Terapia Existencial: agosto 2010

terça-feira, 17 de agosto de 2010

Atenção Plena

O termo atenção plena, mente alerta ou ainda consciência plena (ing. mindfulness, al. Achtsamkeit, fr. pleine conscience) designa uma atitude mental que se caracteriza por uma atenção ampla e tolerante dirigida a todos os fenômenos que se manifestam na mente consciente - ou seja todo tipo de pensamento, fantasias, recordações, sensações e emoções percebidas no campo de atenção são percebidas e aceitas como elas são.

O treinamento e aprendizado dessa forma de atenção, geralmente através de meditação e de outros exercícios afins, permite ao indivíduo uma maior tomada de consciência de seus processos mentais e de suas ações.

A atenção plena, originalmente um conceito da meditação budista, desempenha um papel importante em várias formas recentes de psicoterapia, como a terapia comportamental dialética, o programa de redução do estresse baseado na mente alerta e a terapia de aceitação e compromisso.

Índice
1 Atenção plena no Budismo (Sati)
2 Atenção plena e psicoterapia
3 Referências
4 Bibliografia
5 Ligações externas

Atenção plena no Budismo (Sati)

Na tradição espiritual budista a quarta das Quatro Nobres Verdades refere-se ao caminho que conduz ao fim do sofrimento. As oito seções em que se subdivide esse caminho, chamado por isso Nobre Caminho Óctuplo, apresentam-se divididas em três grupos, o terceiro dos quais (Samadhi, meditação ou concentração) refere-se à disciplina necessária para se obter o controle sobre a própria mente, e assim, o fim do sofrimento.

A disciplina meditativa engloba assim três seções: o esforço correto (Samma Vayamo) para melhorar, a atenção plena correta (Samma Sati) e a meditação correta (Samma Samadhi). Atenção plena designa, nesse contexto, um prestar atenção àquilo que é, de momento a momento. A prática da atenção plena ensina a suspender temporariamente todos os conceitos, imagens, juízos de valor, interpretações, comentários mentais e opiniões, conduzindo a mente a uma maior precisão, compreensão, equilíbrio e organização[2].

Atenção plena e terapia

O uso de técnicas de meditação budista para fins medicinais-psicoterapeuticos é registrado pelo menos desde o século VIII, quando o monge zen-budista japonês Guifeng Zongmi descreveu, entre seus cinco tipos de meditação, um tipo dedicado às pessoas comuns, completamente isento de objetivos religiosos e voltado à saúde física e mental[3]. Uma maior divulgação da meditação ocorreu, no entanto, apenas na década de 60 do séc. XX, com a vinda do monge budista vietnamita Thich Nhat Hanh[4] [5].

Nos últimos anos um grande número de autores e pesquisadores, entre eles o médico americano Jon Kabat-Zinn e os psicólogos americanos Marsha M. Linehan e Steven C. Hayes, vêm se dedicando ao trabalho de oferecer para a meditação um referencial teórico científico, possibilitando assim seu uso terapêutico independentemente da conceituação religiosa budista e abrindo sua prática para um público mais amplo.

A pesquisa mais recente oferece indícios de que uma série de terapias baseadas na atenção plena podem ser bem sucedidas no tratamento de dores crônicas[6], de estresse[7], e de comportamento suicidal recorrente[8].

Referências
↑ Bishop, S.R., Lau, M., Shapiro, S., Carlson, L., et al. (2004). "Mindfulness: A Proposed Operational Definition", Clin Psychol Sci Prac 11:230–241.
↑ Bhavana Society Plena atenção hábil - Parte 1.
↑ Fischer-Schreiber, Ingrid, Franz-Karl Ehrhard, Michael S. Diener & Michael H. Kohn (trans.) (1991). The Shambhala Dictionary of Buddhism and Zen. Boston: Shambhala.
↑ Thich Nhat Hanh. BBC (2006-04-04). Página visitada em 2008-05-25. "Thich Nhat Hanh is a world renowned Zen master, writer, poet, scholar, and peacemaker. With the exception of the Dalai Lama, he is today's best known Buddhist teacher"
↑ Thich Nhat Hanh. Time (November 5, 2006). Página visitada em 2008-05-25. "One of the most important religious thinkers and activists of our time, Nhat Hanh understood, from his own experience, why popular secular ideologies and movements?nationalism, fascism, communism and colonialism?unleashed the unprecedented violence of the 20th century.[...] Nhat Hanh, now 80 years old and living in a monastery in France, has played an important role in the transmission of an Asian spiritual tradition to the modern, largely secular West."
↑ McCracken, L., Gauntlett-Gilbert, J., and Vowles K.E. (2007). "The role of mindfulness in a contextual cognitive-behavioral analysis of chronic pain-related suffering and disability", Pain 131.1:63-69.
↑ Grossman, P., Niemann, L., Schmidt, S., and Walach, H. (2004). "Mindfulness-based stress reduction and health benefits: A meta-analysis", Journal of Psychosomatic Research 57:35–43.
↑ Williams, J.M.G., Duggan, D.S., Crane, C., and Fennell, M.J.V. (2006). "Mindfulness-Based cognitive therapy for prevention of recurrence of suicidal behavior", J Clin Psychol 62:201-210.

Have you ever said "excuse me" to a store mannequin or written a check in January with the previous year's date?' asks Ellen Langer. For most of us, the answer is probably 'yes', but these small mistakes, the author believes, are the tip of a mindlessness iceberg. A Harvard psychology professor, her research into rigidity of mind led to observations about mental fluidity, or mindfulness.

One of the great themes of self-help literature is the need to be free of unconsciously accepted habits and norms. Langer's classic shows how we can actually accomplish it. The book is in the best tradition of Western scientific research, filled with the results of fascinating experiments which should appeal to those readers who enjoy Emotional Intelligence or Learned Optimism.

Who or what is a mindful person? Langer suggests that their qualities will include:

•Ability to create new categories;
•Openness to new information;
•Awareness of more than one perspective;
•Attention to process (doing) rather than outcome (results); and
•Trust of intuition.
New categories

To look at the first: Langer says we live and experience reality in a conceptual form; we don't see things afresh and anew every time we look at them. Instead, we create categories and let things fall into them, which is a more convenient way of dealing with the world. Apart from the smaller things, such as defining a vase as a Japanese vase, a flower as an orchid or a person a boss, there are the wider categorisations under which we live including religions, ideologies and systems of government. Each gives us a level of psychological certainty and saves us from the effort of constantly challenging our own beliefs. We divide animals into 'pets' and 'livestock' so that we can feel OK loving one and eating the other.

Mindlessness results when we don't know that the categories we subscribe to are categories, and have accepted them as our own without really thinking. Creating new categories, and reassessing old ones, is mindfulness. Or as William James put it: 'Genius...means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.'

New information

Langer talks about 'premature cognitive commitments', which are like photographs in which meaning, rather than motion, is frozen. To evoke the dangers of false, frozen images, she reminds us of Miss Havisham in Dickens' Great Expectations, who still wore the wedding dress she had donned the day she was abandoned at the altar, but which now hung like faded curtains over her aged body.

At a more prosaic level, a child may know an elderly person who is grumpy, and will hold onto a picture of 'old people are grumps' and take it with him into adulthood. In not bothering to replace that picture with different images of later life, the person is locked into a false perception that is likely to be reflected in their own experience. They will turn into an old grump too.

This of course applies to other aspects of life; if we are mindful, we will be less willing to take 'genes' as an excuse for behaviour or lack of action. Just because a parent never rose above middle management level, we don't assume we won't become company president.

Perspective and context

Mindlessness occurs when people accept information in a context-free way. The ability to transcend context, Langer says, is the mark of mindfulness and creativity.

She notes that much pain is context-dependent. Getting a bruise out on the football field will matter much less to us than if we sustain one at home. Imagination is the key to perceiving differently. The Birdman of Alcatraz, stuck in a cell for over 40 years, managed to make his life a rich one by his care of injured birds.

The implication of these vignettes for personal development is clear: we can put up with anything as long as it is within a positive context. Without a defined personal vision, life might seem like a mass of constant worries and annoyances; with one, everything is put into perspective. As Nietzsche said, if you have a 'why', you can put up with any 'how'.

Process orientation

Another key characteristic of mindfulness is focus on process before outcome, or 'doing rather than achieving'. We look at the breakthrough of a scientist and say 'genius', as if what he discovered happened overnight. With the rare exception, like Einstein's great year of discovery, most scientific success is the result of years of work that can be broken down into steps. A college student looks at his professor's book in awe, thinking 'I could never write something that good', assuming it must be higher intelligence, not years of study and work, that delivered up the weighty tome. These are all faulty comparisons.

The process orientation requires us to ask, not 'can I do it?' but 'how can I do it?' This '...not only sharpens our judgment, it makes us feel better about ourselves', says Langer.

