can bring to a table if Choice making is good for you why don't people do this and that got me more into uh the mindlessness and mindfulness work now okay so we have people living longer how can it be that you're making choices your mind is active and your body complies and so then I thought about it uh not in one F swoop um but realized that this whole notion of mind body these are just words we come together here I am all of me my fingers my shoulders my thoughts as one thing and if we put the mind and body back together then the amount of control we have is enormous right wherever I put my mind I'm also putting my body so in the mindful body which started off as a memoir I have lots of stories that show the leading up to this idea let me just tell you two very quickly one was I got married Andrew you won't believe it I was obscenely young and you find out if you read the book I was even younger than admitted because I was secretly married years before that okay so I go I'm 19 years old I think I go to Paris on my honeymoon we go into this restaurant I order a mixed grill one of the foods there was a pancreas my then husband who was more sophisticated than I more worldly I said which of these is the pancreas says that so I eat everything I'm a big eater now comes the Moment of Truth can I eat the pancreas why I thought that being married meant I had to eat the pancreas I I still haven't figured out but anyway I start eating it and he starts laughing not good for newly woods and I ask him why are you laughing he said cuz that's chicken you ate the pancreas a long time ago so I made myself sick okay the other side of that my mother had uh breast cancer that had metastasized to her pancreas and um then magically it was gone somehow she had made herself well so I had many of these sorts of experiences and talk about you know mine I've been talking about this since gosh uh when did we first since 79 so now people are talking about Mind Body Connection it's not a connection you know if you're talking about a connection between two things it says they're separate and you still have to deal with what's connecting them when you put them back together it's one thing you don't have to deal with with um you know that mediator and so um the study you're asking me about which I'm surprised I'm having a junior moment that I actually remembered the question you asked rather than a senior moment um that uh before I tell you about the study with with valy the first study we did testing this Mind Body Unity was a counterclockwise study so here what we did was we took elderly men we were going to have them live in a retreat that had been retrofitted to 20 years earlier and had them live there as if they were their younger selves so they talked about things from the past as if they were just unfolding the results were incredible their Vision improved their hearing improved their memory their strength and they look noticeably younger so that was very exciting and began all this mindbody Unity work now comes the study that you're talking about with Ally where um in a conversation that she and I had she was my student um and she made proclamations about exercise and any Proclamation this is the short answer to your question anybody proclaims anything my mind immediately goes so when might not that be true I'm starting to pick up on that yeah you know a it's a gimmick I guess it's a gift is what it is um and um so um the question was that how important was the understanding of exercise to the effects of exercise so we take tramber maids and interestingly the first question we asked is how much exercise do you get and they say they don't get very much exercise because to them exercise is what you do after work that's with the Surgeon General who sits behind kind of desk old days um so you would imagine whether they realized they were getting exercise or not since they're getting so much exercise that they're going to be healthier than other people who are not getting them and they weren't that's interesting so now we divide them into two groups very simple study um randomly divide them into two groups and one group we simply teach them their work as exercise making a bed is like working in this machine at the gym doing the windows whatever so you have two groups one who thinks they work as exercise one who doesn't realize um we take many many measures um and they're not eating any differently one group from the other they're not working any harder nevertheless the group that changed their mind and now saw their work as exercise lost weight there was a change in waist to hip ratio body mass index and their blood pressure came down remarkable yeah yeah and what what usually talk about um when I start talking about this is that this was a test of the no sio effect most people know what the plus ebo is you take something that's nothing and it has the effect as if it's something right you take a sugar pill thinking it's strong medication and um it plays out as if it was a nobo is the reverse you're taking something so here you're doing the exercise but you don't realize it and it uh gets rid of the effect an early study on this was don't remember who did it now was a senior moment um people were given epicac and epicac is supposed to make you vomit so if you accidentally had poison or whatever you take epicac and bomit so people are given epicac people who have a problem vomiting and they're told the epicac will stop their vomiting and it stops their vomiting uh so many Placebo studies where you take people they're rubb with a a leaf that they think is poisonous Ivy so it is either is poison ivy or it's not poison ivy you think it's poison ivy or you don't think it's Poison Ivy and your body reacts to your thoughts if you think it's not poison ivy you don't get the rash if you think it is poison ivy you do spectacular yeah and so you know we've been studying this for forever I think that placebos are probably our very strongest medicine although um it's interesting that um when people think that they were given a placebo they get very upset you know they should be excited um because if the placebo didn't cure you who cured you you did it yourself but placebos have gotten a bad rap uh I think primarily because of the pharmaceutical companies right you want to bring a drug to market the way you do that is you have to run um an experiment where the drug outperforms the Placebo and when it doesn't damn it I can't make all those billions of dollars without saying wow this sugar pill is mighty mighty strong I want to talk about three themes that you raised the first one is this Mind Body notion and now as even as I say it Mind Body I I feel like a hint of guilt because I completely agree that the division of mind and body is one of the greatest mistakes of thinking psychology and Western medicine that ever existed in fact a lot of my uh you know secret mission in this podcast is to remind people every single episode it seems that you know the brain and body are connected bidirectionally through the nervous system but other systems too like there's no there's no single system hormone system nervous system immune system that doesn't that doesn't you know cross the blood rain barrier and go back and forth that's all because of dayart you know dayart was out to dinner and the uh waitress asked him if he wanted a salad and he said I think not and he disappeared I think I am I was about to ask like how how was it and after that Andrew I say this is not my day job so I don't have to be funny I love it I love it um I've spent a lot of time um trying to learn the history of medicine and and the the merge of philosophy and Medicine there's a wonderful book that if anyone is suffering from insomnia they should check out because it's extremely detailed and difficult to listen to or read but it's called The Prince of medicine which basically details all the reasons why we are so confused about how medicine is done and should be done and it has to do with rules and restrictions and cultural conventions and it's it's a whole barbed wire mess basically but um it includes this mess that was created for us which is this idea that somehow because the brain is perhaps the seat of our Consciousness to many people they believe that um but certainly you know like if I if I were to lose a few fingers on my left hand I'm not sure I would fundamentally be a different person but if I lost a few millimeter or the equivalent amount of of real estate in my brain my personality could very well change perhaps for the better um some some would say uh and I'm probably now hoping for that event um but all kidding aside you know I think the mindbody distinction is is has really poisoned our thinking about what's possible and the other experiments that you you described you know point to what's possible and I I want to talk about those but maybe if we could just hover on this notion of the of mind and body as as a single thing that there's an us I don't want to get too philosophical here but that that there's an us and and our body carries us forward in in motor Behavior but but like how should we conceptualize the self if we don't have a mindbody distinction I don't know why why that's a problem well I think why you know I am who I am period right how does that change whether we want to see me as having a mind body and elbows um so explain to me and then I will explain to you yeah well what I love is um I'm going to first uh reflect uh what I love is the the flexibility of your thinking around these things again it's like maybe exercise the effects of exercise are epip phenomena or um you know so in thinking about Mind Body I 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 fun Mally changed if I but if I lose a piece of neural real estate I'm fundamentally different that's the only thing that anchors me to the to the idea that they're separate 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 you'd end up different yeah yeah that's I'll I'll buy that explanation yeah I mean I'm just I'm just trying to probe this because I think um nowadays people think oh you know if I breathe in a certain way I'll change my state of mind which is true um 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 um even the work with the brain where um to assess this Neuroscience now is crazy with uh fmis 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 you know I I had this experience um I I like doing strange things and I was out in Kansas City and so somebody said there's an iridologist what is an irid sure for fun we'll go to the iridologist so this person is looking in my eye my Iris that's the iridologist part and she said uh you have a problem with your gallbladder I thought okay that's great gu 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 but 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 uh joy and so it's all there we just have to notice I have no memory now of what it was used said that led to that on my part but I'm glad I said it anyway well we're probing mind body and and their interconnectedness and um so this iridologist I've never heard that term before um this iridologist it could be based on what we were discussing a few moments ago it could be that the suggestion that there was a problem with your gallbladder led to a problem with your gallbladder or do you you think that that she had some or or he had some um diagnostic knowledge um I hadn't even considered the former which is strange to me um no I just assumed that she was seeing something and um you know but your idea but either way it's fascinating right some you know by somebody suggesting you have a gallbladder problem to have a gold BR problem um yeah what are your thoughts on things like acupuncture and and like and when I think about acupuncture I'm not just thinking about the needles the few times I've been to an acupuncturist um the first thing they do is they ask you to stick out your tongue they they are able to diagnose um tongue texture and color and maybe they I think everything is everywhere although there's you know I I teach health psych in at Harvard and there's some data on it being mostly Placebo but you know 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 um to make the changes that most of us deserve desire so in other words so going to an acupuncturist itself means I want to to find answers and seek and you are more likely to find and um and then you're in a position to improve might I ask what happened with your mom's mindset that or life or psychological life that you think led to the there's you know it's a an N of one you know uh it's very hard to know I knew that when she got sick uh I believed at that point that um being anything negative was going to um work in the opposite direction and so and I wouldn't let anybody into see her who wasn't uplifting um you know that was I don't 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 um she wasn't a big golfer but you know my reasoning was that you know I must believe she's going to be better or why would I have spent the money uh her reasoning was my reasoning must be that if I get these she'll think that you know so it didn't work but we had these golf clubs that were never used um you know I don't know um I I believe that um we have more control uh at that point I hadn't done all of these experiments um 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 I had these data people living longer and so on and yet mindlessly I you know virtually took over her life you know deciding who can see or what she can do um but um I don't know um and I don't think there would have been with just one person any way of knowing what what led to the uh disease going away but the fact that it went away was crucial to me you know I think that um we 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 um give up a great deal of control by doing so now U you asked me before um about how I came to certain things let me go back uh to an answer I should have given you many years ago I was um at a horse event and this man asked me would I watch his horse for him because he wants to get his horse a hot dog hot dog I'm a straight A student what is it crazy horses 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 and 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 you say these particular horses who hadn't eaten for 3 days were given this grain and under those circumstances 80% of them didn't eat meat that's a mouthful right you can't you know communicate that way so you abbreviate it 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 you know 