Prime Time Replay:

Ellen Langer, Ph.D.
on The Power of Mindful Learning


MsgId: *breakthrough(1)
Date: Wed Dec 3 08:36:27 PST 1997
From: moderator At: 152.163.205.219

Welcome to Breakthrough Medicine. Today I'll be speaking with Ellen Langer, Ph.D., author of "The Power of Mindful Learning." I'm your host, Madeleine Lebwohl. Dr. Langer, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, will discuss her innovative theories on the process of learning.

We will be conducting an in-studio interview today. Hello, Dr. Langer.

MsgId: *breakthrough(4)
Date: Wed Dec 3 08:49:15 PST 1997
From: moderator At: 152.163.205.219

Dr. Langer: Hi!
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Date: Wed Dec 3 08:50:15 PST 1997
From: moderator At: 152.163.205.219

Your book discusses ways to improve learning. What are some of the most important points behind your theory of mindfulness?
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Date: Wed Dec 3 08:52:22 PST 1997
From: moderator At: 152.163.205.219

Dr Langer: People have some mindless notions about learning, and whenever they think they're going to try and learn something these mindsets, oddly, almost insure mediocrity. It doesn't matter whether you want to learn a new sport, how to be a better person, how to be happy, how to do your job better, whenever you think of yourself as trying to learn something, you bring to mind mindsets that are maladaptive.

So, for example, people believe that practice makes perfect. And that what they should do is practice a skill so that they can do it without thinking about it. I believe, and my research strongly suggests, that you really don't want to do anything without thinking about it. If you compare people who perform in expert fashion to everyone else, the main difference is that experts do not take the basics for granted. Just think about it, when you're first learning a task, you obviously know very little about it. That's not the time when you want to freeze your understanding of it. Because if you do, then better ways of performing the task when you know it better, won't occur to you. Moreover, when you mindlessly perform, you're not taking advantage of information in the present. So, for example, if you were playing tennis, and you were taught mindlessly how to hold a tennis racket, and now for some reason you had to play with a racket that was much heavier, it would not occur to you to change your grip to accomodate the change in racket weight. Without doing this performance suffers.

Another mindset we have that impairs our learning, deals with how to pay attention. People mistakenly believe that the way to pay attention is to hold the target of your attention still, and focus your eyes on it as if you were focusing a camera. But in fact the only way you can pay attention to something is to vary that which you're paying attention to. What that means is that one should engage the thing they want to pay attention to mindfully. Paying mindful attention amounts to actively drawing distinctions, noticing, so if you wanted to pay attention to a tree, what you would want to do is notice smaller things about the tree.

If you do, you might notice the shape of the different branches, the number of the branches,or where the leaves are situated. This active distinction drawing is the essence of mindfulness. It doesn't matter if the distinctions are smart of silly, important or seemingly irrelevant. As long as they are novel you will stay attentive. Indeed, in study after study that we've conducted, we find that when people are instructed to draw these novel distinctions, that is, to be mindful, three things repeatedly occur.

First, people find it easy to pay attention, even people who thought they had attention problems. Number two, people like the thing that they're paying attention to more, when they've attended mindfully, and three, this mindfuless results in improved memory regarding the target of they're attention.

MsgId: *breakthrough(15)
Date: Wed Dec 3 09:04:50 PST 1997
From: moderator At: 152.163.205.219

In your book, you mention that forgetting is not necessarily a bad thing -- it lets you relearn something.
MsgId: *breakthrough(16)
Date: Wed Dec 3 09:07:08 PST 1997
From: moderator At: 152.163.205.219

Dr. Langer: What I enjoy doing most in my thinking and my research is turning people's basic assumption upside down. This has led me to a different view of forgetting. The consequence of forgetting means that you have to be situated in the present. You can't rely on the past information. The advantages of being situated in the present are legion, and do not need me to explore them. When people have learned mindlessly, what they do is freeze their understanding of something and they don't vary their understanding of something, depending on the context. Under circumstances like these, where you've learned mindlessly, you're better off forgetting so that you will sensitive to the context. And in that state of mindfulness, you're able to take advantage of opportunities as well as avert the danger not yet arisen.
MsgId: *breakthrough(18)
Date: Wed Dec 3 09:09:15 PST 1997
From: moderator At: 152.163.205.219