Intuition

Intuition is an important path to mindfulness, because its very use requires ignoring old habits and expectations to try something that may go against reason. Yet the best scientists are intuitive, many spending years methodically validating what appeared to them in a flash of intuitive truth.

The amazing thing about mindfulness and intuition is that they are both relatively effortless: 'Both are reached by escaping the heavy, single-minded striving of most ordinary life.' Yet intuition will give us valuable information about our survival and success; we cannot explain where it comes from, but we ignore it at our cost. The mindful person will go with what works, even if it doesn't make sense.

Final word

In essence, mindfulness is about preserving our individuality. By choosing the mindset of limited resources, by choosing to focus on outcomes rather than doing (process), and by making faulty comparisons with others, we become little more than robots. The true individual is characterised by openness to the new, is always reclassifying the meaning of knowledge and experience, and has the ability to see their daily actions in a bigger, consciously chosen perspective.

Langer recognises the parallels in her work with Eastern religion; for example, the Buddhist understanding that meditation is about enjoying a mindful state which leads to 'right action'. Mindfulness, Langer hopes, has the same effect, and therefore has important implications for the health of society, not just the individual. The beauty of mindfulness is that it is not work; in fact, because it leads to greater control of our own thinking, it is to use Langer's word, 'exhilarating', in a quiet way creating excitement about what is possible.

Its ideas may seem difficult, but Mindfulness was written for a popular audience and is quite short. It has none of the hoopla common to self-help writing; people value it for its fine distinctions and insights based on years of research, and like it for its understatedness.

Ellen Langer Interview on Mindfulness

“Claudia Hammond presents a series looking at the development of the science of psychology during the 20th century.

She re-visits Ellen Langer and Judith Rodin’s 1976 study, conducted in a New England nursing home, Arden House.

When the two psychologists set up the experiment so that residents on two floors of the 360-bed home for the elderly would experience some changes in their everyday life, they had no idea that they were introducing factors which could prolong life.

While residents on both floors were given plants and film shows, only those on the fourth floor had the opportunity to control these events: choosing the plant and looking after it themselves, and choosing which night of the week to view the film.

Eighteen months later, when Langer and Rodin returned to the home, they were astonished to discover that twice as many of the elderly residents in this ‘choices’ group were alive, compared with the control group on the second floor, who had been given plants that the staff tended, and were told which was their film night. It appeared that taking control made you live longer.

These findings fit in well with the work on learned helplessness in dogs which Martin Seligman had done in the late 1960s, and on Langer and Rodin’s own studies on the perception of control.

Claudia Hammond meets Ellen Langer, now Professor of Psychology at Harvard, and hears about Arden House and the work she has gone on to do on what she calls ‘mindfulness’. She visits Arden House, which is still a nursing home, and is shown around by current administrator Joanne Scafati.

Dr Zelda Di Blasi, who lectures in psychology at University College, Cork, sets the study in context, and Rosalie Kane, Professor of Public Health at the University of Minnesota, and Howard Kaplan, CEO of City Club Living accommodation for the elderly, discuss the impact of Langer/Rodin on care of the elderly.”

Page 5 of 5 --“The question is how much does it help simply to have the feeling - or does the feeling help because it gets you motivated to try to do something,” says Julie Norem, a psychologist at Wellesley College.

(Richard Howard ) Skepticism about Langer’s conception of mindfulness is fed by the fact that she doesn’t always publish her more provocative findings in academic journals, a tendency that can make her seem less interested in testing her ideas than publicizing them. The study of the older men is recounted anecdotally in multiple books, but was never published in a peer-reviewed research journal. (The movie was born when a screenwriter cold-called Langer and told her he had read “Mindfulness” on his mother’s recommendation.)

Langer readily concedes that her ideas have changed since her early career. “When I was first studying the illusion of control, I was doing it from a very rational perspective,” she says. Now, however, she says she is suspicious of the empirical approach that lies at the heart of scientific research. One of her favorite hobbyhorses is probabilistic thinking. (“You can tell me that there’s a 20 percent chance of it raining tomorrow, but tomorrow it will either rain or it won’t rain.”)

Instead, Langer’s “psychology of possibility” focuses not on how the typical person thinks, but on the special qualities of outliers and apparent oddities, and rests on a faith in the untapped potential of the mind. Her work reaches thousands of people, and, on the largest scale, she sees progress.

“I think the culture is headed toward an evolution in consciousness,” she told me.

The psychology of possibility can take Langer to some curious places. In a blog post last summer for the Psychology Today website, she told the story of a friend who on a long-ago trip took photos of an Indian guru only to find he didn’t show up on film. The inability of many people to believe the story, Langer suggested, was due to “our mindless adherence to longstanding views.”

But to Langer, among the strongest arguments for the psychology of possibility is the way it has enriched her own lived life: She is now a painter, a dispenser of performance-enhancing advice on the doubles court, and the basis for a Hollywood biopic. As she told the seminar at Kripalu, “I have fun when I make the paintings, I have fun when I write the books, I have fun when I speak to you. Because, why not have fun?”

Home /Globe /Ideas Mind Power
Harvard professor Ellen Langer’s research transformed psychology. Now she wants it to transform you.
By Drake Bennett
February 21, 2010
E-mail this article To: Invalid E-mail address Add a personal message:(80 character limit) Your E-mail: Invalid E-mail address Sending your articleYour article has been sent.
E-mail|Print|Reprints|Yahoo! Buzz|ShareThisText size – + STOCKBRIDGE - The Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health is housed in a former Jesuit seminary built in the 1950s, on a rise with broad views of the Berkshires. The long hallways have the institutional feel of a high school, except that everyone is speaking in respectful tones, and rolled yoga mats are everywhere, like baguettes in Doisneau’s Paris. On the walls are limited-edition photographs of lean people doing yoga in front of moss-dappled Indian shrines. At the gift shop on an early February weekend, visitors could have their tarot read, or a photographic portrait taken of their aura. And one of the featured speakers, offering a weekend-long seminar, was a senior professor at Harvard University, Ellen Langer.
Langer is a famous psychologist poised to get much more famous, but not in the ways most researchers do. She is best known for two things: her concept of mindlessness - the idea that much of what we believe to be rational thought is in fact just our brains on autopilot - and her concept of mindfulness, the idea that simply paying attention to our everyday lives can make us happier and healthier. She was Harvard’s first tenured woman professor of psychology, and her discoveries helped trigger, among other things, the burgeoning positive-psychology movement. Her 1989 book, “Mindfulness,” was an international bestseller, and she remains in high demand as a speaker everywhere from New York’s 92d Street Y to the leadership guru Tony Robbins’s Fiji resort. And now a movie about her life is in development with Jennifer Aniston signed on to star as Langer.
While other researchers might blanch at the Hollywoodization of their work, for Langer it’s almost an organic development - part of a long journey to bring the message of her research to the masses. Langer’s reputation in the field of social psychology rests on a set of ingenious
experiments that expose the strange power of the mind to fool itself and to transform the body. In one of her best-known studies, she found that giving nursing home residents more control over their lives made them live longer. In more recent work, she made hotel maids lose weight simply by telling them that their work burned as many calories as a typical workout. And in the study at the center of the Aniston movie, a team led by Langer found that instructing a group of elderly men to talk and act as if they were 20 years younger could reverse the aging process.
Today, Langer’s studies are required reading in introductory psychology courses, and her work has inspired a generation of leading behavioral researchers who are rethinking human thought itself. But Langer herself has taken a different tack. As her intellectual successors publish research studies, she has transformed herself into almost an advertisement for her own work, setting out to spread the word about the power of mindfulness. Nearly a decade ago, she took up painting, pursuing it, as she pursues everything, as mindfully as possible; today her canvases, many of them whimsical portraits of her pet dogs, show in well-reputed galleries and sell for thousands of dollars. She has long been at work on a book on mindfulness and tennis, a sport she plays avidly. And her recent books are concerned less with how mindfulness works than how we all might better use it to improve our lives.