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 and and it becomes very unlikely when you when you turn it all inside out that way and so um 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 um you know uh 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 um a few examples of this that's kind of funny I say so um Michael Jordan and I are going to have a foul shooting contests we each get to shoot one basket who's going to win well most people are just going to quickly say Michael Jordan all right how much money 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 um or I'll give you a million dollars of Michael Jord wins you give me half a million dollars if Ellen Langer wins first you think you'll take the beted but when you think about it no he sometimes misses she sometimes makes the basket um maybe 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 or 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 could be the case that I could win all of a sudden you become less certain now certainly if we were shooting a 100 baskets he would win let give you another example I use too often because I don't know which of these will will feel right you go and um to a Mercedes parking lot or pick your favorite car and I'm going say there are 100 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 capped at a million okay now Mercedes are wonderful cars 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 you if you were going to start at a 100 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 so it doesn't matter as much you see if I can be happy whether this occurs or the opposite occurs um I care less about which way it turns out but right now we're all brought up in a world we had 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 and just be still my favorite example this is so for me was so funny I'm doing uh one of these podcasts over zoom and I'm trying to explain that um uh evaluation is in your head not in the things you're evaluating I say as 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 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 then you breathe you know so I um failed the test I got you know dented the car I missed the bus whatever it is so what um 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 um 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 your 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 what that means is that ag1 ensures that you're getting all the necessary vitamins minerals and other micronutrients to form a strong foundation for your daily Health ag1 also has probiotics and prebiotics that support a healthy gut microbiome your gut microbiome consists of trillions of microorganisms that line your digestive tract and impact things such as your immune system status your metabolic Health your hormone health and much more so I've consistently found that when I take ag1 daily my digestion is improved my immune system is more robust and my mood and mental focus are at their best in fact if I could take Just One supplement that supplement would be ag1 if you'd like to try ag1 you can go to drink a1.com huberman to claim a special offer they'll give you five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3 k to with your order of ag1 again go to drink a1.com huberman to claim this special offer today's episode is also brought To Us by ju ju makes medical-grade red light therapy devices now if there's one thing that I have consistently emphasized on this podcast it is the incredible impact that light can have on our biology now in addition to sunlight red light and near infrared light sources have been shown to have positive effects on improving numerous aspects of Cellar and organ Health including faster muscle recovery improved skin health and wound healing improvements in acne reduced pain and inflammation even mitochondrial function and improving Vision itself what sets juv lights apart and why they're my preferred red light therapy device is that they use clinically proven wavelengths meaning specific wavelengths of red light and near infrared light in combination to trigger the optimal seller adaptations personally I use the ju whole body panel about three to four times a week and I use the ju handheld light both at home and when I travel if you'd like to try juv you can go to juv spelled jv.com huberman juv is offering an exclusive discount to all hubman lab listeners with up to $400 off ju products again that's ju spell jv.com huberman to get up to $400 off so 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 um sad sadly though um then they believe the ball is still there when in fact the bow may be gone true right okay so there's always a portal portal to a different to a different outcome it's I'm and I'm catching on to your mode of thinking here this is actually what I'm trying to trying to do because I think um you know the brain is a prediction making machine in addition to doing other things that regulates heartbeat all the autonomic stuff right heartbeat digestion Etc it remembers things and it's a prediction making machine uh 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 H happening in our conversation in the backdrop of these experiments is uh 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 so again things are changing you're holding it still in your mind um and you know so um you're living with somebody or you meet somebody and you you know right away you decide what you know size that person up so now you can control your interactions with them um and and but what you're doing is ignoring all the times the person is not like that um and uh all the ways that the relationship uh could have otherwise grown you know that we in general and this is you know I have um a psychological treatment for chronic illness it's all based on the same idea of change things are changing we're always holding it still and um so you have the illusion that you're controlling things you know but it um in fact uh you're giving up control by not recognizing for yourself or somebody else you know all of our statements of we can't 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 um these lists come out oh these resolutions are so mindless and but they're more than just Mindless um they deny that what we did made sense or else we wouldn't have done it that one thing that I told you is more important to me than anything else that I came to over all these years of study um you know 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 um and I think that's never the case I woke up early this morning and and the my first thoughts of the day I like to think have some importance for something who knows it's when my mind it seems clearest for at least a nanc um and 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 yeah that's sad it's very it's sad and 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 and you know in my life and to be present with people as it were but um I I thought well no let's let's go back to step because we both said it was sad why is it sad reconsidering you know that to um to be able to think of five different things instead of one Dre could be could be an asset right it could be an asset I think that for me what I I realize is um most of the shoulds are just total lies yeah they don't and also they don't they're just lies like they're not actually coming from a SC I'm not hearing other people's voices in my head uh you you should do this it's you know not parental narrative or or anything it's just it's just um it's just contamination of a of a like of 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 and it was so pleasant right you know he hear an evening discussion about the news or talk talk show or whatever on the radio um while cooking and so that kind of quote unquote distraction felt really meaningful I felt like when 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 um 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 um or 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 I 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 um maybe it's a function of getting older but I I get so much more satisfaction and get truly so much more done from just doing one thing in my work life understand the the one thing idea you know that um 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 um you know fixing my back in the seat always lots of things going on um and I I think that also tasks you know so let's say you're 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 are you multitasking 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 there's some reason I'm leaving this to go to this well maybe I'm I'm running the script backwards it let me put it different certainly the 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 it still blows me away how much I enjoy things that would that would fall under the category of simple things or things that that I experien in I ation yeah um as compared to how little I enjoy and sometimes um reflect on how punishing quote unquote multitasking is like like being in a text conversation while I'm walking on the beach no no but when you're texting while you're on the beach probably it's some kind of work text right there there's some something about it and why are you doing it when you're on the beach it's not because I can easily imagine oh 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 you know I I 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 you know when you're lost doing or found really I don't want to say lost when we're writing I find myself while I'm writing but when you're you know engaged in an activity um you know you're making each of those moments matter but um you know they should matter as much I had this thought that I would help people who was stressed and I would say to them okay so assuming that their vision is reasonable I would just thread a needle threading the needle and then I'd ask them how they felt and everybody going to feel fine because you're actively engaged in 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 to go back to the your three your three things um you know uh it's like the text on the beach is not an I love you text because I don't see why that would distract you I 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 um and then the question is why see the work thing that way and especially someone like you where you don't need any of this anymore anyway you know well yeah that's that's a discussion into itself no but no it 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 unbeknown to us they brought us all out and so we're sitting there and um I'm the last one to be asked and the question was what's on your bucket list and so the first person answers what's on the next person and 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 you're like a a glass you know and and the water is full or whatever you vodka in this case you know that it's full it's full you can't do more than that and so if the moment is Meaningful you don't have to be writing that book being in love um on a vacation in Paris um you know and so the I think we have all these crazy Notions um even the idea of I've talked about this before work life balance Oho that's scary to me what that says you know what life really means is some you know Joy right other than just being you know doing work 247 or however long people work not 247 um what is it 3 and a half anyway um 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 and I think that's sad I think it's sad that people think life has to be stressful that work has to be unpleasant um 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 F these these articles just get served up to me in my in my Google feed or something like the five things that people regret most on their deathbed I think these lists are terrible I 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 I've derived tremendous pleasure from my work but also tremendous relationships tremendous tremendous excuse me levels of insight into what I think are insights anyway clear you wouldn't be having the experience now yeah exactly exactly I mean I 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 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 um lists of that sort in a short media article form because I think a it clearly doesn't change Behavior I mean people have been talking about you know drink L well smoking was eradicated mostly from from this country through different mechanisms but um you know sleep sleep more um stress less I mean these lists come out and they they don't change Behavior at all and not only that but even the discussion about let's say something like sleep and I find it outrageous um I we might even disagree on this here but uh 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 yeah you know um and um my age everything should um play a part in this if I relax in the 2 or 3 hours before going to sleep that's it especially if I dim the lights I actually require a full two to three hours less of sleep to wake up feeling refreshed my criteria is what 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 uh follow perceived amount of sleep yeah 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 eight Sleep mattress cover I love getting my sleep score I like to see what I got um people do with the with the uh Aura ring or the woop band or you know pick your favorite technology nowadays or Apple watch whatever if I understand this study correctly the perception of how much sleep people got based on their knowledge of a number a score Etc dictates the cognitive performance and their physical well-being I mean this is this runs countercurrent to like everything in the wellness biohacking movement it jibes however with the data that I'm aware of I think it was sleep lab at Stanford that um for instance positive anticipation of next day events reduces your sleep need and improves the quality your sleep just being excited for the next day can make it such that the 5 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 but they're not going to be able to fall asleep because the amount of sleep they need is dictated by the day before not the day to come well I do think that um there was a I'll sleep when I'm dead mindset that was diminishing People's Health for a while I do think um it's great that books like Matt Walkers you know why we sleep Etc came out although that book focused more on the 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's sleep but I I think that there's such a thing as creating a uh sleep need anxiety and then you know can't sleep 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 