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Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll. The idea of

mindfulness has received quite a bit of currency in public discourse in the past few years. It's usually associated very closely with the idea of meditation, some sort of careful thought in quiet contemplation to looking in on what are the chitter-shattering thoughts

flying through your brain and trying to observe them and understand them and

so forth. Today's guest, Ellen Langer, who is a psychologist at Harvard, is the pioneer

of mindfulness. In fact, she is known somewhat affectionately as the mother of mindfulness.

But she doesn't, for the most part, pursue it in the context of meditation.

For Ellen, mindfulness is something much more active and pervasive and in some sense easy.

It doesn't require nearly as much discipline as you might worry about if meditation is your game.

And what she has been doing over the last several decades is studying the effects of being

mindful both on our psychology and on our physiology.

So by mindful, she just means literally paying attention

to what is going on, to not let yourself

fall into a cognitive rut, where you assume that you know what is going on and therefore move forward with it but instead really see, really here, really perceive what is going on, and this simple idea, I mean it really just is that simple

as far as I can tell, has kind of amazing benefits. So we'll talk about some of the psychological

benefits, but Ellen came out with a new book at the end of last year called The Mindful Body,

...