“Things are not good or bad,” she repeated to her audience at Kripalu, “What’s good or bad are the views we take of things.”
For some psychologists, mantras like these make Langer less a social scientist than a guru. She treats research and writing - the day-to-day work of most psychologists - with a pronounced cavalierness, neglecting to publish results even when they strike her as interesting. At times she sounds suspicious of the very idea of scientific evidence. What she is practicing, she says, is a different brand of psychology, “the psychology of possibility.”
“I do research, but my research is not designed to be a description. It rarely says what is, but what can be,” she told me at Kripalu.
“I don’t think I’ve ever envied anybody. If someone has something, I can, too,” Langer announced to her Kripalu seminar during the Saturday morning session. Dressed in slim black slacks and a black, tunic-like cardigan, she stood before 65 people, mostly women, in a lofty, barn-shaped room that had once been the seminary’s main chapel.
The night before, Langer had asked participants to think of someone or something that bothered them. She started the morning by asking what they had come up with. One woman said her husband was always late for breakfast, another described her child’s “defying” behavior, another made what sounded like a veiled complaint about her in-laws.
In responding to each, Langer returned to a similar point: Each of these complaints was born of mindlessness. They were instinctual responses rather than thoughtful engagement. Why not see the time alone at breakfast as a gift? Would the young mother rather have a child who blindly followed orders? And surely there was something interesting and redeemable to be found in the in-laws.
As advice, it was not revolutionary. But as the morning went on, and Langer described the research on which she had built her particular worldview, a sense emerged of just how powerful she thought the mind could be.
As Langer sees it, it’s the pervasiveness of mindless behavior that makes mindfulness so powerful, and her earliest research focused on the former. Her doctoral dissertation, at Yale, grew out of a poker game with some colleagues. One round, the dealer accidentally skipped someone. “Everyone went crazy,” Langer recalls. It was out of the question, she learned, to simply give the skipped person the next card and proceed with the deal. She began to wonder why people were so attached to “their” cards even when they had no idea whether they were good or bad.
At the time, the dominant view in the field of psychology assumed that human decision-making was a thoroughly logical process, driven by a constant calculation of probabilities and costs and benefits. The reaction to that botched deal made Langer suspect something very different.

To test this, she ran a study in which she set up a lottery and varied the terms by which people got their tickets. She found that subjects valued their tickets much more when they were allowed to choose them, even though that did nothing to increase their chances of winning. She called this “the illusion of control.”
Langer followed this up by looking at the often meaningless factors that determine how people evaluate information. In one study, conducted with Benzion Chanowitz and Arthur Blank, she had experimenters approach people who were using a Xerox machine and ask to cut in to make copies. They found that people were more likely to let someone cut if offered a reason - but, intriguingly, it did not matter if the reason made sense. People were as receptive to a meaningless reason (“to make copies”) as a valid one (“I’m in a rush”).
“It is not that people don’t hear the request,” Langer wrote in “Mindfulness,” “they simply don’t think about it actively.”
These findings broke open the field of social psychology. “It was a huge corrective,” says John Bargh, a psychologist at Yale known for his work on “automaticity” and thought. He remembers reading the Xerox machine study as a graduate student: “That just lit me up. It opened my eyes and everything was off to the races after that.”
For Bargh and others, Langer’s research cleared the way for a whole new model of how people really think and decide, one that replaced the cold inner logician with a rich tangle that incorporated emotion, evolution, and the particularities of the human body. Researchers like Daniel Gilbert, Antonio Damasio, and Dan Ariely saw mindless behavior as a trove of clues, and in many cases, psychologists discovered that there could be a value to “mindlessness” - our seemingly irrational instincts were not only quicker, but often more accurate than our more considered ruminations.
Langer, on the other hand, thought mindlessness was harmful. Not paying attention to their lives, as she saw it, made people bored and careless, prejudiced and complacent; it stunted innovation and led to catastrophic errors among pilots and soldiers and surgeons. She didn’t see mindlessness as a window into the brain. She saw it as a condition to be cured.
So Langer began to study its opposite. She called it “mindfulness,” a term that was being independently adopted around the same time by doctors and therapists embracing the Buddhist practice of mindful meditation. Langer’s definition was something more everyday - that we simply need to go through life paying better attention to it. She began to focus her work on the question of what difference that might make.
Among other things, she argued, it could make us live longer. In 1976, working with Judith Rodin at Yale - a psychologist who would later become president of the University of Pennsylvania - she published a landmark field study that looked at what happened when nursing home residents were given more control over their lives. Langer and Rodin set up their experiment so that one group of residents was asked to make a few small decisions about their lives - where to receive visitors, what entertainment options they preferred, and how to care for houseplants placed in their rooms - and another group was not given these choices. A year and a half later, Langer and Rodin found that not only were the residents who had been given more choices happier, more social, and more alert than the other group, many more of them were still alive.

Page 4 of 5 --“Whenever you’re making a choice, you have to notice things, and that makes us engage,” Langer told me. “Mindfulness is figuratively enlivening, and it’s literally enlivening.”

Discuss
COMMENTS (24)
(Richard Howard ) Another set of findings by Langer suggests that, to a seemingly supernatural degree, simply believing something can make it so. In a study published in 2007 with her student Alia Crum, Langer found that telling hotel maids that their work satisfied the surgeon general’s recommendations for an active lifestyle led to a decrease in those maids’ weight, blood pressure, and body fat four weeks later, even though they reported no change in activity or diet.

The study that the movie will center on took place in 1979 and was, in its way, a feat of canny stagecraft. In an old monastery in Peterborough, N.H., Langer and her students set up an elaborate time capsule of the world 20 years earlier, then sent two separate groups of men in their late 70s and early 80s to spend a week there. Each group spent the week immersed in the year 1959, discussing Castro’s advances in Cuba and the Colts’ victory in the NFL championship, listening to Perry Como and Nat King Cole, watching “North by Northwest” and “Some Like it Hot.” The only difference between the two groups was that one talked about the year in the present tense - they were pretending it was 1959 - and the other group referred to it in the past.

Before and after, the men in both groups were given a battery of cognitive and physical tests. What Langer found was that the men in both groups seemed to have reversed many of the declines associated with aging - they were stronger and more flexible, their memories and their performance on intelligence tests improved. But the men who had acted as if it really was 1959 had improved significantly more. By mentally living as younger men for a week, they seemed actually to have turned back the clock.

What was happening to those men? Today Langer says she’s not entirely sure. It may be that they believed, on some level, that they really were 20 years younger, and that their bodies reacted accordingly. Or it may be that the effort of maintaining the fiction engaged their minds in a way that rejuvenated them.

But ultimately Langer seems less interested in the question of how mindfulness works than how to harness it in practice. In her books - mostly written for a popular audience - and her many speaking engagements, she outlines a philosophy in which the right mindset can often literally transmute life’s ills.

Other researchers, however, are more cautious about Langer’s mind-over-matter effects, and wonder if other factors might be at work. There may be subtle behavioral changes that accompany the changes in mindset, unbeknownst to both subject and researcher

Home /Globe /Ideas Mind Power
Harvard professor Ellen Langer’s research transformed psychology. Now she wants it to transform you.
By Drake Bennett
February 21, 2010
E-mail this article To: Invalid E-mail address Add a personal message:(80 character limit) Your E-mail: Invalid E-mail address Sending your articleYour article has been sent.
E-mail|Print|Reprints|Yahoo! Buzz|ShareThisText size – + STOCKBRIDGE - The Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health is housed in a former Jesuit seminary built in the 1950s, on a rise with broad views of the Berkshires. The long hallways have the institutional feel of a high school, except that everyone is speaking in respectful tones, and rolled yoga mats are everywhere, like baguettes in Doisneau’s Paris. On the walls are limited-edition photographs of lean people doing yoga in front of moss-dappled Indian shrines. At the gift shop on an early February weekend, visitors could have their tarot read, or a photographic portrait taken of their aura. And one of the featured speakers, offering a weekend-long seminar, was a senior professor at Harvard University, Ellen Langer.
Langer is a famous psychologist poised to get much more famous, but not in the ways most researchers do. She is best known for two things: her concept of mindlessness - the idea that much of what we believe to be rational thought is in fact just our brains on autopilot - and her concept of mindfulness, the idea that simply paying attention to our everyday lives can make us happier and healthier. She was Harvard’s first tenured woman professor of psychology, and her discoveries helped trigger, among other things, the burgeoning positive-psychology movement. Her 1989 book, “Mindfulness,” was an international bestseller, and she remains in high demand as a speaker everywhere from New York’s 92d Street Y to the leadership guru Tony Robbins’s Fiji resort. And now a movie about her life is in development with Jennifer Aniston signed on to star as Langer.
While other researchers might blanch at the Hollywoodization of their work, for Langer it’s almost an organic development - part of a long journey to bring the message of her research to the masses. Langer’s reputation in the field of social psychology rests on a set of ingenious
experiments that expose the strange power of the mind to fool itself and to transform the body. In one of her best-known studies, she found that giving nursing home residents more control over their lives made them live longer. In more recent work, she made hotel maids lose weight simply by telling them that their work burned as many calories as a typical workout. And in the study at the center of the Aniston movie, a team led by Langer found that instructing a group of elderly men to talk and act as if they were 20 years younger could reverse the aging process.
Today, Langer’s studies are required reading in introductory psychology courses, and her work has inspired a generation of leading behavioral researchers who are rethinking human thought itself. But Langer herself has taken a different tack. As her intellectual successors publish research studies, she has transformed herself into almost an advertisement for her own work, setting out to spread the word about the power of mindfulness. Nearly a decade ago, she took up painting, pursuing it, as she pursues everything, as mindfully as possible; today her canvases, many of them whimsical portraits of her pet dogs, show in well-reputed galleries and sell for thousands of dollars. She has long been at work on a book on mindfulness and tennis, a sport she plays avidly. And her recent books are concerned less with how mindfulness works than how we all might better use it to improve our lives.

