In this interview I speak to Ellen J. Langer, Harvard’s first tenured female psychology professor and a trailblazer in social psychology, who has spent over 45 years upending assumptions about the human mind.
Known for her groundbreaking “counterclockwise” study—where elderly men reversed signs of aging by living as their younger selves—she challenges the rigid dualism of mind and body. Her latest work, The Mindful Body, builds on this legacy, showing how perception can accelerate healing or sharpen cognition, as evidenced in experiments with rigged clocks and sleep labs. In this compelling interview, Langer redefines mindfulness—not as meditative retreat, but as a vibrant, practical embrace of uncertainty. With disarming insight, she dismantles certainties (1+1 isn’t always 2) and champions “confident uncertainty” as a path to resilience and joy. Her research, spanning decades and earning her accolades like the Guggenheim Fellowship, reveals mindfulness as a tool for vitality—neurons firing, lives enlivened. As the world grapples with complexity, Langer’s ideas, honed through seminal studies like the chambermaid experiment on the nocebo effect, offer a radical yet accessible shift: notice more, fear less. This conversation promises not just intellectual rigour but a tantalising glimpse into a freer, more dynamic way of being.
Q: What is mindfulness?
[Ellen J. Langer]: A couple of years ago, I gave a talk, and around the corner from the venue was a restaurant called The Mindful Burger. So, let’s start with definitions! When people hear the word mindfulness, they often think of meditation. Meditation is fine, but it’s not mindfulness. It’s a practice you engage in, hopefully leading to post-meditative mindfulness. But the mindfulness we study is very different—it’s not a practice, it’s a way of being.
At its core, mindfulness stems from a simple yet challenging idea: uncertainty is the rule. We don’t actually know anything for sure. When we believe we do, we stop paying attention. But when we recognize that we don’t know, we tune in. There are two ways to cultivate mindfulness as we study it. One is top-down: accepting that uncertainty is the rule, not the exception. This naturally leads to noticing more, which keeps us in the present, makes us sensitive to context, and allows us to recognise opportunities and avoid unseen dangers.
The other way is bottom-up, and it leads to the same place. This involves taking things we think we know and actively noticing new aspects of them. For example, step outside—something you’ve done every day for as long as you can remember—and find three new things. Keep doing this, and you’ll realize you didn’t know your surroundings as well as you thought. You can also try this with a spouse or long-time partner. After 10, 20 years together, everything can feel like “same old, same old,” but in reality, people are constantly changing. Everything is. We just tend to hold things still in our minds, confusing the stability of our mindset with the stability of reality. But reality is not still.
People struggle with uncertainty because they feel like they should know. I want to free everyone from that misconception. You can’t know everything. And when you shift from a personal attribution for not knowing—thinking, “I don’t know, but everyone else seems to, so I’ll fake it or avoid the situation”—to a universal attribution—realizing, “I don’t know, you don’t know, nobody knows”—you stand taller. This allows you to embrace what I believe is the most successful mindset: confident uncertainty. Right now, people mistakenly conflate confidence with certainty, but they are not the same.
To demonstrate this, I do an exercise in my talks to show people they don’t know as much as they think. I take something everyone assumes they understand—simple arithmetic. How much is 1+1? Most would say 2. But that’s not always true. In a base-10 number system, yes, 1+1 equals 2. But in a base-2 system, it’s written as 10. Most people don’t even realize there are different number systems. And in the real world? If you take one pile of laundry and add another, you still have one pile. One wad of chewing gum plus another makes one bigger wad. Clouds combine into one. So, outside of abstract math, 1+1 often doesn’t equal 2.
Why does this matter? Because when you’re mindless—assuming 1+1 is always 2—you don’t notice context, and you don’t have choices. But when you’re mindful, you do. If someone asks you how much 1+1 is, you get to decide: do I answer 1, 2, 10, or something else? You become aware, engaged, and flexible.
And here’s the best part: mindfulness is fun. Have you ever seen a happy robot? Hollywood may depict them, but in reality, robots aren’t happy or unhappy—they’re just machines. The last thing we want is to live like machines. Our research over the past 45+ years shows that when you’re actively noticing, your neurons are firing, and that’s literally and figuratively enlivening. And what do we do when we’re having fun? We notice, we engage. So mindfulness is not just beneficial—it’s enjoyable.
And it’s easy. What could be better?
