What if Age Is Nothing but a Mind-Set?

[Perknose]

Great NYT article on the ongoing body of research of Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer.

Some snippets:

One day in the fall of 1981, eight men in their 70s stepped out of a van in front of a converted monastery in New Hampshire. They shuffled forward, a few of them arthritically stooped, a couple with canes. Then they passed through the door and entered a time warp. Perry Como crooned on a vintage radio. Ed Sullivan welcomed guests on a black-and-white TV. Everything inside — including the books on the shelves and the magazines lying around — were designed to conjure 1959. This was to be the men’s home for five days as they participated in a radical experiment, cooked up by a young psychologist named Ellen Langer.

[...]

At the end of their stay, the men were tested again. On several measures, they outperformed a control group that came earlier to the monastery but didn’t imagine themselves back into the skin of their younger selves, though they were encouraged to reminisce. They were suppler, showed greater manual dexterity and sat taller — just as Langer had guessed. Perhaps most improbable, their sight improved. Independent judges said they looked younger. The experimental subjects, Langer told me, had “put their mind in an earlier time,” and their bodies went along for the ride.

The results were almost too good. They beggared belief. “It sounded like Lourdes,” Langer said. Though she and her students would write up the experiment for a chapter in a book for Oxford University Press called “Higher Stages of Human Development,” they left out a lot of the tantalizing color — like the spontaneous touch-football game that erupted between heretofore creaky seniors as they waited for the bus back to Cambridge. And Langer never sent it out to the journals. She suspected it would be rejected.

A few years earlier, Langer and one of her students, Alia Crum, conducted a study, published in the journal Psychological Science, involving 84 hotel chambermaids. The maids had mostly reported that they didn’t get much exercise in a typical week. The researchers primed the experimental group to think differently about their work by informing them that cleaning rooms was fairly serious exercise — as much if not more than the surgeon general recommends. Once their expectations were shifted, those maids lost weight, relative to a control group (and also improved on other measures like body mass index and hip-to-waist ratio). All other factors were held constant. The only difference was the change in mind-set.

Critics hunted for other explanations — statistical errors or subtle behavior changes in the weight-loss group that Langer hadn’t accounted for. Otherwise the outcome seemed to defy physics.

In a yet-to-be-published diabetes study, Langer wondered whether the biochemistry of Type 2 diabetics could be manipulated by the same psychological intervention — the subjects’ perception of how much time had passed. Her theory was that the diabetics’ blood-glucose levels would follow perceived time rather than actual time; in other words, they would spike and dip when the subjects expected them to. And that’s what her data revealed. When a student emailed her with the results this fall, she could barely contain her excitement. “This is the beginning of a psychological cure for diabetes!” she told me.

They had two groups of subjects go into a flight simulator. One group was told to think of themselves as Air Force pilots and given flight suits to wear while guiding a simulated flight. The other group was told that the simulator was broken and that they should just pretend to fly a plane. Afterward, they gave each group an eyesight test. The group that piloted the flight performed 40 percent better than the other group. Clearly “mind-set manipulation can counteract presumed physiological limits,” Langer said. If a certain kind of prompt could change vision, Langer thought, there was no reason, that you couldn’t try almost anything. The endgame, she has said many times since, is to “return the control of our health back to ourselves.”

:hmm:

 

[moonbogg]

I think if you tricked someone into thinking they were young, they will literally die thinking they were young. The body deteriorates regardless. I saw a great TED talk on aging and how to deal with it by maintaining the body like you do a car. Fix stuff as it goes bad, like replacing lost cells, removing waste within cells, generally repairing the various kinds of damage that occurs over time. No mental state can do that I'm pretty sure.

http://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_aging?language=en

 

[cabri]

Mind over body will work only for a limited situation until the body itself rebels

 

[alzan]

Interesting. I consider myself living proof that a positive mindset can do wonders for one's health. I was diagnosed with renal cancer last year; I had my "Oh shit, I've got cancer." moment fairly early in the diagnosis/discovery stage. Once I'd gottent beyond that (~2 hours) I decided I was going to come out on the other side of the diagnosis kicking, screaming and cancer-free.

Three months after diagnosis/discovery the tumor was removed and I had only minor adjustments to make to my lifestyle, no radiation or chemotherapy.

One year later and I'm kicking, screaming and cancer-free.

 

[alkemyst]

Age is both a mind-set and physical. Unfortunately most judge based on the latter.

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

Mind over body will work only for a limited situation until the body itself rebels

The mind has incredible control over the body. You can use it up or you can reforge it.

 

[ThinClient]

The mind has incredible control over the body. You can use it up or you can reforge it.

Which is why every single person in history has died or will die, right? Because the mind can reforge the body to live forever?