What contributes the most to learning incorrectly?
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Date: Wed Dec 3 09:10:45 PST 1997
From: moderator At: 152.163.205.219

Dr. Langer: When people learn mindlessly, what they do is they come to confuse the stability of their mindsets with the stability of the underlying phenomenon. Things are changing all the times. Our mindlessness keeps it still. It takes a world that is variable and interesting, and often makes it seem better known than it is, and uninteresting.

For example, if you were taught three reasons for the Civil War, and took in that information mindlessly, it would not occur to you that a black teenager or a black thirty year old in Mississippi in 1870 might see the reasons for the Civil War different from a 70 year old black in Mississippi at that time, which may be different than a white or black European then or now may the reasons for the War. The point is, that without treating information as context free, as true no matter what, there's a lot more to think about, there's more reason for the individual to get involved, and consider what his or her own thoughts on the issue might be.

MsgId: *breakthrough(24)
Date: Wed Dec 3 09:15:17 PST 1997
From: moderator At: 152.163.205.219

What's the easiest way to catch yourself as you try to improve your mindfulness?
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Date: Wed Dec 3 09:17:21 PST 1997
From: moderator At: 152.163.205.219

Dr. Langer: Its very hard when you've learned something mindlessly to respond to it mindfully, because in some sense, when you're mindless, you're not there monitoring your behavior. However, when something goes wrong or you find yourself unhappy with an outcome, all you need to do is ask yourself to generate the ways you might do it differently the next time.
MsgId: *breakthrough(29)
Date: Wed Dec 3 09:19:10 PST 1997
From: moderator At: 152.163.205.219

You could you give some pointers on ways to become more mindful?
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Date: Wed Dec 3 09:21:18 PST 1997
From: moderator At: 152.163.205.219

Dr. Langer: Mindfulness is best achieved by preventing mindlessness in the first place. Prevention is much easier than cure. The way to prevent mindlessness and insure mindfulness is to realize that all information depends for its truth on context. So that when you're taking in information in the first place you want to be sure not to take it in as absolute fact. When you take it in as absolute fact, the problem is it won't occur to you later, when you need to see the information as less than absolutely true, to question it.

The way to become and stay mindful, is to develop a healthy respect for uncertainty. The way to be mindful about any particular thing, is to actively draw distinctions about it. That's the essence of mindfulness. You don't draw novel distinctions about something you think you already know completely, whether its person, place or thing. That if you approach it with complete certainty you don't need to notice anything about it. Realizing that information is different from different perspectives ensures an appreciation of uncertainty, which means that when you look at it you expect to see new things. That expectation of novelty will keep you mindful.

MsgId: *breakthrough(32)
Date: Wed Dec 3 09:25:58 PST 1997
From: moderator At: 152.163.205.219

Is your concept of mindfulness similar to buddhist mindfulness?
MsgId: *breakthrough(33)
Date: Wed Dec 3 09:28:42 PST 1997
From: moderator At: 152.163.205.219

Dr. Langer: Yes, but the major difference lies in the ways it is achieved. As I've said that the kind of mindfulness we've been talking about comes about by actively drawing novel distinctions. That leads us to breakthrough our rigid categories that entrap us. The form to achieve the same end that buddhists write about is through meditation. The practice of meditation leads to post meditative mindfulness. The two processes are not at all at odds with each other. The major point that I think we would all make is that I think its very important to break out of our rigid mindsets in whatever ways we're comfortable in doing so. For westerners who often have trouble sitting still for five minutes a day, no less twenty minutes twice a day that is required for meditation, might find the practice of mindfuless as I describe it easier.
MsgId: *breakthrough(35)
Date: Wed Dec 3 09:32:03 PST 1997
From: moderator At: 152.163.205.219