Q: Why are we so uncomfortable with not knowing?
[Ellen J. Langer]: Part of the reason for this is that we’re raised in a world where things are categorised as good or bad. We’re taught to avoid the bad and strive for the good. But in reality, things aren’t inherently good or bad—it’s our minds that assign those labels.
Once you recognise that, you can take any situation and interpret it in a way that makes it enjoyable. You no longer have to chase after certain outcomes or fear others. Whatever happens, happens.
For example, we’re talking now, and if the internet suddenly goes out—so what? I’ll go have lunch. It just doesn’t matter.
When you understand that your perception shapes your experience, you stop fearing uncertainty. The fear of ‘not knowing’ comes from the worry that something bad might happen. But if things aren’t inherently good or bad, then not knowing isn’t something to be afraid of.
Q: Is this connected to a lack of spirituality, faith & belief?
[Ellen J. Langer]: Well, I think those are three different things. When people talk about being spiritual, they often mean being kind, connected, and open to experience—all of which naturally follow from being mindful. Faith is fine, but if you’re mindful, you don’t necessarily need it. You can still have faith, of course, but you don’t have to rely on a higher power to make your life okay. The control comes back to you as an individual.
Q: What are your views on the mind/body connection?
[Ellen J. Langer]: Descartes gave us mind-body dualism, and most people accept it without questioning. But when I thought about it, I paused—wait a second. We all have experiences where the mind influences the body. One example I probably overuse: you’re walking down the street, a leaf blows into your face, and suddenly your blood pressure and pulse spike—until you realize, oh, it’s just a leaf. We all know this happens.
The real question is: how do we get from an immaterial mind to a material body? We can’t explain that. Since 1979, I’ve been writing and speaking about mind-body dualism. It takes time for ideas to make their way into common thinking. The interim step people take is talking about a “mind-body connection.” But that’s just as problematic—how exactly are they connected? How do you link something immaterial to something material? These are just words. Don’t print this, but we could have said “mind, body, and elbows,” and it wouldn’t have changed anything. So I thought: let’s eliminate the artificial divide. If we treat the mind and body as one unit, then wherever we put the mind, we necessarily put the body—and that opens up enormous possibilities for control.
That realisation led to many experiments on mind-body unity. Take the earliest one—the counterclockwise study. We created a retreat designed to look and feel as if it were 20 years in the past. Elderly men lived there, acting as though they were their younger selves, speaking about past events as if they were unfolding in real time. Without medical intervention, long practice, or significant effort, within a week their hearing and vision improved, their strength increased, their memory sharpened, and they even looked noticeably younger.
Since then, we’ve done many studies confirming the same findings, as I report in The Mindful Body. One of the most recent: we inflicted a minor wound on participants and placed them in front of rigged clocks. For one-third, the clock ran twice as fast; for another third, it ran half as fast; for the last third, it showed real time. Most people assume a wound heals at its natural pace. But no—it healed according to perceived time. If the clock ran faster, the wound healed faster. If it ran slower, healing slowed.
Another study in a sleep lab showed similar results. Participants woke up believing they had slept two hours more, two hours less, or exactly the time they had. Their biological and cognitive functions aligned with their perceived sleep, not their actual sleep.
Then there was the chambermaid study—essentially a study on the nocebo effect. Most people know about the placebo effect: you take a sugar pill, believe it’s medicine, and get better. Placebos are one of the strongest indications of mind-body unity—you’re not ingesting anything useful, yet most ailments improve. A nocebo is the opposite: you take something real, but your beliefs strip away its benefits. In this study, chambermaids engaged in rigorous physical work all day, yet they didn’t think of it as exercise. When we reframed their mindset—making them aware their work was exercise—they lost weight and saw improvements in their health, despite no change in behaviour.
I first became aware of mind-body unity through personal experiences. One example: as a newlywed in Paris, I ordered a mixed grill, which included pancreas. I asked my then-husband which piece was the pancreas, and he pointed to something on my plate. I ate everything else first, dreading the moment I’d have to eat it. When I finally did, I immediately felt sick. My husband started laughing—turns out, I had eaten the pancreas long before and what I reacted to was just chicken. I had literally made myself sick through belief alone.
A more profound case: my mother had breast cancer that metastasised to her pancreas—another pancreas story. Then, almost magically, it was gone. Either she had healed herself, or I had made myself sick. I believe both happened, and both were due to the power of the mind.
