Bruce Grierson wrote this week’s cover story about Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who has conducted experiments that involve manipulating environments to turn back subjects’ perceptions of their own age. Grierson’s last article for the magazine was about Olga Kotelko, a 91-year-old track star, which became the basis for his book “What Makes Olga Run?”
How did you first hear about Ellen Langer or grow interested in her research?
Ellen must have been hiding in my blind spot. She’s been doing her thing for almost four decades, but I didn’t stumble across her until I was researching my book, What Makes Olga Run? A chapter of that book deals with human limits and the role of the mind therein. I called Ellen up. She told me the story of her mother’s and grandmother’s afflictions. Then I learned she was contemplating this cancer study. It started to feel like a story.
Did she surprise you in any way?
About 20 seconds into a conversation with her, you know she’s different. She doesn’t sound like a scientist. She speaks in the rhythms of one of those old borscht-belt comics — punch, punch, punch, stop-me-if-you’ve-heard-this-before. There’s almost a narrative intelligence — if that’s a thing — that’s more obvious than her scientific intelligence. She’s an artist — literally (she paints) and also in sensibility. She’d surely agree with Einstein that not everything that can be measured matters, and not everything that matters can be measured. She’s fun to be around, but she kind of wore me out.
You write that Langer was hesitant to publish some of her early studies because the outcomes seemed implausible, even magical. Now she publishes and is more established as a researcher. Has the scientific community come to accept more unorthodox experiments?
Ellen is still considered eccentric, but less so than even a decade ago — not because she has moved but because the world has. The placebo effect is real, and powerful, and possibly getting stronger. Mind-body effects are a mainstream subject. But she’s still pretty far out there on a limb with some of this work. People won’t be convinced until it has been replicated under strictly controlled conditions. Nor should they be.
In the comments, readers have expressed the concern that Langer’s experiment is difficult to replicate and that it is hard to isolate the cause of improvements from other factors, like a temporary vacation from one’s life, or the expectation of improvement. How has Langer discussed these concerns with you?
In the original counter-clockwise study, she did want to have another control group of age-matched men who simply took a vacation, to see if it was maybe just the novelty of the setting that was the active agent. But she couldn’t afford that. It’s a problem. To do science right, rigorously controlling all the variables, is expensive. One researcher on a shoestring budget can’t do much more than get a conversation going. As for the “mediators and moderators” that are actually producing the results, what Ellen sometimes flippantly says is, “Who cares?” She’s more interested that you got better than how you got better.
Have you started to incorporate any of her techniques into your life?
Among her little cognitive-behavioral experiments, I like this one: Pretend your thoughts are transparent. Spend a whole week assuming your every thought can be read by others. So, if I think you’re an idiot, that would motivate me to find some nicer way to think about you. At the end of the week your experiences would be enhanced. I’ve tried that for brief stretches. It feels Buddhist — like pretending everyone you meet is your mother. Doing it for a whole week seems impossible.
It’s also intriguing how she defuses stress. If stress is just worry about “bad things” coming down the pike (or already arrived), then if you can learn not to be evaluative, to think of events as neither good nor bad but merely interesting to various degrees — boom. No stress. Again, fun to think about, hard to do.
Is Langer at all worried that she’s encouraging an American obsession with youth and immortality — which may be unhealthy fixations themselves? Or is that why she chose a condition as extreme as cancer for her next experiment? Namely, seeming healthier is more undeniably a good than seeming younger?
Right — the latter: It’s about health. To my mind, the counter-clockwise experiments aren’t so much about looking younger, but about being able to do stuff — becoming capable and independent again. She chose Stage 4 metastatic breast cancer partly for personal reasons: It was the disease that killed her mother. But also because any improvement, or even stalling the descent, would be a huge boon for these women. Even a few good days could be a tremendous gift.
Does she hope that such an expensive treatment could be made widely available or scaled up in some way if it proves successful?
We did talk about this. Who has access to these interventions? Right now only people with means. Ellen has thought about some sort of subsidy program if the retreats start doing well.