um if you can't if you're not sleeping what is the reason for that and if you're stressed you know 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 uh less than your typical or NE required night's sleep hopefully it's for good reasons hopefully you're having a good time it's it's it's when you get the fire alarm in the middle of the night that that becomes as you said stressful um I'd like to just briefly go back to the um counterclockwise study could you describe a little bit more about the um the Practical aspects of that study so these were people who let's say were on average how old was it somewhere between like 30 and 50 no no no no no counterclockwise and these were people who were 80 oh 80 okay excuse me now but also that was when um 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 can be in the study so um they're down the hall I'm in my office and I see them and they look like they're not going to make it down the hall to the office and I'm saying to myself why am I doing this you know that I'm taking on too much you know I in fact had I realized all the responsibility uh 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 you know support system one or two of them had died you could end up in a mess yeah yeah I was fortunate that none of that happened but no so they were old um and um it was interesting because you know they show up and they look you know really now it probably be somebody 105 that's the way they you know present it um 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 to have all sorts of um problems and so on almost instantly when they got there they changed the feeling was almost palpable now I did this thing wasn't good science but um so the first group that we took there was the reminiscent group group this was a group where they were going to reminisce for that week so they always knew now was now and then was then right that was a a control group we get to the retreat and um I'm in this van oh people you know people need to understand the study was uh 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 Chad lately you know give me the 10 best songs back uh 20 years ago at any rate um so I'm on the uh 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 not I was sexist at the time oblivious um that uh none of my male graduate students were with me that meant I had seven old men and at least seven heavy suitcases there was no way that I was going to carry their suitcases upstairs so um unplanned for we get off the bus and I say you're in charge of your own suitcase I don't care if you move it an inch at a time to get it to your room or you unpack it here a shirt at a time however you want to do it now imagine nothing else the difference between somebody who's cuddled who's not even thought to be able to respond to a question you know where the daughter or son would answer for them to now they're in charge of their whole lives and um that meant that even the comparison group was going to do well which they did just not quite as well as the other group and 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 you know so um if I got um one monkey to say hey Ellen that's nonsense that would be fine if we couldn't train the rest of them you know 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 a little script running in the back of my mind and now I'm not going to judge it the sorts of experiments and the general line of inquiry that you've been involved in for you know some time now to 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 and the the idea that science has done in a particular way um you know a very brief anecdote you know the folks that founded at The esselin 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 um a class on mindfulness and breathing to bring Stan graph through and some other people and this was probably the the late 7s early 80s and whatever the cultural norms were at Stanford at that time they claimed they were basically runoff campus went and started esselin I 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 reduce stress levels okay so now and nowadays there's grants given for this kind of stuff and meditation so there's been a huge shift in the in the in the academic cultural millu 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 I want to know a how was it received early on B did you care C 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 that you Delight in kind of um not poking the bear but playing with ideas that are um 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 to be quite as different as you're uh suggesting did any of your colleagues think like like great okay no I love hearing that because it shatters my Notions of of kind of um East Coast I League AC I mean perhaps behind my back but well clearly it's worked out and nowadays you know there are multiple Labs at Harvard 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 um that was the the so it's interesting 8-year-old Ellen Langer like well maybe cookies are the the nutritious stuff you I know I understand so I seem to be um you know come hella high water I'm going to do it I'm not like that at all more now that I'm older but I tell a story um I don't remember what the point of it the exact point was in the mindful body where I'm met the dentist I'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 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 you know it never occurred to me and so lots of these ideas you know are not um against or what you know I don't know where they come from I know Lee Ross when you know so Lee was a professor at Stanford and I remember having a conversation where he said Ellen you know you're from Mars and I said said I I'm Not So Different he says okay so you're a normal not an exceptional Martian but you're still a martian um and then a colleague um had a conversation with and and I was flattered by this but I think it it wasn't meant to be flattering because they were worried what my reaction was was that you know I'm from a different uh time um and you know so that plays differently if you're aware you know so like when I started painting um you know um 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 I have to introduce you to my good friend Rick Rubin who's been on this podcast a few times because he he wrote the creative act he's he's basically his life has been spent you know trying to pull out the best creative works from musicians and and he's been involved in other things too and he's just has a you know a kind of Supernatural level of ability to do this he keeps coming back to this thing in our discussions but also in his book and and elsewhere about how the the the impediment the greatest impediment to the creative process is to think about the publicity or cultural milu that it's going to exist in that he really believes that that these things are offerings to to the to God to the universe to whatever um that come through us and that the the barrier is the the it's almost like the self-awareness is the barrier so uh 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 um and um when you put people as I say back in the equation everything becomes mutable everything you know so and so there are thing here's where I am different from uh from many other people better or worse my think in this case for better you know that I everything can be changed you know you tell me you meet this you know this woman and she's too heavy weight can be lost hair can be grown everything can be changed so I I'd give a talk when I was very young and I um 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 uh the older I get the uh the more malleable everything seems to be even a thing you know to go back I don't know why this comes to mind but it does um if um an insurance company is making a decision about what drugs to insure now who said that this disorder is better or more worthy than that dis I say so these are people making this decision so imagine that you have a group of nuns they're the committee making the decision versus a group of Lusty 50-year-old men and they're deciding whether people should be reimbursed for um Viagra for example you and that's what it's all about you know that when you recognize that whatever is could be different is meetings and I I deal with this uh when I give lectures you know at some point I might say uh 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 six5 men find me attractive I don't know what anyway invite him to the stage and then we look ridiculous I'm 53 he's 65 and um I ask 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 so you don't hold the tennis racket like this if your hand is half the size of the person who or twice the size or you 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 you know tennis so you have and everybody when you think about this and 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 and 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 wuss second surf if I had three surfs I kill it it doesn't go and 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 you're writing the rules to so you think differently about yourself you don't feel bad about it in fact you know when people play tennis with me we often play three servs why not you know everything about it is up for grabs and um 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 um 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 um you know legality is not the same thing as morality you know by law one was not allowed interracial marriage by law one was not allowed to be gay by law 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 um you know if it does fight it deviate at least live the 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 this snapshot offers you with insights on your heart health Hormone Health immune functioning nutrient levels and much more they've also recently added tests for toxins such as BPA exposure from harmful Plastics and tests for paases or forever chemicals function not only provides testing of over a 100 biomarkers key to your physical and mental health but it also analyzes these results and provides insights from Top Doctors who are expert in the relevant areas for example in one of my first tests with function I learned that I had elevated levels of mercury in my blood function not only helped me detect that but offered insights into how best to reduce my mercury levels which included limiting my tuna consumption I've been eating a lot of tuna while also making an effort to eat more leafy greens and supplementing with Knack and acetal cysteine both of which can support glutathione production and detoxification and I should say by taking a second function test that approach worked comprehensive blood testing is vitally important there's so many things related to your mental and physical health that can only be detected in a blood test the problem is blood testing has always been very expensive and complicated in contrast I've been super impressed by function Simplicity and at the level of cost it is very affordable as a consequence I decided to join their scientific Advisory Board and I'm thrilled that they're sponsoring the podcast if you'd like to try function you can go to function health.com huberman function currently has a weight list of over 200 50,000 people but they're offering Early Access to huberman podcast listeners again that's function health.com huberman to get early access to function I feel like one of the major detriments to living the way that you're describing um which by the way has tremendous gravitational pull in my mind like it's it's such a better way to go through life right um and I subscribe also to this notion that pretty Prett much everything was made up besides the laws of nature right I mean to me physics is real and uh chemistry is real biology gets biology is real it gets tricky because they're they're all real but it's our understanding of them that varies so we haven't worked out all of physics yet sure um you know 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 come hell high water right I mean um you know seeing what may be like I I mean I could say listen uh because of the laws of gravity objects fall down not up but of course there there are we could create exceptions to that but that humans make up all sorts of rules culture dictates group think 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 m M you 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 um Andrew because we think we know but are oblivious to the fact that every sing every sing it's a big statement Behavior can be UND stood 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 I can try my hardest not to be gullible but I'm going to eventually be gullible 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 gble 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 in uh different terms that with all that I've studied found um found interesting over all 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 now if you think about that that means every sing single time you're demeaning somebody or yourself or you're 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 um once you realize that your behavior makes sense um you like yourself more uh when you're realizing that you know uh 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 uh I don't remember it was two or 300 Behavior descriptions I said Circle those things about yourself that you keep trying to change but you keep failing it so for me I'd Circle impulsive um gullible 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 um and so on and so now that I have more respect for myself because what I did made sense I carry myself differently um I'm I'm not doing what you were just suggesting before where I'm tormenting myself and you know and so on um and the people I'm with you know there's a lot in the mindful body that deals with language and only a fraction of the Sensitivity I seem to have um to language in in a different way from the way linguist would study it um but you have things you know um let's say forgiveness we have all these terms that seem good and you know because you 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 okay so how did this come about I was asked to give a sermon sermon I'm Jewish don't I have to go to this church I 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 talk forgiveness it's not religion but it sounds religiously all right I'll think about forgiveness I think about forgiveness and what I came up with was sacrilegious some would think if you ask 10 people is forgiveness good or bad