Dr. Ellen Langer is a professor of psychology at Harvard University. She has been described as the “mother of mindfulness” and has written extensively on the illusion of control, mindful aging, stress, decision-making, and health. Ellen Langer is the author of eleven books and more than two hundred research articles written for general and academic readers on mindfulness for over 35 years. She is the founder of The Langer Mindfulness Institute, and she’s also a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and three Distinguished Scientist Awards; the World Congress Award, the NYU Alumni Achievement Award, and the Staats award for Unifying Psychology. Her best selling book—Mindfulness, has sold multiples copies around the world and has since become a game-changer for many people who practiced mindfulness over mindlessness.
In one of the experiments, Dr. Langer gathered a group of elderly patients in nursing home-like environments and surrounded them with the decor; clothing, food, and music that was popular when they were in their twenties… And the following weeks, physical exam showed—tighter skin, better eyes-sight, increase muscle strength, and even higher bone density than before. The placebo effect is the basis for many of the best charisma enhancing techniques. Dr. Langer described Mindlessness as being on autopilot. Its where rules and routines govern what you do rather than guide what you do. Langer notices; When people are mindless, they are trapped in a rigid perspective— uncaring to the ways in which meaning changes depending on subtle changes in the context they’re in. This form of behavioral pattern tends to create a lack of awareness and exposure to validate new information in a way one can see things from different perspectives.
The highly innovative findings of social psychologist Dr. Ellen J. Langer and her team of researchers at Harvard introduced a unique concept of mindfulness, adapted to contemporary life in the West. Langer’s theory has been applied to a wide number of fields, including health, business, aging, social justice, and learning. There is now a new psychological assessment based on her work (called the Langer Mindfulness Scale). In her introduction to this 25th anniversary edition, Dr. Langer (now known as “the Mother of Mindfulness”) outlines some of these exciting applications and suggests those still to come.