Q: How can we reconnect our mind and body?
[Ellen J. Langer]: It’s interesting. In the book, I talk about three levels, and this is an instance of that. There are people who, when you tell them their minds can do these things, they simply accept it and let their minds go. Then there’s the next level—people who resist and say, “No, the mind doesn’t work that way.” And finally, there’s the highest level, those who come to truly understand that it does. Some people buy into it immediately, some fight it, and others come to deeply grasp it.
I remember an article—not for publication, necessarily, but you can if you want. Back in 2016, I was the cover story for The New York Times Magazine. Getting the editor on board was a challenge. They always want to frame things as “How does X affect Y?” But when you ask, “How does affecting Ellen affect Ellen?” it becomes a ridiculous question. It was hard to get them to see that everything is happening at once.
People sometimes misunderstand me. I’m certainly not suggesting that nothing is happening internally—what my colleagues might call “under the hood.” What I am saying is that whatever’s happening is happening simultaneously. When I raise my hand, my head is different, every organ in my body is different—I don’t see how it could be otherwise. But it’s not a chain reaction of “this affects that, and that affects the next thing.” It’s all happening together.
Wait—what question was I answering? Oh, right, how do we get people to accept this?
I think people who are steeped in mind-body dualism weren’t taught mind-body unity. It’s not like they took classes in it and rejected it—it just wasn’t part of the culture. The goal, then, is to teach people the importance of the mind.
Now, let’s talk about placebos—perhaps our most effective medication. Why do they get such a bad rap? Placebos are incredibly powerful, yet people resist the idea. If someone’s in pain and then the pain stops, they often refuse to believe a placebo was responsible. They can’t wrap their heads around it.
I don’t have data on this, but logically, consider the pharmaceutical industry. If I’m a big company trying to bring a drug to market, my drug has to outperform the placebo. If the placebo works just as well—or better—I stand to lose millions, even billions of dollars. So, of course, I’m not exactly rooting for placebos. And then you have the medical profession, trained only in the body. It’s hard to go against what you’ve been explicitly taught for seven years.
But we are making progress. Even the shift from mind-body dualism to mind-body connection—though it doesn’t go far enough—is a step. What they’re really saying is, “Okay, the mind can influence the body.” My work is about showing just how much it can.
So many of the things people think they can’t do are really just a result of mindlessness. The truth is, you can never know you can’t. An experiment can be set up to test whether, under certain conditions, you can do something. If you fail, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible—just that it didn’t happen in that moment. Can I jump six feet high? If I eat my Wheaties and try, but don’t make it, that doesn’t prove the human body can’t do it. Since you can never prove you can’t, it’s better to assume maybe you can.
People also have this strange obsession with 100% success. They want perfection, but they don’t realize they have a choice: they can be perfectly mindless or imperfectly mindful.
Here’s an example I’ve overused, but it makes the point. As a kid in an elevator, you couldn’t reach the button. Then, one day, a parent picks you up, and you press it—exciting! Later, you grow taller and can press it yourself—still fun. But once you’re an adult, how often do you feel excitement pressing an elevator button? Never. Zero times. Because the thrill was in learning, not in knowing. Too many people think that once they’ve learned something, they’ve got it. They don’t realize that everything is always changing, and if they don’t stay aware, they become mindless.
Here’s another example. I was on a podcast yesterday, and the host was from Detroit—someplace where it gets cold. I asked, “If your car starts to skid on ice, what do you do?” He said, “You gently pump the brakes.” That’s what we were all taught for safety. But for decades now, cars have had anti-lock brakes, and the safest thing to do is actually to firmly hit the brake. The lesson? What once kept you safe may now be dangerous.
Everything is changing. When we recognise that, everything becomes new. Everything becomes exciting.
Q: Can art help us rebuild the mind/body connection?
[Ellen J. Langer]: If you start painting and believe you can’t do it well—and that makes you feel worthless—the painting won’t heal you. But what’s interesting about art is that people tend to have a looser criterion for excellence. They might say, “I don’t know if it’s good, but I know whether I like it or not.” That kind of thing.
Even with that subjectivity, I paint, and some people love my work, while others don’t. And those who don’t? They can be rude! Because they still believe in an absolute standard of good and bad, independent of individual perspective. I think I mentioned this in my book On Becoming an Artist—how many famous people and works of art were initially rejected. I don’t remember all the examples, but I do know that Impressionist paintings, which now sell for millions, were once dismissed.