“Things are not good or bad,” she repeated to her audience at Kripalu, “What’s good or bad are the views we take of things.”
For some psychologists, mantras like these make Langer less a social scientist than a guru. She treats research and writing - the day-to-day work of most psychologists - with a pronounced cavalierness, neglecting to publish results even when they strike her as interesting. At times she sounds suspicious of the very idea of scientific evidence. What she is practicing, she says, is a different brand of psychology, “the psychology of possibility.”
“I do research, but my research is not designed to be a description. It rarely says what is, but what can be,” she told me at Kripalu.
“I don’t think I’ve ever envied anybody. If someone has something, I can, too,” Langer announced to her Kripalu seminar during the Saturday morning session. Dressed in slim black slacks and a black, tunic-like cardigan, she stood before 65 people, mostly women, in a lofty, barn-shaped room that had once been the seminary’s main chapel.
The night before, Langer had asked participants to think of someone or something that bothered them. She started the morning by asking what they had come up with. One woman said her husband was always late for breakfast, another described her child’s “defying” behavior, another made what sounded like a veiled complaint about her in-laws.
In responding to each, Langer returned to a similar point: Each of these complaints was born of mindlessness. They were instinctual responses rather than thoughtful engagement. Why not see the time alone at breakfast as a gift? Would the young mother rather have a child who blindly followed orders? And surely there was something interesting and redeemable to be found in the in-laws.
As advice, it was not revolutionary. But as the morning went on, and Langer described the research on which she had built her particular worldview, a sense emerged of just how powerful she thought the mind could be.
As Langer sees it, it’s the pervasiveness of mindless behavior that makes mindfulness so powerful, and her earliest research focused on the former. Her doctoral dissertation, at Yale, grew out of a poker game with some colleagues. One round, the dealer accidentally skipped someone. “Everyone went crazy,” Langer recalls. It was out of the question, she learned, to simply give the skipped person the next card and proceed with the deal. She began to wonder why people were so attached to “their” cards even when they had no idea whether they were good or bad.
At the time, the dominant view in the field of psychology assumed that human decision-making was a thoroughly logical process, driven by a constant calculation of probabilities and costs and benefits. The reaction to that botched deal made Langer suspect something very different.

Page 3 of 5 --To test this, she ran a study in which she set up a lottery and varied the terms by which people got their tickets. She found that subjects valued their tickets much more when they were allowed to choose them, even though that did nothing to increase their chances of winning. She called this “the illusion of control.”

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(Richard Howard ) Langer followed this up by looking at the often meaningless factors that determine how people evaluate information. In one study, conducted with Benzion Chanowitz and Arthur Blank, she had experimenters approach people who were using a Xerox machine and ask to cut in to make copies. They found that people were more likely to let someone cut if offered a reason - but, intriguingly, it did not matter if the reason made sense. People were as receptive to a meaningless reason (“to make copies”) as a valid one (“I’m in a rush”).

“It is not that people don’t hear the request,” Langer wrote in “Mindfulness,” “they simply don’t think about it actively.”

These findings broke open the field of social psychology. “It was a huge corrective,” says John Bargh, a psychologist at Yale known for his work on “automaticity” and thought. He remembers reading the Xerox machine study as a graduate student: “That just lit me up. It opened my eyes and everything was off to the races after that.”

For Bargh and others, Langer’s research cleared the way for a whole new model of how people really think and decide, one that replaced the cold inner logician with a rich tangle that incorporated emotion, evolution, and the particularities of the human body. Researchers like Daniel Gilbert, Antonio Damasio, and Dan Ariely saw mindless behavior as a trove of clues, and in many cases, psychologists discovered that there could be a value to “mindlessness” - our seemingly irrational instincts were not only quicker, but often more accurate than our more considered ruminations.

Langer, on the other hand, thought mindlessness was harmful. Not paying attention to their lives, as she saw it, made people bored and careless, prejudiced and complacent; it stunted innovation and led to catastrophic errors among pilots and soldiers and surgeons. She didn’t see mindlessness as a window into the brain. She saw it as a condition to be cured.

So Langer began to study its opposite. She called it “mindfulness,” a term that was being independently adopted around the same time by doctors and therapists embracing the Buddhist practice of mindful meditation. Langer’s definition was something more everyday - that we simply need to go through life paying better attention to it. She began to focus her work on the question of what difference that might make.

Among other things, she argued, it could make us live longer. In 1976, working with Judith Rodin at Yale - a psychologist who would later become president of the University of Pennsylvania - she published a landmark field study that looked at what happened when nursing home residents were given more control over their lives. Langer and Rodin set up their experiment so that one group of residents was asked to make a few small decisions about their lives - where to receive visitors, what entertainment options they preferred, and how to care for houseplants placed in their rooms - and another group was not given these choices. A year and a half later, Langer and Rodin found that not only were the residents who had been given more choices happier, more social, and more alert than the other group, many more of them were still alive

Falta de Atenção

Langer é um psicóloga famosa prestes a ficar muito mais famoso, mas não da forma como a maioria dos pesquisadores fazem.

Ela é mais conhecida por duas coisas: o seu conceito de inconsciência - a idéia de que muito do que acreditamos ser o pensamento racional é na verdade apenas o nosso cérebro em piloto automático - e seu conceito de consciência, a idéia de que simplesmente prestando atenção ao nosso quotidiano pode nos tornar mais felizes e saudáveis.

Ela foi professor de Harvard a primeira mulher titulares da psicologia, e suas descobertas ajudaram a desencadear, entre outras coisas, o crescente movimento da psicologia positiva.

Seu livro de 1989, "Consciência", foi um best-seller internacional, e ela continua em alta demanda como orador em toda parte de 92d de Nova York Street Y de recorrer a liderança guru Tony Robbins Fiji. E agora um filme sobre sua vida está em desenvolvimento com Jennifer Aniston assinou contrato para estrelar como Langer.

Enquanto outros pesquisadores possam se apavora com a Hollywoodization do seu trabalho, por Langer é quase um desenvolvimento orgânico - parte de uma longa jornada para levar a mensagem de sua pesquisa para as massas. Langer reputação no campo da psicologia social repousa sobre um conjunto de experimentos engenhosos que expõem o estranho poder da mente para enganar a si mesmo e transformar o corpo.

Em um de seus estudos mais conhecidos, ela descobriu que dando aos moradores do lar de idosos mais controle sobre suas vidas fizeram viver mais. Em trabalhos mais recentes, ela fez arrumadeiras de hotel perder peso, simplesmente dizendo-lhes que o seu trabalho queimou tantas calorias como um típico treino.

E no estudo, no centro do filme de Aniston, uma equipe liderada por Langer descobriu que instruindo um grupo de homens idosos a falam e agem como se fossem 20 anos mais jovens, pode reverter o processo de envelhecimento.

Hoje, os estudos Langer são leitura obrigatória em cursos de introdução à psicologia, e seu trabalho inspirou uma geração de importantes pesquisadores do comportamento humano que se repensar o próprio pensamento. Mas Langer se tomou um rumo diferente.

Como seus sucessores intelectuais divulgam pesquisas, ela transformou-se em quase uma propaganda para seu próprio trabalho, estabelecendo a espalhar a palavra sobre o poder da atenção plena.

Quase uma década atrás, ela começou a pintar, perseguindo-a, enquanto ela prossegue tudo, como conscientemente possível, hoje suas telas, muitas delas retratos extravagantes de seus cães de estimação, mostra em galerias de renome e vender por milhares de dólares.

Ela tem sido por muito tempo trabalhando em um livro sobre consciência e de tênis, um esporte que joga avidamente. E seus livros recentes se preocupam menos com a forma como funciona a atenção como todos nós seria melhor usá-lo para melhorar nossas vidas.

Página 2 de 5 - "As coisas não são boas ou ruins", ela repetiu a sua audiência na Kripalu, "o que é bom ou ruim são as opiniões que tomamos das coisas."

Para alguns psicólogos, mantras como estes fazem Langer menos um cientista social do que um guru. Ela trata da investigação e da escrita - o trabalho do dia-a-dia da maioria dos psicólogos - com um cavalierness pronunciada, deixando de publicar os resultados, mesmo quando atingi-la interessante. Às vezes ela parece suspeito da própria idéia de evidência científica. O que ela é praticante, ela diz, é uma marca diferente da psicologia, "a psicologia da possibilidade."

"Eu faço a pesquisa, mas a minha pesquisa não foi concebido para ser uma descrição. Ele raramente diz o que é, mas que pode ser ", ela me disse no Kripalu.