what are they going to tell you going tell you it's yeah if you ask 10 people is blame good or bad what are they going to say bad but you know you can't forgive unless you first blame so our forgivers are our blamers that's interesting now do you blame people for good things or bad things you blame thing people for bad things but things that in 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 that's you know I think that's the way to do it is to recognize uh in a a more open-minded way uh the the motivations that people have vary the consequences um you know no matter what you do do uh whatever negative thing it seems there you know positive things will follow if you allow them and you look at it that way can I ask you to no oh that's right it's your podcast yes you can definitely not my podcast we're here together um could I ask you for any Reflections that come up around this recent thought train I was uh on um 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 I use smartphones and I love them and I use social media and I think it's terrific for certain things but of course these things have issues just like the automobile created issues the television created issues and on and on okay fossil fuels and all of this people will debate fossil fu but anyway you get the point every technology brings with it some convenience um or some uh 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 build planes we okay and I just decide 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 we've got AI just this last week There's this whole 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 like 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 as far as I know so it 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 but we special I mean we are really the utmost example of this and I just wonder like what do you think the human compulsion is to develop Technologies I don't think there's 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 um but I think that drive yeah no all mindfulness is is noticing new things creating new things um with that creation we're maximally alive and so if we happen to be on the technology train you know uh then it's technology that's going to get our attention um the people who are in other areas whether it's creating music doing what you you know you and I do um 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 what do you think it is that that humans have this generative spirit in their mind body U same thing um to to express and to create things that have some durability in time or that are just an expression of of of where we are I mean it's so unusual I don't think but I don't think that um it's durability is what matters I think then that becomes a social construction you know um what is the the group The Asian 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 uh to show that nothing lasts yeah sand castle no selfie I call it you know you sand castle no selfie 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 sand castle no selfie like it's you're it's getting washed away and then someone says we take a photo of it it's like nope actually I just do it just to see it's just a practice of getting out what I'm I feel I need to get out well so for my mindfulness book which I wrote way back when uh the uh secretary I had then was wonderful guy but um 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 uh he would just sort of randomly cuz he didn't know what he was doing either and um then at some point he lost an entire draft of the book a sort of imagine you know and my first thought was um probably more typical than my second thought which is so crazy oh 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 um then I just started working on it again you know um 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 publication you know then at some point the game changes and you don't care about the number um and that's freeing and uh 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 um would make uh much of Life feel differently you know so we we did um this is going to seem strange kind of answer here but um 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 uh 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 and 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 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 Seinfeld This was so funny I thought um must been old Seinfeld he you after the show he does a five minute standup and I'm going to not do it as well as he but nor should I and he says what is this thing with appetites you know you 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 spoiled this one there's another one right behind it you know and if if you realize that that high that total engagement the passion you were feeling was not um a result of anything particular about the person the Conta the context um 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 and I'm going to go do art and um I just don't want to scare anybody um 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 is 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 um and I going know 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 mreal a rembrand uh you know I mean people so different um that it's sinful for people to think they know how things should be so they know who can do it and who can't um as if there's only one way to do whatever it is and I had this experience um and very clear in my mind so I have this painting and um I have this friend who um is an art collector she drinks a little too much she came over for a visit and she saw the painting very early painting of mine and she looks at it just Ellen there's something there this is the important bues now don't go thinking you're rembrand okay which wasn't nice but she 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 but I said and Rembrandt isn't me now I would rather be the very best Ellen Langer than the 500,000th 5 millionth whatever rembrand and when you recognize that um Quality is a decision people are making there is no absolute standard you know if you know anything about art I mean you know let's take even uh the Impressionists for people who pay so much money today they were all rejected in their day um you know when you 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 um in uh what you're doing and uh whether or not it does you're putting yourself on that canvas um and it's great fun it's exhilarating and um you know when somebody you know belittles it um it's strange to me you know where where are those criteria coming from no different from in schools you know I 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 I don't really mean virtually I have to say because I'm an academic right all I believe all of our ills 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 um propagated in um magazines newspapers you know uh taught by our parents taught to each other all that are limiting us and causing the the problems that we keep trying to solve and how easy it would be if we just acknowledge everybody doesn't know something every every body 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 um to presume that every smart person in the world would evaluate that the same way I find distasteful um so constantly you know 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' uh researched an episode of us 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' had um guest lectured in at Stanford it turns out um we have to be careful now I have to be careful with saying things like the best one of the one of the most um 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 of enhancing recall and depth of of consolidation um and I think all of us in at least in this country I'm 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 wi 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 um I said this before that when 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 the real estate that was totally unused the only person who knew that was the lowely Cabana Boy Who nobody is going to ask what his opinion is you know everybody has a perspective that can add to the the you know the larger piece and by having this idea of there are those of us on top we really know you know people expect and I was given this genius award and you know shortly afterwards every time you and you're supposed to be a genius I never claimed the danger of awards that carry things titles like genius or or even Nobel um you know I'm not going to poke at my few friends that happen to have nobels because they've done beautiful work but it's rare that people who get nobels do much after that they become great sources of fundraising for universi so geted um but and I don't thinkone going to AAR for AEL Prize winner here but I this BRS me to this notion of labels not just rankings and performance but labels I mean we labels hide all the ambiguity so if I you know we can use uh 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 um uh 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 but their worlds become very different you know all the ambiguity is hidden we studied this it's the borderline effect as we call it where so imagine let's say you and I take an IQ test and for argument 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 um 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 I no longer think well of myself um and so if you asked me to read certain things I'd probably opt out and so on and in a very short time the difference become 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 say who doesn't have it I'm above or 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 um so we have data supporting that and it's almost just a gonan experiment a thought experiment you know um you know at some point you have to you know put a limit and say you know but but you need to always know that it's made up so you know when 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 you know um anyway so to go back to what you're saying remind you now cuz I'm having the junior moment that labels names of things these categories uh help us organize things but more often or as often um hold things still and um cause problems you know um I did that first study way back when uh called a patient by any other name and um we had uh we made a videotape of a person being interviewed and showed it to therapists who were either U Behavior therapists or fian 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 uh elite elite special operations for a number of years very smart guy very philosophical and he once said to me for reasons that I don't recall uh 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 why are you telling me this right because I pointed out that he was from Special Operations he said you know that he uh and his teammates had a a mode of refreshing their um mindset around particular operations that were because of the division of the military he was in ETC was quite varied it wasn't like they were just sort of doing one type of thing they had to be very adaptive and he said that um they had to completely wipe away this I am component of their vocabulary except as it related to um 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 very interesting way of of thinking about identity how it shapes mindset how it constrains it and opens doors um and converts things into um action and uh or or failure to to execute yeah yeah I I found it very intriguing that you know because here's a guy wouldn't normally think like think of this stuff but it turned out he said that was a very potent tool for them yeah well think that um as soon as you're learning something and if you have your sense of um as if you're going to be the same person over the next 70 years for example uh 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 ten When You're 15 um and now you're 40 you you shouldn't be doing any of it the same way why do you think we get now you're 80 um 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 15year old rather than taking advantage of their positive things that happen as you get older they're not all negative you know that I mean if I'm playing tennis with u I don't know 15-year-old kid um 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 uggles the mind you learn 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 and that's the way you're going to do it for the rest of your life a driving thing just as a not really appropo of anything except in the car that if you're driving on ice what do you do a car starts a skid you're driving on Ice I California you don't pay I know what you don't do you don't slam on the breaks you come off you you slowly come off the gas I've driven on the East Coast a little bit that's exactly wrong Andrew that used to be the case you say so you first 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 Brak and turn into the now that there are antiock brakes the only way the safest way to stop that car is to jam on the breaks so but 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 you know continue that and it becomes very unsafe um I didn't get the memo okay no most people don't that's why I brought it up now uh seeming appropo of almost nothing but um we need to understand that things are changing and pay attention to the way that they're changing and change with it and you know the more you hold yourself you're talking about identity the more you hold yourself still uh the harder that's going to be um you know I I'm I'm much older as most people are than I used to be but I don't have any sense of age I I really don't in fact the other day the other day now means years ago um I was helping uh this woman with something and um 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 um we did some research where um we have people who you know they're accused in the environment that often uh tell us how old we are and those um are not always so good so for example if I at my age I'm in a fancy store and I go to buy um let's say a dress was skirt okay um it would be inappropriate for me to buy a miniskirt and I'm too old to be wearing almost nothing there right um so clothing tells you how old the person is now we did research just archival research with people who wore uniforms so if you're wearing a uniform from the first day you start working you're there 30 years there's no difference okay there's no age relevant CU and in those situations uh are healthier really yeah because they're not getting the cube at 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 now I've discussed on this podcast before that the pases or forever chemicals like Teflon