My argument is that we should all go back to our two- or three-year-old selves and keep asking, Who says so? Where does this come from? Because when you understand that everything around you was put there by people—people with biases, people who are different or similar to you—you start to see how much is just human construction. The more different someone is from you, the more important it is to recognise that what they consider “true” is just one perspective.
People often assume things are the way they are because they were meant to be. Let me give an example—though help me come up with a better one! In one of my classes, I once put on the board: This is the first gay pride parade. It started here and followed this route. Then I asked my students, Why? And they gave these logical answers: maximum visibility, maximum safety, optimal logistics. But no—the truth is, my friend started it, and she happened to be in one spot and had to deliver a package to someone at another. That’s it! The point is, we assume that everything was intentionally designed when, in reality, much of it is arbitrary. And once we recognize that, it’s easier to change things.
Take tennis, for example. When I play doubles, I serve, and then I have a second serve—but it’s a weak one because I don’t want to double fault. If I ruled the world, we’d have three serves. The first one? I’d go all out. If it didn’t go in, I’d go all out again, learning something in the process. And then, I’d still have my backup third serve. The gods didn’t hand us the rules of tennis! Of course, we need consistent rules for tournaments, but as individual players, we need to understand that these rules aren’t divine law—they’re customs. If we played with three serves, my game would be much better!
Let me tell you, Vikas, when I give talks in person, I like to ask if there’s anyone in the audience who’s 6’5”. And there always is—tall men seem to gravitate toward me, I don’t know why! So, this 6’5” guy comes on stage, and here I am, 5’3”. We look ridiculous standing next to each other. Then I ask: Should we do anything physical in exactly the same way? One of us is not getting our needs met.
What I’m trying to teach people is that the more different you are from the person who created a rule, an instruction, or a tradition, the more important it is not to follow it mindlessly. Find your own way.
And that brings us back to art! Art has that flexibility built in. One of my early paintings—well, I had a friend who drinks too much, and she’s a serious art collector. She came over, saw my painting, and said, “Ellen, there’s something there.” Then, under the influence of alcohol, she added, “But don’t go thinking you’re Rembrandt!”
And I thought to myself, And Rembrandt isn’t me.
If I’m the most authentic Ellen Langer I can be, then no one can do me better. I’d rather be the best Ellen Langer than the millionth imitation of Rembrandt. And it’s easier to embrace that when you recognize that there’s no absolute standard for excellence. Otherwise, I’d be chasing Rembrandt’s greatness instead of my own. But wait a second—what I create has a certain quality that his doesn’t.
Q: Does our knowledge of death preclude us from maintaining this balance?
[Ellen J. Langer]: with the world aging, death is on many people’s minds. There are so many older people now, and entire industries are devoted to helping them extend their lives—counting steps on an Apple Watch, drinking this potion, and so on. And that’s fine, as long as people are engaging with these things mindfully. If you have to eat something, you might as well eat something good.
But my own view—partly based on research—is that rather than focusing on adding more years to our lives, we should spend more time adding life to our years. I have many studies showing that when we do that, when we help older people become more mindful, they actually live longer.
Q: What does legacy mean to you?
[Ellen J. Langer]: I don’t think of legacy in an ego-driven way. I was very fortunate—I had wonderfully supportive parents, and as a result, I’ve been a happy camper all my life. I think I’m at the far end of the optimism continuum. Since I was a little kid, I’ve always asked, “Why don’t you look at it this way?” It feels partly like a responsibility and partly like a plea—if everyone embraced this perspective, we’d all be happier.
Mindfulness is contagious—we have new data to support that. In my talks, I show a slide that says “virtually,” and then I tell people I don’t really mean that—I mean literally. All of our problems—personal, interpersonal, professional, and global—are the direct or indirect result of our mindlessness. That means we can solve them. Imagine what a better world that would be—not just for me, but for the people I care about and for everyone else.
That’s as close as I come to anything resembling a legacy. Of course, I’m human—I grew up in an imperfect world, and I’m not above thinking, “Wait a second, I wrote that 20 years ago!” But in my calmer, more mature moments, my only thought is: Wouldn’t it be a nicer world? Whether my name is attached to it or not is beside the point.