"Eu não acho que tenha inveja de ninguém. Se alguém tiver alguma coisa, eu posso, também, "Langer anunciou a sua seminário Kripalu durante a sessão da manhã de sábado. Vestida com calça preta slim e um casaco preto, túnica semelhante, ela estava diante de 65 pessoas, maioritariamente mulheres, em um quarto, em forma de celeiro sublime que já tinha sido capela principal do seminário.

Na noite anterior, Langer pediu aos participantes para pensar em alguém ou algo que os incomodava. Ela começou pela manhã, perguntando o que eles tinham vindo acima com. Uma mulher disse que seu marido estava sempre atrasado para o almoço, outro descreveu seu filho "desafiando" o comportamento, outro fez o que parecia ser uma reclamação velada sobre seus sogros.

Ao responder a cada um, Langer retornou ao mesmo ponto: Cada uma destas queixas nasceu da insensatez. Eram respostas instintivas ao invés de noivado pensativo. Por que não ver o tempo sozinho no café da manhã como um dom? Será que a jovem mãe preferiria ter um filho que seguiu cegamente as ordens? E certamente havia algo de interessante e reembolsável, para ser encontrado no sogros.

Como conselho, não era revolucionária. Mas como a manhã foi passando, e Langer descreveu a pesquisa em que ela construiu sua visão de mundo particular, um sentimento surgiu de quão poderosa ela pensou que a mente poderia ser.

Como Langer vê-lo, é a persistência de um comportamento irracional que faz plena consciência tão poderoso, e suas primeiras pesquisas voltadas para o primeiro. Sua tese de doutorado, em Yale, cresceu fora de um jogo de pôquer com alguns colegas.

Uma rodada, o concessionário acidentalmente ignorado alguém. "Todo mundo ficou louco", lembra Langer. Ele estava fora de questão, ela aprendeu, simplesmente dar a pessoa ignorada a próxima carta e continuar com o negócio. Ela começou a se perguntar porque as pessoas estavam tão apegados a "suas" cartas mesmo quando eles não tinham idéia se eram bons ou maus.

Na época, a visão dominante no campo da psicologia humana do princípio de que a tomada de decisões é um processo completamente lógico, impulsionado por um cálculo de probabilidades constante e os custos e benefícios. A reação a esse negócio malfeito feito Langer algo suspeito muito diferente.

Versão em Inglês

Langer is a famous psychologist poised to get much more famous, but not in the ways most researchers do.

She is best known for two things: her concept of mindlessness - the idea that much of what we believe to be rational thought is in fact just our brains on autopilot - and her concept of mindfulness, the idea that simply paying attention to our everyday lives can make us happier and healthier.

She was Harvard’s first tenured woman professor of psychology, and her discoveries helped trigger, among other things, the burgeoning positive-psychology movement.

Her 1989 book, “Mindfulness,” was an international bestseller, and she remains in high demand as a speaker everywhere from New York’s 92d Street Y to the leadership guru Tony Robbins’s Fiji resort. And now a movie about her life is in development with Jennifer Aniston signed on to star as Langer.

While other researchers might blanch at the Hollywoodization of their work, for Langer it’s almost an organic development - part of a long journey to bring the message of her research to the masses. Langer’s reputation in the field of social psychology rests on a set of ingenious experiments that expose the strange power of the mind to fool itself and to transform the body.

In one of her best-known studies, she found that giving nursing home residents more control over their lives made them live longer. In more recent work, she made hotel maids lose weight simply by telling them that their work burned as many calories as a typical workout.

And in the study at the center of the Aniston movie, a team led by Langer found that instructing a group of elderly men to talk and act as if they were 20 years younger could reverse the aging process.

Today, Langer’s studies are required reading in introductory psychology courses, and her work has inspired a generation of leading behavioral researchers who are rethinking human thought itself. But Langer herself has taken a different tack.

As her intellectual successors publish research studies, she has transformed herself into almost an advertisement for her own work, setting out to spread the word about the power of mindfulness.

Nearly a decade ago, she took up painting, pursuing it, as she pursues everything, as mindfully as possible; today her canvases, many of them whimsical portraits of her pet dogs, show in well-reputed galleries and sell for thousands of dollars.

She has long been at work on a book on mindfulness and tennis, a sport she plays avidly. And her recent books are concerned less with how mindfulness works than how we all might better use it to improve our lives.

Page 2 of 5 --“Things are not good or bad,” she repeated to her audience at Kripalu, “What’s good or bad are the views we take of things.”

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For some psychologists, mantras like these make Langer less a social scientist than a guru. She treats research and writing - the day-to-day work of most psychologists - with a pronounced cavalierness, neglecting to publish results even when they strike her as interesting. At times she sounds suspicious of the very idea of scientific evidence. What she is practicing, she says, is a different brand of psychology, “the psychology of possibility.”

“I do research, but my research is not designed to be a description. It rarely says what is, but what can be,” she told me at Kripalu.

“I don’t think I’ve ever envied anybody. If someone has something, I can, too,” Langer announced to her Kripalu seminar during the Saturday morning session. Dressed in slim black slacks and a black, tunic-like cardigan, she stood before 65 people, mostly women, in a lofty, barn-shaped room that had once been the seminary’s main chapel.

The night before, Langer had asked participants to think of someone or something that bothered them. She started the morning by asking what they had come up with. One woman said her husband was always late for breakfast, another described her child’s “defying” behavior, another made what sounded like a veiled complaint about her in-laws.

In responding to each, Langer returned to a similar point: Each of these complaints was born of mindlessness. They were instinctual responses rather than thoughtful engagement. Why not see the time alone at breakfast as a gift? Would the young mother rather have a child who blindly followed orders? And surely there was something interesting and redeemable to be found in the in-laws.

As advice, it was not revolutionary. But as the morning went on, and Langer described the research on which she had built her particular worldview, a sense emerged of just how powerful she thought the mind could be.

As Langer sees it, it’s the pervasiveness of mindless behavior that makes mindfulness so powerful, and her earliest research focused on the former. Her doctoral dissertation, at Yale, grew out of a poker game with some colleagues. One round, the dealer accidentally skipped someone. “Everyone went crazy,” Langer recalls. It was out of the question, she learned, to simply give the skipped person the next card and proceed with the deal. She began to wonder why people were so attached to “their” cards even when they had no idea whether they were good or bad.

At the time, the dominant view in the field of psychology assumed that human decision-making was a thoroughly logical process, driven by a constant calculation of probabilities and costs and benefits. The reaction to that botched deal made Langer suspect something very different.

iNCOSCIENCIA NOS USA

Ellen Langer e da psicologia social da insensatez

Como alguém propenso a deixar suas compras na loja e zoneamento para fora ao andar de bicicleta no trânsito de Manhattan, posso me relacionar com o que Ellen Langer chama de "insensatez".

Por mais de uma década, Langer, um psicólogo social em Harvard, tem pesquisado e escrito sobre a insensatez ea sua contrapartida, "atenção".

Mindlessness, muito apropriadamente, é o mais fácil de entender: é a tendência humana a funcionar em piloto automático, seja por estereótipos, realizando mecanicamente, por repetição, ou simplesmente não está prestando atenção.

Apesar de extremamente comum, poucas pessoas (a menos que eles estão praticando budistas, talvez) realizam na medida em que eles vivem sem pensar.

Mindlessness resulta muitas vezes de pensamento categorial. (Na verdade, o pensamento categórico é a primeira das três categorias de inconsciência!)

Por exemplo, digamos que um toca homem rico para o futuro à sua porta tarde da noite, diz que na caçada e precisa desesperadamente encontrar um 3 'x 7' pedaço de de madeira. Ele lhe dará $ 10.000 para ajudá-lo a encontrar um. Você pensa em um depósito de madeira, embora você não tem idéia onde é e descobrir que nada estaria aberto àquela hora, de qualquer maneira. Então você liga-lo. Não lhe ocorreu que a porta que você abriu um 3 'x 7' pedaço de madeira, porque você pensa nisso como uma categoria chamada "porta", não "madeira".

Todo mundo experimenta o mundo através da criação de categorias. observações Langer são nada de novo sobre esta contagem. Como Walter Lippmann colocá-lo em 1922, "A difusão borrão e uma aspiração indiscriminadamente deslocamento caracterizar o que não entendo."

Todos os estrangeiros são parecidos.

Lippmann: "Nós não ver primeiro e depois definir, definimos primeiro e depois ver."