have been linked to major health issues such as endocrine disruption that means hormone disruption gut microbiome disruption fertility issues and many other health problems so it's really important to avoid them this is why I recently fell in love with ourplace products especially one of their cooking pans the titanium always pan pro ourplace products are made with the highest quality materials and are all past and toxin-free they're beautifully designed and function extremely well for all your cooking needs most 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 ourplace products it's nice to look at when sitting on the counter or on the stove for a limited time ourplace is offering an exclusive 20% discount on their Innovative titanium always pan Pro designed to last a lifetime and completely toxin free visit fromourplace decom huberman and use use the code save hubman 20 to claim the offer so if one has parents let's say who are quote unquote slowing down a bit um and they're talking a little bit about some aches and pains and they're and there is a stairwell in the house for instance and 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 lift things or or um or maybe just move into the downstairs do you think that in just thinking about that they're going to accelerate their um their the demise of their locomotor ability I do actually um 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 you pay attention each time you forget and that makes it even worse well I said to my students uh in this health class smart kids at Harvard this is on uh Thursday I teach Tuesday and Thursday I said what was the last thing I said in class on Tuesday nobody remembers I said you must be getting dementia you know all right 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 you get less involved in what you're doing if you're trying to learn something you had the competing uh part of you saying you know that you're not going to remember this and so on and and independent of all of this I think a lot of the loss in memory has nothing to do with memory you know uh there when I was young and and you're introducing me to people I thought it was important for me to remember their names Andre I know doesn't speak well of me 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 after was 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 you're you're um values uh change as you get older then it's not a matter of forgetting when you don't know it in the second place um and I think that and if we turn it around because now I'm doing this because I know you expect it of me and we say what if you remembered everything everything that Terri how would you get through you know you wouldn't get to experience anything new um so forgetting you know uh serves a purpose and um I used to think I never tested this and now I came up with this years 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's really saying anything and so being hard of hearing protects you from a lot of that um you know noise yeah my grandfather us to turn off his he you know I started we I've I've always um had glasses for reading at night when my eyes would get fatigued or or something but recently I I came to my awareness that my vision at a distance is very very sharp I'm like an eagle I can you know read numbers you know you know very far away but Vision my vision up close has been um diminishing I find myself straining a bit more even did so I started wearing you know eyasses have the book further away I should have the book further away but you know I've just have defaulted to eyeglasses and then um but I realized that because I understand the the neuroplasticity of the visual system that I'm certainly accelerating the demise of my near Vision um by wearing glasses and so I'm trying to you know balance the two well 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 given the Snelling ey chart the letter is the Snelling 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 now most of us have trouble around 2third of the way down the chart so um what we did was start the chart a third of the way down so letters are smaller than on top um so now 2/3 of the way down that starting point the letters are really small and what happens is again people can see what they couldn't see before awesome yeah so the idea that your vision has to get worse um I don't uh 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 sooner be able to run away from you if I'm hungry I can see the restaurant sign um 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 uh eye test seems to me you know and again you know we haven't touched on this but it's probably important with respect to Vision it's true with everything you know um in fact I tell people you're wearing glasses um try it without glasses you want to see when you can see and when you can see with almost everything um we again um hold things still when they're varying now what I mean by this is that let's say with vision my guess is that um 11 o'clock in the morning my vision is better than at 7 o'clock at night the data yes okay I me it'd be hard for it night so what does this say that says maybe I should either have uh 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 it an energy bar you're allowed to eat it it's like you take a piece of cake put it in a muffin tin it's called a muffin it's healthier than the piece of cake anyway all that be that as it may um that control a um a great amount of control over our physical well-being comes about by attention to variability which is just a fancy way of talking about mindfulness mindfulness is noticing change that's what it means to be variable all right 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 you know almost blind um where I can't see and when I can see and then you ask yourself why and then it may be the case that um 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 you know 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 um uh things that are supposed to be helpful that we teach ourselves to to need them in ways we otherwise wouldn't and so he did this attention to symptom variability with big diseases so when you have a chronic illness first way most people understand chronic illness is that there's nothing that can be done about it yeah the 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 a little the stock market it's going up it doesn't go up in a straight line goes up down a little up you know and so on all right so when it's better why is it better so we do this um 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 I 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 third or whatever I'm up to um 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 are 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 uh Parkinson's stroke biggies and in each case have very positive results and the good thing about these sorts of things is that there are no negative side effects and it doesn't mean that you have to stop doing any U medical procedures you may be doing but you know 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 is anything all the time so I call you um 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 illen 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 or and certainly there are limits to this if you told me I need to write a thousand pages in five minutes I would there 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 is 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 um until banister broke it you know no one else broke it he broke it lots of people broken it since um and did immediately afterwards so what do you think about this notion of of what's possible in terms of uh pre-ordained human uh decision constraints like no one can break the four-minute mile some breaks the four-minute mile now we we reset to a real a new reality in time and in sort of capability because I 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 um 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 see 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 once you believe it has to be like that then it doesn't occur to you to do anything other than that um but if we start off with the Notions of science that I was talking about before that it's old POS um probability no absolutes then it wouldn't occur to you um to 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 um the use of the scientific method which is what you use in your in your lab and in your research um and why it is that you haven't um it seems challenged the scientific me method itself except at the level of like what hypothesis you're going to test I mean in order to do great science I mean at some point you need St you need statistics you need sample size to be sufficient um you know the the rigor of your studies is as important as the um the originality of the questions you're asking and so it seems that you've you've embraced the scientific method as as it least useful yeah that's 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 um are any more absolute well as I said before that all the answers are probabilities so it's just a language to use um you know the uh counterclockwise study um was criticized because I didn't publish it in a standard Journal because my assumption of um the com you know it's very hard if you're doing something over a week's time to control every possibility and what I was trying to do in that study was uh to show that vision for example can be improved that lots of the things that people presume wired in as you get older it gets worse and worse um that just doesn't have to be that way but um I'm having trouble remembering now because I know that I was going to write a paper taking the whole uh 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 what it it's a good one but I don't um 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 um biology psychology anything you know that our methods can only take us so far and um the people who get beyond that are the people who don't presume that that's as far as you can go you know 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 practice Jewish chemistry which was a little is good a little more is better you which is not the way to 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 uh what it is that led me to to a different way of being um and testing it or just thinking that some of the things that people say just made no sense to me not long ago we went through one of the biggest Public Health crisis of um at least my lifetime and at least two U major controversies arose um one was the extent to which masks should or shouldn't be worn uh and are useful or no the other is about the the so-called vaccines um and this is yeah I think those are beautiful examples because um you know one can make an argument that you should wear masks but the other side also makes sense the way masks were preventing you even non-verbal communication which is very important and important to People's Health right your relationships are not an inconsequential part of your well-being um and um vaccines you know there is no treatment that's going to be good for everybody somebody very close to me uh if given dexadrin puts her to sleep Dex is basically speed exact put you know um 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 masks because we're absolutely certain that masks should be worn there are other arguments to be made why people should wear masks you know or not wear masks or not wear masks you know whatever the case is going to be um and um you know I think it's important that in the medical world you know that I think I gave this talk at one point and I thought I was talking to 5,000 I me 5,000 women with breast cancer and it turned out there were lots and lots of Physicians there if I had known that I I might have spoken a little differently um and scared afterwards I said you oh my goodness because I was not flattering you know I had respect for uh for most of these people um but then I found out 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 uh appreciating other people when they disagree with you and so on and um I don't know how you do that at the higher level um you know government and and so on um but you this is a maybe a silly example but meaningful to me so I spent a lot of time in Mexico and um 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 um you you know so lots of these rules and laws divert attention to as if there's only one thing that matters you know so when you're told to drive 60 miles an hour what does that mean you know um and um 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 are other considerations to how fast you might go you know the the quality of your car the quality of the roads is it raining at the moment um 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 um is an absolute truth yeah and experience matters um 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 Etc and there are other people who are absolutely convinced that the vaccines caused injury um perhaps to them or to people that they know and both sides as it were seem to know a lot about their side their side and so the discussions aren't really discussions yeah because the people that felt that they had a vaccine injury know an immense amount about that injury the context and others who it yeah the people who had a different experience of the vaccines or have a different stance of the covid vaccine know tremendous amount about the statistics and mass of what the general outcomes were as a consequence okay so it's futile right like like it's not a it's not a meaningful discussion and then what ends up Happ 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 there are alternative perspectives um just a very simple a simple change in schools well then I'd like to challengeing idea since that seems to be a challenging assumption my ideas no no 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 to I feel better now at almost 50 than I did in my 20s and psychologically and physically and I felt great then so I I challenge the assumption that we get worse with age yeah no I'm 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 in our thinking I think that um 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 cuz if if you're you know a robot um you know you're not going to be learning anything and getting more set or less set is an irrelevant question but I remember um you know this goes back to um the pancreas you know my 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 I wrote this blog once um long time go where you're 2 years old and you fall and