Do you find that children can learn mindfuless?
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Date: Wed Dec 3 09:34:52 PST 1997
From: moderator At: 152.163.205.219

Dr Langer: In many ways, children are, I believe, more mindful than most adults, and what our system of education and our jobs as parents are often mistakenly employed to knock this mindfulness out of them. That what growing up means is to learn the rules of the culture. And in so doing, people are taught to be more conforming than individuating. One way that schools unwittingly encourage mindlessness, is by teaching that the way to learn something is through rote memory, to repeat it over and over again. If you watch children on their own, for example, listening to a song on the radio, its effortless, and fun for them.

All learning should be fun. And another myth I discuss in The Power of Mindful Learning is the myth that we should delay gratification. Teachers and parents together seem to believe that learning is hard but somehow kids need to be taught to get through it, so they tell children, if only you do this awful thing like studying then you can enjoy yourself afterward and go out and play.

Interestingly, fun is not fun unless you're learning something new. A joke that is already known is not funny. A crossword puzzle that you've just completed is not something that you want to complete again. Activities themselves are not inherently good or bad. It is how we engage them that determines whether it will be pleasurable or not. If we engage the things we do mindfully, they will be fun. If we engage them mindlessly they will not be.

We have done lots of research on assessing the power of mindful learning, and find over and over again, that when people learn mindfully, they find such learning reasonably effortless, they enjoy it, they find the material easy to pay attention to and easy to remember. What we did in one study was to take a textbook and change the text so that it provoked mindfulness. What we did was to make the text more conditional. In other words, rather than speaking as if the information was absolutely true, independent of context, which is the way most information is given, simply by using the word is, we encourage mindlessness.

In this experiment what we did was to present all of the information, using expressions like it could be; it would seem that; perhaps; thus creating a sense that the information is true in some context and not others, give the individual more to think about and encourages greater involvement. We had students study from this text, or their traditional text, and then we tested them on the material, and found that those students who learned from the mindful text were able to use the information they studied in creative ways. And they found the material more interesting. Again, notice that the material is essentially the same. The major difference is whether it leads to a sense of certainty, in which case there is nothing more to think about, or to this mindful, creative uncertainty.

MsgId: *breakthrough(44)
Date: Wed Dec 3 09:47:53 PST 1997
From: moderator At: 152.163.205.219

When people try to learn more than one thing at a time -- say they have to learn in a situation that is distracting -- as if the T.V. is on as they read a book, can mindfulness be learned to hold on to your distinctions?
MsgId: *breakthrough(45)
Date: Wed Dec 3 09:51:44 PST 1997
From: moderator At: 152.163.205.219

Dr. Langer: Its not the number of things to attend to. If you have a mindset that its already known, then there's no reason to pay any attention to it. If its not known, then you pay attention to it to come to know it. The way you come to know something, to learn about it, is to actively learn distinctions about it. Assume you're reading a magazine and there's a lot around you to distract you. For instance the television is on, people are talking. If you actively draw distinctions about the magazine article, that will make it engaging enough to tune out these so-called distractions. If you decide to draw distinctions about the television program, then that is where your attention will follow. You can control what you attend to, as long as you attend to it mindfully.
MsgId: *breakthrough(47)
Date: Wed Dec 3 09:53:16 PST 1997
From: moderator At: 152.163.205.219

Thank you for joining me today on Breakthrough Medicine.
MsgId: *breakthrough(48)
Date: Wed Dec 3 09:53:55 PST 1997
From: moderator At: 152.163.205.219

Dr. Langer: Your welcome.
MsgId: *breakthrough(49)
Date: Wed Dec 3 10:03:19 PST 1997
From: moderator At: 152.163.205.219

Please join me next week when I speak with Stanley Ambrose, of the department of anthropology, University of Illinois, on the analysis of prehistoric human bones and what they tell us about the culture and diet of prehistoric people.


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