Lippmann cita um incidente numa conferência de psicologia para ilustrar o ponto de lutar contra um (envolvendo um palhaço) que, sem o conhecimento dos participantes, foram set-up. Posteriormente, as testemunhas foram convidadas a escrever um relatório imediatamente. Dos 40 casos, apenas um a menos de 20 erros por cento em relação aos principais fatos e treze mais de 50 por cento. Em 24 contas, 10 por cento de todos os detalhes foram pura invenção. Como escreve Lippmann, "Fora de quarenta observadores treinados escrevendo um relato responsável de uma cena que acabou de acontecer diante de seus olhos, mais do que a maioria viu uma cena que não tivesse ocorrido. Qual é então que eles viram?... Seu estereótipo de tal uma briga. "

A segunda fonte de estupidez é "agir de uma única perspectiva," indo às cegas com o fluxo ao invés de pensar "fora da caixa".

Nós somos aquilo que os psicólogos chamam de "avarentos cognitivos", a poupança de energia mental para quando precisarmos dele. Por exemplo, se a única perspectiva que estamos operando é de odiar compras, podemos encontrá-lo mais fácil de entrar em coma na Kroger 24 horas, pegando apenas os produtos familiar, ao invés de considerar cuidadosamente qual é o melhor desodorante. Mindlessness, neste caso, é o caminho de menor resistência.

O terceiro tipo de insensatez está relacionada com tarefas repetitivas ou hábito.

Psicólogos pegou sobre isso em 1896, quando Gertrude Stein (!) E Leon Solomons demonstraram que tanto a escrita ea leitura pode ser feito automaticamente. Com muita prática, os indivíduos podem escrever palavras durante a leitura, ditados durante a leitura, e ler em voz alta enquanto escuta uma história que está sendo lido para eles. Ilhas Salomão e Stein concluiu que muitas ações consideradas inteligentes podem ser executadas automaticamente.

Uma vez que as ações se tornam automáticos, o pensamento pode realmente ficar no caminho. Langer e um colega conduzido um experimento em uma linha de trabalho em Boston, onde, por um suposto "estudo lingüístico da qualidade da voz", eles pediram às pessoas para falar em um gravador. Metade foi convidado para falar sobre o motivo era difícil encontrar um trabalho em Boston, a outra metade para falar sobre encontrar um trabalho no Alaska, presumivelmente, um problema que não tinha pensado muito. Metade de cada grupo foram convidados a pensar sobre seu tema dado em primeiro lugar. Os resultados foram claros. As pessoas eram muito mais fluente quando se discute uma questão de romance depois de determinado tempo para pensar nisso antes, ou quando eles falaram sobre um tema familiar, sem tempo para pensar nisso. Pensando em um tema familiar interrompido seu desempenho.

Você pode ver isso em ação: sempre foi usar um ATM diferente e percebi que você não sabe sua senha quando os números são criados de forma diferente?

Langer escreve de forma clara e convincente em dois livros, A atenção eo pouco mushier O Poder da Aprendizagem Consciente. Infelizmente, as ações seu trabalho algumas limitações de psicólogos pop e outros, para esse efeito, as ciências sociais em geral, na medida em que não é apenas histórica, mas em grande parte anedótica, com foco em variedades de insensatez e de estratégias individuais de enfrentamento. O tema suscita muitas perguntas Langer grande, mas não aborda-los: Como é que os ambientes sociais e culturais afetam a insensatez? Como a tecnologia e meios de comunicação contribuem para o uso insensatez? As pessoas são mais estúpidos do que costumava ser?

Leve pensamento categórico: Desde o momento em que pensadores como Lippmann e William James reconheceu esta peculiaridade da humanidade, a mídia eletrônica entrou em cena. Os meios eletrônicos, eu acho, pode ser dito para aumentar o pensamento categórico em pelo menos uma das duas maneiras: a tão comentou sobre-utilização de personagens estereotipados, lugares e idéias em seu conteúdo, e com o meio em si.

A mídia é, por definição, algo atenuante entre os sentidos e do mundo. Nossos cérebros fazem sentido das experiências, tentando integrar sensoriais de entrada de áudio, verbais, táteis, olfativas, etc Para pedir um exemplar, se tudo que uma pessoa sabe que é a palavra falada "gato", uma imagem vaga de um felino é trazido à mente. Se a pessoa ouve a palavra "gato" e pode ouvir o ronronar ou miar animal, ela tem uma idéia mais completa do animal. Uma imagem contribuiria ainda mais informação. . . mas para realmente compreender o que é um gato, ela precisa tocar sua pele, sentir o cheiro da caixa de areia, etc

Quando um objeto é percebido que está faltando em algumas áreas sensoriais, a experiência adquirida a partir de objetos semelhantes enche dentro É aí que reside o potencial da mídia para aumentar o pensamento categorial, para estas memórias servem como estereótipos.

Meios de comunicação oferecem informações sensoriais limitados. Jornal fornecer informação verbal e pictórica, rádio-aurais, televisão-verbal pictórica, e fonética, e assim por diante. O que carece de um meio, nós fornecemos. Comparado aos encontros presenciais, mediados ambientes exigem mais "preenchimento" de informação sensorial. E o mais aclimatados passa a utilizar a mídia, o mais automático este processo parece se tornar; "preencher" torna-se um reflexo inconsciente. Por exemplo, apesar de uma compreensão racional da incapacidade para comunicar a intenção, o tom ea emoção através de e-mail, meras palavras em uma tela pode conjurar profundamente pessoal, reações corporais. Você sabe que não pode determinar a intenção, o tom ea emoção, mas tentar mesmo assim.

Nada disto interesses Langer. E suponho que não há razão para esperar que fosse. Ela é bastante preocupada com inculcar a atenção plena, que, por sua definição, é algo semelhante ao pensamento criativo. . . ou, para usar uma metáfora Zen (apesar da insistência peculiar Langer que sua consciência não tem relação com os conceitos orientais de consciência), você também pode pensar nisso como "mente de principiante", a capacidade de ver as coisas como sempre novo e aberto. As crianças pequenas não têm que ser ensinados a atenção plena, eles são naturalmente dessa maneira, nunca em momento e capazes de se divertir jogando com caixas de papelão.

Subjacente a atenção é a busca contínua e activa de novidade. "O problema é que as pessoas pensam da novidade como um estímulo", disse Langer, em entrevista por telefone.

Em outras palavras, a novidade não reside no filme rápido-fogo edições ou melhor vídeo game gráficos. "O truque é ensinar às pessoas que elas são o que tornam as coisas interessantes. Pode-se ler o mesmo livro, muitas vezes, ou podia ver o mesmo programa de televisão mais e mais, e levar a algo diferente cada vez."

Essencialmente, uma abordagem consciente é como "jogar"; um estúpido, "trabalho". O trabalho é o que se faz para atingir uma meta especial, o jogo é focar sobre o fim do processo está fora de questão. Para emprestar exemplo Langer, tomar golfe (por favor). Alguém que gosta de putters golfe ao redor, experimenta novas técnicas, palestras para as pessoas, joga. Mas digamos que alguém inventa um método milagroso para bater a sua desvantagem em metade. O jogador aprende isso e corta o seu handicap.

Então, talvez eles começam com um clube de milagre para cortá-la pela metade novamente. Depois há uma outra descoberta e assim sucessivamente até que não há jogo. Centrando-se sobre o resultado final, o jogador perde de vista o processo e não há mais jogo. (Isso aconteceu comigo na sétima série, aliás, depois que eu li esse livro Rubik's Cube sobre como resolver isso em três minutos.)

Sendo uma abordagem psicológica pessoal, há muito a recomendar as estratégias conscientes de manter seu cérebro em, permanecendo no momento, e com foco no processo, não o objetivo.

Naturalmente, o esforço individual é fundamental. Mas as pessoas não operam em um vácuo; circunstâncias sociais limitar as opções. Desconsiderando o objetivo, por exemplo, é um mau conselho para alguém que precisa de permanecer empregados.

E é em grande parte em contradição com uma cultura centrada na maximização da eficiência, uma onde as tecnologias ostensivamente para poupar trabalho, como computadores, aparelhos de fax, acesso à internet e telefones celulares têm uma forma estranha de fazer mais trabalho, não menos.

Quem pode se dar ao luxo de permanecer no momento ou prestar atenção ao ambiente, quando há três trabalhos quarta-feira devido, uma cozinha para limpar, bocas para alimentar, um senhorio com raiva de pagar, e 20 chamadas a responder em uma hora?

cólera sugere que seu trabalho é particularmente adequado para a criação de um ambiente de trabalho mais humana. Mas as lojas de inconsciência têm sido exploradas no local de trabalho para tornar as pessoas mais estúpido, não menos.

A ciência social que subjaz mindlessness ajudou a aumentar a percepção e não a realidade que os locais de trabalho acomodar o pensamento consciente. Décadas atrás, psicólogos industriais constatou que os trabalhadores são mais compatíveis, mais produtivos e menos propensos a aderir aos sindicatos quando se sentem como seus pensamentos contagem, independentemente de eles realmente fazem.

