Hello everyone watching and listening. Today I'm speaking with the mother of mindfulness,

Dr. Ellen Langer. Dr. Langer was a colleague of mine when I worked at Harvard in the early

90s and so it's a particular pleasure for me to be talking to her today. We discuss

her latest book, The Mindful Body Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health. We explore how intentional

awareness paired with humility allows for a healthier mindset and body, how the perception

of time impacts the effects of disease and age, the way to view tragedy and suffering so

that we might conquer them through faith and hope, and the immense benefits to be found

in carefully considering to what, where and who you direct your attention. I was reading

your new book today, The Mindful Body Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health. We were colleagues

back in the 1990s, I suppose we still are colleagues in some ways. I was thinking about mindfulness

again, and I have a proposition for you and you tell me what you think about this. I was

thinking that mindfulness is something approximating paying attention to what you're paying attention

to, but I'm open for definitions. No, no, I like that, but the way I defined it is actively

noticing that if people give people instructions and say, pay attention, be present, and that's

sweet, but it really falls on deaf ears because when people are not there, they don't know

they're not there. All of the research we've done over 40 years has most of us, most of

the time are mindless. So to be mindful, you can do one of two things. The one most easiest for

people is probably just to notice new things about the things you thought you knew, and then you come

to see you didn't know them as well as you thought you did and then your attention naturally goes

to them. The other is to adopt a mindset, the only mindset we should have for uncertainty. People

don't realize that everything is always changing, everything looks different from different perspectives,

so we can never know. And if you know you don't know, then you naturally stay tuned in. If you were

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