you're screaming bloody murder because you scraped your leg and then you're 7 years old and Johnny or Janie didn't send you a Valentine and you're distress you know distroyed 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 attracted and it goes on and on and at some point this was all kind of silly and you know um 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 um you know that in the example I use um I have the New Yorker is 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 skip first okay okay Level One not reading and those not reading it anymore are very different but they're seen as the Same by the level twos the 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 you say 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 when you know when I was young especially if I'm on an important show like yours Andrew and um we just took a break for a minute and I if I had eaten something and I got a spot on my sweater I'd sit like this no not even realizing how stupid does this look right but that no one should see that I got you know God forbid you're human you you spilled who cares who so I 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 some won't come to class most come then a large majority where two different shoes that look the same you know two different black sneakers that are you know and then you have the Bold where a red and a and a black sneaker that's cool and we talk about 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 can 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 did this in my seminar as well that was in the lecture class um she comes in she say Professor Langer 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 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 you know and when people recognize that everything is sort of in some sense up for grabs you know that none of it really matters um it's so freeing and there's so many ways that we can strict ourselves and to to make it an answer to your question hopefully you get older and you realize that most of this it just doesn't matter um now you can learn that when you're younger all you need to do is recognize that 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 you may dislike me because I'm gullible it's all 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 uh gets in the away sometimes I mean sense of justice can be very important in in society so don't get me wrong but uh for instance recently I had an experience where a news story came out it wasn't about me um but and those are the only ones you read right uh it came out and the the headline was well I'm just going to say what it was that um so and so's home this famous person's home was destroyed in the LA fires had um a description of what it happened 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 4Runner parked in the driveway oh W 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 uh in in addition to that and I realized that was my fault and I realized they're just making up lies like 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 no one's factchecking this 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 way I don't really care but my sense of justice is what frustrated me and as soon as I went but what difference that's kind of funny like like this reporter so desperate for a a story and to capitalize on the the horrible like felt that they needed to do and 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 yeah um sometimes lying sometimes in 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 I and I think as I've hit this like what I hope is a new Vista in my life I'm thinking to myself like wow like we're we're really um obvious like we're so obviously silly like the game I bring up Rick Rubin again he he has this 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 isn't that um 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 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 and so once you start looking yourself it doesn't have to be made up or not um if 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 I realized I was the one being ridiculous I'm upset because of there's some injustice because what because I 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 the I guess it was the the break with my assumption that the traditional media tries to get things right that they at least try and in this case the person clearly didn't even try they they had access to the real information they CH if you say there's something to be learned regardless of whether it's true or not you know I thought you were going someplace else with this my mind wanted to um you I thought you were talking about the tragedy of the fire which um as an example I use in the mindful body to show that um events are not not good bad rather our view of the event is what makes it good or bad and uh 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 um neighbors uh were outside because my house had burned down and um you know which is pretty scary okay um a couple of funny things happened they said uh they were able to save my dogs which that wasn't funny that was Wonder but they couldn't save the parrot parrot I didn't have a par well Roger Brown when he was alive gave me this stuffed parrot that was in CAG okay A K who own parot I was like writing for a moment par okay um so now I stay at a friend's house and the next day I called the um insurance company and um the uh person comes over and he said this was the first time in his 20-year career that the the damage was worse than the call um 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 okay so that the first thing I move into the Charles hotel and I'm a sight to be seing with my two little dogs and um it's Christmas then all the presents coming in you know we're burned all the ones going out you know um it's now Christmas Eve and I go out um 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 Andrew I tell you I could not tell that story for months maybe years without it bringing tears to my eyes it was beautiful every Christmas I'm reminded about 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 um one stuffed parrot no no that I don't remember that until right now no it was kind of fun I was teaching uh going to be teaching you know as soon as school began again a large lecture class and all my notes were burned and so oh my God what am I going to do and so what I did was was I called a student who got an A in the course the year before borrowed her notes and admitted those and U taught the course but and it was the best course I ever taught because um I was not relying on anything that I would then repeat in you know in any absolute I was totally there uh for each lecture um what do you think it is about about hard events that are life-changing that um anchor our our our mindfulness no no I don't think that they necessarily are I think that you know uh if something happens you know um you you should take advantage of it and learn something from it and you know so there's uh data not from my lab or yours um but that people who 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 I've got to start living and uh it's a shame I mean I think most people are sealed and unlive lives and um you know that you need a heart attack to wake you up or somebody else's death you know um my uh postto adviser well all three of my advisers died um suicide cancer cancer um so that the joke is you don't want me to work for you but um but in all ser and I was very very close with the the middle one and but the last one as well um and he died of pancreatic pancreatic cancer as it were and um we did multiple fesh thrifts for him celebrations of life right you know there's like in Academia they can't get enough FES thrifts and this you know and and um I'll never forget Ben getting up his uh the celebration of life in front of all the big ups at Stanford and all these people and editors flew in I mean there were like over 200 people there president of Stanford was there and he said you know if I had um 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 you know died a lot earlier you know um that was the first thing he said and the second thing he said is um you know if I could do it over again you know one of these if I could do it over again things he said um 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 I interviewed him for hours even before I had a podcast uh yeah I don't think people he knew to I don't think it's really death that they're afraid of they're afraid of pain yeah and that um you know and having no control at that moment uh uh the old people I know and studying this for so long I know lots of uh very old people um none of them seem to be afraid of death in fact I ended my counterclockwise book with uh a conversation I was having with um a friend who was 90s something and she said you know Ellen I'm not afraid of dying but living is such fun and I think that that's the way most of us should be um but there's something I wanted to say that uh we touched on before and I don't think um 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 um you know um 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 seem infrequent and uh 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 an everyday occurrence of course the more frequent it is the more likely and then you know um but when I think about us spontaneous remissions and I personally think that they're much more common than um the medical world was likely to believe you know once you're in a hospital life is very different from the way um 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 uh the attention that's given to it the uh degree to which Things become self-fulfilling prophecies you know I think that um 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 uh a death sentence um you 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 um these super agers the people that fall into that Cate I hate I hate that you know I'm I'm sure super memorizers 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 and I don't think that there's any evidence for that yeah well I align with you on that stance I mean um I use the name um only because they're sometimes referenced as as such but uh a focus of the podcast recently has been to emphasize that in that group and others um 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 into later age and it's ROP it's roped into excuse me neurally it is roped into it's linked up with the dopamine reward circuitry and other circuitries in a way that ties it some somewhat to this notion of the will to live being um related to the uh embracing new learnings or at least new challenges you know that there was um uh a story way back when um so there is this um mental facility and people are on what's you their vernacular 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 W 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 I've always been bothered by that title sorry for anyone that's been um treated there and had a great experience because it I imagine it's a great hospital did you read the mindful body I talk about a mindful Hospital which would be different from uh the ground up and now now trying to uh in uh in Mexico um Canada and so and in the states Minnesota uh trying to put up at least start with a mindful emergency Ward and then become a whole mindful Hospital should be very different 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 no I mean no only walking out yeah no but and I believe that stress is by far the major killer it's a very extreme position Andrew I 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 um 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 give them three weeks to adjust to it then we measure this stress level every 3 4 weeks I believe the stress level will predict the course of the disease over and above nutrition genetics and treatment um and stress is psychological which takes me back to how all of this can be controlled um by our minds but anyway so you go to a hospital the first thing you are is stressed uh you have the people working in the hospital especially during Co but it was always the case suffer an enormous amount of burnout well what is burnout you don't get burn out 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 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 being fed and um my neurons are firing and I'm not going to burn out we have lots of simple things so when I was talking to aula one day who did some wonderful work on checklists and you know the uh in surgery for instance if they have a checklist there are many fewer errors that are made but uh he had just you know sent the last draft to the Publishers so he wasn't going to be able to change it I said 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 any livestock no do you have any fruits and vegetables you answer three of these and you don't answer any of the other you just know it's no no no all the way down the list so a checklist um and even the checklist and Aviation you know the pilot to uh co-pilot pil flaps up um uh throttle open anti ice off it becomes mindless so remember the plane that um was going from the air Florida flight going from Florida to Washington DC so that's one warm climate to another warm climate and they got flaps up throttle open anti ice off but there was uh snow in DC an unusual event the plane crashed because the deiser was turned off and people were killed and the point of it is that a check a checklist well better than no checklist there's a better than better way we talk a lot about that in in the mindful body that the checklist needs to be a mindful checklist so not um 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 um how much liquid can you see you know so not yes no going Beyond yes no and the where you can only answer the question if you're actually looking at the person so then you're noticing now 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 um powers of observation asking questions depth as opposed to speed yeah um these seem to be the the kind of basic Contour yeah 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 um you think they're losing it they're forgetting now if you think they're forgetting uh 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 the only time you're paying attention is when they're forgetting so you've not attended to all the times they're remembering so the uh the problem seems worse but if you were in fact attending to when are they misremembering what are the circumstances you and you catch it early you say that the person doesn't forget everything