Não é novidade, a gestão em geral responderam à pesquisa em Psicologia pela contratação de "recursos humanos" conselheiros e "chefes de equipa" para ouvir os trabalhadores e, em seguida fazer o que quisesse, de qualquer maneira. Várias tendências de gestão, ao longo dos anos, usou vários nomes para a mesma idéia: ergonomia, gestão de "progressista", etc

A aplicação consciente de tais técnicas não são de forma exclusiva para o trabalho. O estado irracional de que Langer escreve é exatamente o que os publicitários, comerciantes e agentes do poder de todos os tipos esperança de aproveitar.

Na verdade, eu me deparei com o trabalho de Langer em Influência Robert Cialdini: A Psicologia da Persuasão, blurbed pelo Journal of Marketing Research como "os livros mais importantes dos últimos dez anos" para os comerciantes. Cialdini cita o caso após caso de inconsciência em ação e como tirar proveito dela.

As indústrias dependem insensatez: as compras por impulso são responsáveis por uma grande quantidade de vendas de mercearia e drogaria.

Porque os consumidores tendem a mindlesslessly selecionar produtos para os atributos irrelevantes (percepção, digamos, uma marca de detergente mais eficaz quando embalado em um certo tom de azul) pesquisadores embalagem meticulosamente testar e analisar os estilos de fonte, as linhas de ferramentas, gradações de cores, texturas e outros aparentemente detalhes irrelevantes que as vendas aumentam.

Depois, há os telefones celulares, de modo que as pessoas não têm que perder um instante de tempo ao cérebro prestar atenção a tais atividades corriqueiras como comer, andar ou dirigir. E não me faça começar nas máquinas de fax, acesso à internet e outros acessórios altamente perturbador projetado para uso em seu carro.

Pode-se até argumentar (apesar de que não serei eu) que a própria economia depende da insensatez. De qualquer forma, o incansável para o crescimento econômico é tão bom quanto qualquer exemplo de abandonar o processo para o gol.

Tudo isso é para dizer que alguém aspira a "consciência" faria bem em reconhecer o mundo exterior. Na raiz da consciência é um enfoque radical sobre o poder da percepção, o entendimento de que as mentalidades ditar a nossa realidade.

Como Langer escreve, porque as pessoas acreditam, com ou sem razão, que lares são sombrias, casas de repouso são sombrias.

Quando esperamos que eles sejam horríveis, que correspondeu às expectativas. Uma pessoa consciente vê o estereótipo de que ela é, uma mentalidade e pode vê-lo de uma nova perspectiva.

Mas o que dizer quando as circunstâncias fora do assunto? Muitas vezes, há razões lares de idosos são vistos como desagradáveis, como qualquer pessoa que já esperou 36horas para ter sua comadre mudou poderia atestar.

Uma abordagem verdadeiramente consciente deve contar com o ponto onde o pensamento precisa mudar versos do próprio ambiente. É para fazer a pergunta: Quando reconhecemos nossa própria estupidez, o que devemos estar atentos sobre?

Mindless in America

Ellen Langer and the social psychology of mindlessness

As someone prone to leaving her groceries at the store and zoning out while bike riding through Manhattan traffic, I can relate to what Ellen Langer calls "mindlessness." For over a decade, Langer, a social psychologist at Harvard, has researched and written about mindlessness and its counterpart, "mindfulness."

Mindlessness, appropriately enough, is the easiest to grasp: it’s the human tendency to operate on autopilot, whether by stereotyping; performing mechanically, by rote; or simply not paying attention. Although exceedingly common, few people (unless they’re practicing Buddhists, perhaps) realize the extent to which they live mindlessly.

Mindlessness often results from categorical thinking. (In fact, categorical thinking is the first of three categories of mindlessness!) For instance, say a rich-looking man rings your doorbell late one night, says he’s on scavenger hunt and desperately needs to find a 3' x 7' piece of wood. He’ll give you $10,000 to help him find one. You think of a lumber yard, although you have no clue where one is and figure that nothing would be open at this hour, anyway. So you turn him down. It doesn’t occur to you that the door you just opened is a 3' x 7' piece of wood, because you think of it as a category called "door," not "wood."

Everyone experiences the world by creating categories. Langer’s observations are nothing new on this count. As Walter Lippmann put it in 1922, "A diffusive blur and an indiscriminantly shifting suction characterize what we do not understand."

All foreigners look alike.

Lippmann: "We do not first see and then define, we define first and then see."

Lippmann cites an incident at a psychology conference to illustrate the point–a fight (involving a clown) that, unbeknownst to attendees, had been set-up. Afterward, the witnesses were asked to immediately write a report. Of the 40 reports, only one made less than 20 percent mistakes in regard to the principal facts; thirteen more than 50 percent. In 24 accounts, 10 percent of the details were pure inventions. As Lippmann writes, "Out of forty trained observers writing a responsible account of a scene that just happened before their eyes, more than a majority saw a scene that had not taken place. What then did they see? . . . their stereotype of such a brawl."

The second source of mindlessness is "acting from a single perspective," blindly going with the flow rather than thinking "out of the box." We are what psychologists refer to as "cognitive misers," saving mental energy for when we need it. For example, if the single perspective we are operating from is HATE SHOPPING, we may find it easier to go into a coma at the 24-hour Kroger, grabbing only familiar products, rather than carefully considering which deodorant is best. Mindlessness, in this case, is the path of least resistance.

The third type of mindlessness is related to repetitive tasks or habit. Psychologists picked up on this in 1896 when Gertrude Stein (!) and Leon Solomons demonstrated that both writing and reading could be done automatically. With much practice, subjects could write words while reading, take dictation while reading, and read aloud while listening to a story being read to them. Solomons and Stein concluded that many actions considered intelligent can be automatically performed.

Once actions become automatic, thinking can actually get in the way. Langer and a colleague conducted an experiment at an employment line in Boston, where for a supposed "linguistic study of voice quality," they asked people to talk into a tape recorder. Half were asked to speak about why it was difficult to find a job in Boston, the other half to speak about finding a job in Alaska–presumably an issue which they had not given much thought. Half of each group were asked to think about their given topic first. The results were clear. People were much more fluent when discussing a novel issue after being given time to think about it first or when they spoke about a familiar topic with no time to think about it. Thinking about a familiar topic disrupted their performance.

You can see this in action: ever gone to use a different ATM and realized you don’t know your password when the numbers are set up differently?

Langer writes clearly and compellingly in two books, Mindfulness and the somewhat mushier The Power of Mindful Learning. Unfortunately, her work shares some limitations of other pop psychologists–and, for that matter, social science in general–in that it is not only ahistorical but largely anecdotal, focused on varieties of mindlessness and individual strategies to cope. The topic raises lots of big questions but Langer doesn’t broach them: How do social and cultural environments affect mindlessness? How do technology and media use contribute to mindlessness? Are people more mindless than they used to be?

Take categorical thinking: Since the time when thinkers such as Lippmann and William James recognized this quirk of humanity, electronic mass media has entered the picture. Electronic media, I think, can be said to increase categorical thinking in at least one of two ways–the oft-remarked-upon use of stereotyped characters, places, and ideas in its content; and through the medium itself.

A medium is, by definition, something mitigating between one’s senses and the world. Our brains make sense of experiences by attempting to integrate sensory input–audio, verbal, olfactory, tactile, etc. To borrow a textbook example, if all a person knows is the spoken word "cat," a vague picture of a feline is brought to mind. If the person hears the word "cat" and can hear the animal purr or meow, she gets a more complete idea of the animal. A picture would contribute still more information . . . but to really understand what a cat is, she’d need to touch its fur, smell the litter box, etc.

When an object is perceived that is lacking in some sensory area, past experience from similar objects fills in. Therein lies media’s potential to increase categorical thinking, for these memories serve as stereotypes.

Media offer limited sensory information. Newspapers provide verbal and pictoral info; radio–aural; television–verbal pictoral, and aural; and so on. What a medium lacks, we provide. Compared to in-person encounters, mediated environments require more "filling in" of sensory information. And the more acclimated one becomes to using media, the more automatic this process seems to become; "filling in" becomes an unconscious reflex. For instance, despite one’s rational understanding of the inability to communicate intent, tone, and emotion through email, mere words on a screen can conjure up deeply personal, bodily reactions. You know you can’t determine intent, tone, and emotion, yet try anyway.

None of this interests Langer. And I suppose there’s no reason to expect it would. She is largely concerned with inculcating mindfulness, which, by her definition, is somewhat akin to creative thinking . . . or, to borrow a Zen metaphor (despite Langer’s peculiar insistence that her mindfulness has no relation to Eastern concepts of mindfulness) you could also think of it as "beginner’s mind"–the ability to always see things as new and open. Little kids don’t have to be taught mindfulness; they’re naturally that way, ever in-the-moment and able to amuse themselves by playing with cardboard boxes.

