1776: "Ellen Langer - Counterclockwise"

0:00In 1979, a group of men in their 70s and 80s, they arrived at a retreat that had been carefully stripped of everything in the present time. All the magazines were old. The television programs, the music, the movies, the news, it all came from another time nearly everything, around them, pointed directly to the year 1959. The experiment was the work of Harvard psychologist, Alan Langer, who was studying the relationship between the mind and the body and how much of what people experience as aging might be influenced by expectations and surroundings. One group was told not simply to remember 1959, but to live for the stay as though it were 1959. They discussed the news and culture of the period in the present tense, surrounded by familiar pieces of the world that they had known 20 years earlier. A comparison group experienced a similar retreat, but they were asked only to reminisce about

1:031959. Before and after the stay, researchers measured aspects of physical and cognitive performance. Now, both groups, they improved, but Langer later reported that the men asked to inhabit the earlier time. They generally showed greater improvement across several measures of physical and cognitive functioning. Photographs taken afterwards were also judged as looking younger. The experiment has important limitations. Involved very few participants that lacked some controls, the Langer later said she would have preferred, and the original study was never published as a conventional peer-reviewed research paper. Much of its detailed record comes from Langer's later accounts, including her 2009 book, Counter Clockwise. It is an evidence that simply thinking young can reverse biological aging. But something else had changed during that retreat. For several days, these men were living in a place where many of the ordinary signals

2:03telling them that they were old, those all disappeared. Instead of continually being treated according to their age, they were surrounded by reminders of themselves 20 years earlier and expected to participate accordingly. Langer would spend decades studying that territory, mindfulness, aging, expectations, and the relationship between mind and body. Her idea of mindfulness centers on actively noticing what's happening rather than automatically accepting familiar assumptions about what must be true. The men in that retreat they didn't actually return to 1959 and the experiment it could not turn back time. But for a few days in 1979, Ellen Langer changed what the clock was allowed to tell them. These are interesting things with JC.