they forget I don't know uh questions about restaurants for example well then you know probably they don't care I'm going to be happy I'm an eater I'm going to be happy wherever we go and so unless we're going to someplace that's phenomenally expensive or we have to travel a great you know whether we went to restaurant a b or c I might not remember for you since you're very Discerning you know 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 catchall and are missing all of the subtleties that in fact would lead to different diagnosis and so if the this you know the same thing in the um 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 uh I had a student uh many years ago who had um Ms and when somebody would ask her how she is she's great you know and then one person then said but how could you be gracious my arms work my head is working you know and went through all the parts of her um that are not suffering you know so you can always attend to what's wrong you can't attend to everything you know playing tennis you could attend to the wonderful shots you made you can attend to the false um you know uh and that's going to lead to very different states right if I attend to every time I I hit that ball in a way I didn't think I could hit I'm going to learn something from it and be motivated to try it again if I attend to every time I screwed up I'm going to you know be embarrassed I'm going to be afraid to um to expand uh and experience new things um I feel like um I've just combined 12 different areas here masterfully and masterfully 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 burn down well you know who knows what newness that will bring these kinds of things um 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 someone give me that answer which 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 experience through you um and um provides opportunities I can certainly adopt that I 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 uh degrees of freedom over how to respond that itself can feel a bit overwhelming of course you know so when Eric FR 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 and when you recognize that they're all equal it just doesn't matter it's easy to choose then so it's Choose Your Own Adventure exactly yeah and then or make whatever you're doing in adventure you know if I can't be near the one I love I should love the one I'm near at one time that was considered uh okay nowadays well nowadays there are a couple things that are more complicated I would I would argue one earlier you mentioned codling of people that are you know uh aged elderly I hate that word now that I'm 77 well you are no one would guess that you're uh that you're 77 and um yeah your Your vitality is undeniable this notion of coddling you know Jonathan height wrote the coddling of 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 um and the idea that you know if you meet five out of 10 of the the you know menu of criteria that you are you might even be this thing you are blank as opposed to just having blank or struggling with everything is yeah yeah and um we certainly over uh prescribe medication in this country uh compar certainly compared to other countries you know the vast amount of anti-depressant and anti medication is consumed in the United States um and certainly those medications can be valuable for people uh I would argue um but they are over prescribed I would also argue so my question is if one grows up being told that they are fragile that um there's threat everywhere or even that there's threat everywhere on social media let's just like push into that um into that dent a little bit too because that's um uh Jonathan's idea uh 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 uh landscape and it's just me who's not capable of it and so I'm going to decide that she's that it's that she's struggling but maybe kids aren't getting enough physical activity one could argue but um on the basis of of data but do you see where I'm going here when when one can kind of pivot to different lenses to look at something through it it increases the the number of options but then at some point we have to decide are we codling our kids too much or are we or are we not coddling them too much um it reminds me of an argument um back I guess when I was your age and the question was um uh violence on TV and we're kids being exposed to this violence becoming more violent and I never quite understood it because um if you were my child and we were sitting there watching this violence I go oh and you would see that my reaction to it was negative and you'd learn um not to engage in that or to recognize you know on the effects on other people what I'm saying is that you know rather than the medium being the message um the medium 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're used mindlessly you know they're not good um and so um I I think it's silly I you know there's data showing that kids who are um uh college kids for example who use a lot of social media have lower self-esteem and all of 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 you're Harvard students for God's sakes why is it that you're only going to post the picture where you look the prettiest talk about the you know 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 uh or the mistaken assumption when you see um all of the the successes that that's the the more General truth everybody but you is having these successes um well certain yeah certainly um social media gives it a literal score for followers and likes and 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 um very robustly whereas but if people learn the three levels that I was explaining before um then you'd see that what looks like is not good in fact maybe quite something you know you have um people who are poor and uh 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 you know I had this um editor uh for mindfulness wonderful woman um she's recently dead died and um the first time we went out um 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 as supposed to that company and I'll never forget this we go for this meal and she looked poor so I I didn't eat anything you know 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 uh so that's the the level three where you have so much you hide it and you know well 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 um with credit that changed yeah um and I have friends who like to wear very very fancy watches I also have friends who um have far more money than them and uh choose to wear no watch so it's it's getting harder to discern um except at the extremes of course it's getting harder to discern who has what and and maybe that's a good thing again at the extremes it's obvious you know that the homeless issue in in Los Angeles and everywhere in California is so it's so troubling and so sad um 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 and um but people could be asked at any stage why is somebody you know dressed 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 and that meaning and that's what you want things to be obscured you don't want to be pigeon hold um 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 um that's a waste I 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 and one's environment could um potentiate longevity so my I have these lyrics in the books a friend of mind Zoe Lewis wonderful Entertainer and she sings a song that I just love you're never too old to be young um and um 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 but 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 um I think who knows what's going to happen eventually I feel lucky that enjoy exercise and always have but if I didn't I don't know um you get yourself yeah I don't like exercise that's exercise you know so I was telling somebody the story actually uh just yesterday so I was visiting friends many many years ago in buau beach and they said in the morning let's go to Captain Jack I'm thinking Captain Jack is going to be breakfast and I'm thinking I'm going to have a big breakfast why not we take a long walk to get there and you know I'm very excited so we get down to the beach and we're walking to Captain Jack and then there's this stick in the sand that says on it Captain Jack all it is was the end point to our walk you know well for me uh if I had known the walk was just for the walk I probably would have enjoyed it much less you know that um if I'm in Paris and shopping Window Shop you 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 um you know uh activities that are meant to be fun and that are easy to engage in are fun um are uh will be good for you and if you see it as exercise if you're doing it for some other reason um it's a shame because even the exercise for exercise sake should me I won't do it if it isn't fun I don't know if that's a privilege position but um 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 be fun well that's a great skill I was talking to my mom last night and she was um saying you know not much is happening here and I kept saying no like tell me what are you guys up to had been a while and she said well I don't have this like big exciting life you know and I said what 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 that has these little yellow flowers and my mom loves gardening and so 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 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 or the incredible breeds of dogs that I'm considering getting maybe all of them um 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 it represented a a really good bridge to a number of things I have to say that um we were talking earlier about how one frames past present and future I don't know if we were talking about it in that way but in think about age longevity um and what's possible the word that came to mind that I'd like to just pressure test a little bit is uh 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 uh 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 what a and I thought to myself what a Terri question School reunions and I thought well no If all we're going to do is uh you know uh Embrace Nostalgia yes if it makes us feel like we're 19 again exactly um this kind of thing and and here you can substitute reunions with should I look at photo albums yeah like like I I don't know how I feel about photos from the past I used to collect them and and and and cherish them and now sometimes when I look at them it just makes me long for something and I'm trying I think I need to learn how to Pivot through that so what what's your what are your thoughts on Nostalgia and just Notions of how we think about our past in general well they're I don't think they're very different from what you've already covered um in that fire I lost all the photos and um it didn't occur to me that I had lost all of them for years because um I didn't look at them here you know so could help a lot a lot of that so it's very true um I think um you know when I was young some of my friends uh um were keeping a diary and I never kept a diary and so then my feeling was I'd rather just be living than 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 and if I say to you that if you're cleaning a toilet that the distinctions you're drawing are no better or worse than if you're um trying to come up with a theory of relativity or understand Einstein's theory of relativity a distinction is a distinction is a distinction um and so that's why these little little things that you're noticing your mother's weed um is no less important although she thought you might see it as less important than you're having just INF in you know uh interviewed somebody that she thought was phenomenal um 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 um without the stress overlay that some people add to their lives which I can't understand um it's no different from a game you know I I use this example and I think that my students must think I'm crazy um and I so if I believe that I should come up with a different example but you 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 uh not there you're flossing but your mind is thinking about um a party you're going to go to for example to me make it fun it so easy I mean you play little games like can I predict how much junk is going to come out as a you know and and which teeth which part you know everything can be made into a game um I had this you can maybe figure out how to bring this product to Market but um it was called I I have so many of these it's called Wego a way of training your child to use the toilet and so it it's not very hard uh we'd sell you could sell them these little vials of chemicals that when you add it a few drops to urine it changes color but so each of these vials will change the color uh to a different color adults 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 um gamifying um things is one of the the great pleasures of parenting yeah you know and earlier you were talking about what what are your grand uh grandkids call you you're the uh Cosmic leader Cosmic leader like you can play these games with them um that and then they reach their uh adolescent in teen years and they then they 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 played with me when I was little because it brings me back to the Notions of of of imagination yeah no um I think that uh one of the worst things that the world uh 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've I mean I've never taken one so yeah no 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 L and that's a shame um 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 um and for people that say well that's a luxury I need to work in order to survive and and feed my family Etc how does one reconcile that um well then learn how to make it fun you know that um anything can be made fun just you make it a game you try to figure out guess what's going to happen see the 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 not related to your work but you get down on all fours and see the world that your cat or your dog sees um you know close the lights and see what it's like being blind um try to get through the day without hearing I I I wanted to do this thing 50 years ago which was to create a a building that simulated um old age and so if you took the 50-year-old and they spent even a short time in that building where um it's colder than usual because there's less oxygen in your blood you feel theis Vision Narrows you um that they would expand each of their abilities um 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 you've done some studies on healing and time perception could you just describe that experiment I love this paper I love this experiment so much Peter and I did this my graduate student um we inflict a wound now it would have been more dramatic if we could really cut you up but we're not satus and even if we were the review committees wouldn't let us 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 it's 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 now when you add that to some of the things that we've already said um you end up with a very different picture and you broke her arm 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 a ridiculous question lots of people have broken arms you know even if this were 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 it's 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 faster than others the fastest healing time that I personally know of is you know let's say two weeks um you know and you know if you can heal faster than that or that been good for you and if not you know um it's fine also because there are advantages to not healing that people don't realize you know if you broken your right arm uh 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 uh which is going to be good for many tests um I don't know how we ended up right-handed or left-handed I'm are you ambidextrous I'm right-handed um I I'll occasionally uh go into hook righty but I'm I'm I'm a righty my dad was naturally left-handed they forced him to be right-handed oh interesting because I'm sort of ambid exress mostly rightand 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 and this is really interesting because not just using so this work with was begun gosh I 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 wrer 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 oh this fits so beautifully I don't want to um spend too much time on this but I'm and you're probably aware of these experiments but just for sake of our listeners um that you probably know that your colleagues at at Harvard uh David hu and and Toren of visel won the Nobel Prize for brain plasticity critical periods of vision Etc and they had this sort of doctrine that um 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 adult humans that it literally shut down Mike merenik and a guy named Greg recken Z at UCSF did these beautiful studies I'll try and describe this really quickly but um where they would have their subjects pay attention to uh little um uh bumps on a rotating drum of different coarseness or finess and then there was a tone playing in the room and if they were told to discriminate uh when the the bumps were changed from course to just slightly less course or more course they they the subject would signal okay that happened and then over time the the area of the brain response for touch in in adults expanded the the the the map of that so adult plasticity what 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 it didn't matter what they were doing with their fingers the auditory cortex changed and the and the somata sensory the touch uh map didn't and so it's proof positive that it's not just a behavior in adulthood but the combination behavior and awareness of what of the shift in in perception that drives adult plasticity um and I find those studies to be well first of all they aren't discussed enough um that that feature isn't discussed enough and second of all it basically says that awareness is the gate to Brain Change sure and I and I think that fits perfectly with everything that you've been talking about yeah I don't see how it could be otherwise actually yeah but you know to go back to the doctor telling you how long it's going to heal it tends to be now a self-fulfilling prophecy so given that doctors have this influence over us they need to be more responsible in the information they're given and we we can't know how long it's going to take to heal um people today are 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 are these Norms derived in fact whenever I speak to anybody I get lots of calls from people who were given these dread diagnosis and you 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 is a lot a lot of things happening and always with the intention of getting people uh to be less uh absolute in their understanding of any of this so that they can imagine all sorts of possibilities but you know even the thing that I just said a moment before that it's important for people to realize the advantage in using their um 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 um 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 I 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 a tomato and you know it's a lot of years you I've seen and done a lot of things but for me to remember that and that um 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 you know hurt my right arm I'm playing tennis poorly but I'm still playing with my left hand um we have such a deficit model of life and this also fits with the conoman stuff right that you know people will work much harder to avoid a loss than they will for a gain and it seems to be 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 transcend you've transcended the typical notion whether I've transcended or not I just think differently and but everybody accepts that and to see the gain in the so-called loss or the loss in the so-called gain um you know you just end up with a very different world you know well I'm not as involved in that aspect um 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 can do cuz that's the way I talk sometimes is to create a long Arc of um positive feedback loops when something good happens but that when something negative happens let yourself feel it acutely and then move on Fast and like so if I were to plot this it would it would basically be like an accepted paper will Delight me and motivate me for many many months if not years but a a rejection or or a tough revision where it's where 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 sages in the sky all KN people they're just a group of people a group of people with different biases and so on um and um you know it doesn't mean you were wrong yeah and reviews I learned from my postto adviser and I love this is he he us to say reviews always make papers better even if you hate them they always make papers better they never make papers worse sometimes they make papers a little bit harder to track because like there's this weird figure put in just to satisfy a reviewer kind like what is this but everyone eventually realized what that figure is about anyway um and so I I adopted the idea that reviews red ink critical feedback are just way of getting better which has also been essential in the podcasting sphere CU 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 humanness and move forward you know correct it and move forward but I think a lot of people try and maintain this ER of perfection like there's some sort of fabri egg that instead of living life like a work of art where it has dimples and cracks and acne and and all the rest and it's human I think a lot of people um want to present themselves to the world like a Fab egg like that's just absolutely but the problem with that is going out the next day you can be that fa ache on day one but now you've got to maintain that I mean the first paper that I published um came back without a comment without a comment not a correction not a typo what a dangerous thing to happen exactly it was awful yeah that was not my experience well set me up for you know expectations what do you mean when for the next one um but I think also that it's um once you recognize that uh this is an opinion rather than a statement of fact you know and then when you uh what I tell my students is that when you get a comment it doesn't mean that the comment is right it means that whatever you wrote 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 um you know papers that are not accepted today may be accepted tomorrow the same paper I mean I you know I I can't tell you how many times people say can't be and then it becomes the standard you know um you mean in terms of a field and what's what's acceptable yeah yeah things have certainly changed and look you you've done a tremendous amount to pioner that change I mean I it's not one study or 10 study or 20 studies I mean there's now a catalog of incredibly groundbreaking work that you've um I don't know if you used intentionally or you 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 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 um because it I think capture 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 and I used to attached 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 right you're not you're not you're not drifting off from yourself you're you're remaining you know of of self and but taking on other perspectives and um 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 what could be true and really challenging preconceived notions um it seems very powerful do you believe in Enlightenment and was the description I just gave anything like what no I'm very flattered um you know I think that when you're walking around and you don't see and all of a sudden you see you you can say that you're enlightened um I 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 um you don't have a students and and uh failing students everything just organizes itself differently and you come to appreciate the individual talents that people have um and when you can do that I don't know if you want to call the person enlightened but life just um is easier um and and nicer you know it's nicer to walk outside and be trusting of people and um 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 um I had left my pocketbook over here wherever that is you can see and we walked over here and for whatever reason and I said I left my pocketbook over there and then I thought you know so was if somebody takes it they probably need it more than I do and it was so freeing um 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 um you know that that little song uh feeling that let me sing I enjoy S I can't carry a tune so what um why should somebody make me feel bad about singing and maybe I'll 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 uh inadequacy why why are people evaluating themselves at every moment um 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 um I don't believe that uh 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 uh you know those of us who are academics where every minute you're given a grade and even you know the number of papers you got accepted you know determines your pecking order and so on it's all so silly you know and then you have the money people and I have2 billion dollar you know so I'm better off than people I'm a better person than people have 10 billion dollars um 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 likable why not um 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 uh in the form of scientific findings which are then uh shared with people through books and through podcasts and I'm just so grateful that you came here today to share with us this is really uh as vast as it's been um you know just a subset of the of the discoveries that you've made so you know a couple of things um first of all thank you for coming here today it's been my pleasure I I've thoroughly enjoyed this and uh 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 know so many other people think differently about everything I mean very very few discussions that I'll hold uh will make me rethink my thinking about everything this one certainly will um and and also for continuing to do the work that you're doing I mean it's uh it's clear that you embody and live the the discoveries that you make and and it's not just uh an academic Pursuit that then you know allows you to collect all the appropriately collect all the amazing Awards and um and titles but that it really serves and and that you live it so thank you for that as well and then um two more questions um very briefly the first one is uh would doesn't matter how long the question is it's the answer that matters right so you ask me the brief question the floor is yours but uh would you consider coming back um again to share with us uh some additional findings is the second to last question and then I'm just thinking that um maybe the last question is uh so that it sticks in people's minds um would you be willing to share the [Laughter] song Oh 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 Le right everybody doesn't know something but everyone knows something else everyone can't 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 no 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 and or enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's a terrific zeroc cost way to support us in addition please click follow for the podcast on both Spotify and apple and on both Spotify and apple you can leave us up to a five-star review if you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics you'd like me to consider for the huberman Lab podcast please put those in the comment section on YouTube I do read all the comments please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode that's the best way to support this podcast for those of you that haven't heard I have a new book coming out it's my very first book it's entitled protocols an operating manual for the human body this is a book that I've been working on for more than 5 years and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience and it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to Stress Control protocols related to focus and motivation and of course I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included the book is now available by pre-sale at protocols book.com there you can find links to various vendors you can pick the one that you like best again the book is called protocols an operating manual for the human body if you're not already following me on social media I am huberman lab on all social media platforms so that's Instagram X formerly known as Twitter Facebook LinkedIn and threads and on all those platforms I discuss science and science related tools some of which overlaps with the content of the huberman Lab podcast but much of which is distinct from the content on the hubman Lab podcast again that's huberman lab on all social 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