Underlying mindfulness is the continual and active quest for novelty. "The problem is that people think of novelty as a stimulus," Langer said in a phone interview.

In other words, novelty doesn’t reside in rapid-fire film edits or better video game graphics. "The trick is to teach people that they are what make things interesting. One could read the same book many times, or could see the same television program over and over, and bring to it something different each time."

Essentially, a mindful approach is like "play;" a mindless one, "work." Work is what one does to reach a particular goal; play is focusing on the process–the end is beside the point. To borrow Langer’s example, take golf (please). Someone who enjoys golf putters around, tries out new techniques, talks to people, plays. But say someone invents a miracle method for knocking their handicap in half. The golfer learns this and cuts their handicap. Then maybe they start using a miracle club for cutting it down half again. Then there’s another discovery and so on until there’s no game. By focusing on the end result, the golfer loses sight of the process and there’s no more game. (This happened to me in seventh grade, incidentally, after I read that Rubik’s Cube book about solving it in three minutes.)

As a personal psychological approach, there is much to recommend the mindful strategies of keeping your brain on, staying in the moment, and focusing on the process, not the goal. Naturally, individual effort is crucial. But individuals do not operate in a vacuum; social circumstances limit the options. Disregarding the goal, for instance, is bad advice for someone who needs to stay employed. And it is largely at odds with a culture centered on maximizing efficiency; one where ostensibly labor-saving technologies such as computers, fax machines, internet connections, and cell phones have an odd way of making more work, not less. Who can afford to stay in the moment or pay attention to the surroundings when there are three papers due Wednesday, a kitchen to clean, mouths to feed, an angry landlord to pay, and 20 calls to answer in one hour?

anger suggests that her work is particularly suited to creating a more humane workplace. But the premises of mindlessness have long been exploited in the workplace to make people more mindless, not less. The social science that underlies mindlessness has helped heighten the perception–and not the reality–that workplaces accommodate mindful thinking. Decades ago, industrial psychologists found that workers are more compliant, more productive, and less likely to join unions when they feel like their thoughts count–regardless of whether they actually do. Unsurprisingly, management generally responded to psychologists’ research by hiring "human resources" counselors and "team leaders" to listen to workers, and then doing what they wanted to, anyway. Several management trends have, over the years, used various names for the same idea: human engineering, "progressive" management, etc.

The conscious application of such techniques are by no means exclusive to the workplace. The mindless state of which Langer writes is exactly what advertisers, marketers, and power brokers of all sorts hope to take advantage of. In fact, I first came across Langer’s work in Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, blurbed by the Journal of Marketing Research as "the most important books in the last ten years" for marketers. Cialdini cites case after case of mindlessness in action–and how to take advantage of it.

Entire industries depend on mindlessness: impulse purchases account for a great deal of grocery and drugstore sales. Because shoppers tend to mindlesslessly select products for irrelevant attributes (perceiving, say, a detergent brand as more effective when boxed in a certain shade of blue) packaging researchers meticulously test and scrutinize font styles, tool lines, color gradations, textures, and other seemingly irrelevant details that increase sales. Then there are cell phones–so that people don’t have to waste a moment of brain time paying attention to such mundane activities as eating, walking, or driving. And don’t get me started on the fax machines, internet connections, and other highly disturbing accessories designed for use in your car.

One could even argue (although that one will not be me) that the economy itself depends on mindlessness. At any rate, the relentless drive toward economic growth is as good example as any of abandoning the process for the goal.

All of which is to say that someone aspiring to "mindfulness" would do well to acknowledge the outside world. At the root of mindfulness is a radical focus on the power of perception, the understanding that mindsets dictate our reality. As Langer writes, because people believe, rightly or wrongly, that nursing homes are grim, nursing homes are grim. When we expect them to be horrible, they live up to expectations. A mindful person sees the stereotype for what it is–a mindset–and can then see it from a new perspective.

But what about when outside circumstances do matter? Very often, there are reasons nursing homes are perceived as grim, as anyone who has ever waited 36 hours to have their bedpan changed could attest. A truly mindful approach must reckon with the point where thinking needs to change verses the environment itself. It is to ask the question: Once we acknowledge our own mindlessness, what shall we be mindful about?

minfulness 5

Poder da mente

Langer é um famoso psicólogo prestes a ficar muito mais famoso, mas não da forma como a maioria dos pesquisadores fazem.

Ela é mais conhecida por duas coisas: o seu conceito de inconsciência - a idéia de que muito do que acreditamos ser o pensamento racional é na verdade apenas o nosso cérebro em piloto automático - e seu conceito de consciência, a idéia de que simplesmente prestando atenção ao nosso quotidiano pode nos tornar mais felizes e saudáveis.

Ela foi professor de Harvard a primeira mulher titulares da psicologia, e suas descobertas ajudaram a desencadear, entre outras coisas, o crescente movimento da psicologia positiva.

Seu livro de 1989, "Consciência", foi um best-seller internacional, e ela continua em alta demanda como orador em toda parte de 92d de Nova York Street e de recorrer a liderança guru Tony Robbins Fiji. E agora um filme sobre sua vida está em desenvolvimento com Jennifer Aniston assinou contrato para estrelar como Langer.

Enquanto outros pesquisadores possam se apavora com a Hollywoodization do seu trabalho, por Langer é quase um desenvolvimento orgânico - parte de uma longa jornada para levar a mensagem de sua pesquisa para as massas. Langer reputação no campo da psicologia social repousa sobre um conjunto de engenhosas

experiências que exponha o estranho poder da mente para enganar a si mesmo e transformar o corpo. Em um de seus estudos mais conhecidos, ela descobriu que dando aos moradores do lar de idosos mais controle sobre suas vidas fizeram viver mais.

Em trabalhos mais recentes, ela fez arrumadeiras de hotel perder peso, simplesmente dizendo-lhes que o seu trabalho queimou tantas calorias como um típico treino.

E no estudo, no centro do filme de Aniston, uma equipe liderada por Langer descobriu que instruindo um grupo de homens idosos a falam e agem como se fossem 20 anos mais jovem, pode reverter o processo de envelhecimento.

Hoje, os estudos Langer são leitura obrigatória em cursos de introdução à psicologia, e seu trabalho inspirou uma geração de importantes pesquisadores do comportamento humano que se repensar o próprio pensamento.

Mas Langer se tomou um rumo diferente. Como seus sucessores intelectuais divulgam pesquisas, ela transformou-se em quase uma propaganda para seu próprio trabalho, estabelecendo a espalhar a palavra sobre o poder da atenção plena.

Quase uma década atrás, ela começou a pintar, perseguindo-a, enquanto ela prossegue tudo, como conscientemente possível, hoje suas telas, muitas delas retratos extravagantes de seus cães de estimação, mostra em galerias de renome e vender por milhares de dólares.

Ela tem sido por muito tempo trabalhando em um livro sobre consciência e de tênis, um esporte que joga avidamente. E seus livros recentes se preocupam menos com a forma como funciona a atenção como todos nós seria melhor usá-lo para melhorar nossas vidas.

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Mind Power

Langer is a famous psychologist poised to get much more famous, but not in the ways most researchers do. She is best known for two things: her concept of mindlessness - the idea that much of what we believe to be rational thought is in fact just our brains on autopilot - and her concept of mindfulness, the idea that simply paying attention to our everyday lives can make us happier and healthier.

She was Harvard’s first tenured woman professor of psychology, and her discoveries helped trigger, among other things, the burgeoning positive-psychology movement. Her 1989 book, “Mindfulness,” was an international bestseller, and she remains in high demand as a speaker everywhere from New York’s 92d Street Y to the leadership guru Tony Robbins’s Fiji resort. And now a movie about her life is in development with Jennifer Aniston signed on to star as Langer.

While other researchers might blanch at the Hollywoodization of their work, for Langer it’s almost an organic development - part of a long journey to bring the message of her research to the masses. Langer’s reputation in the field of social psychology rests on a set of ingenious

experiments that expose the strange power of the mind to fool itself and to transform the body. In one of her best-known studies, she found that giving nursing home residents more control over their lives made them live longer.

In more recent work, she made hotel maids lose weight simply by telling them that their work burned as many calories as a typical workout.

And in the study at the center of the Aniston movie, a team led by Langer found that instructing a group of elderly men to talk and act as if they were 20 years younger could reverse the aging process.

Today, Langer’s studies are required reading in introductory psychology courses, and her work has inspired a generation of leading behavioral researchers who are rethinking human thought itself.

But Langer herself has taken a different tack. As her intellectual successors publish research studies, she has transformed herself into almost an advertisement for her own work, setting out to spread the word about the power of mindfulness.

Nearly a decade ago, she took up painting, pursuing it, as she pursues everything, as mindfully as possible; today her canvases, many of them whimsical portraits of her pet dogs, show in well-reputed galleries and sell for thousands of dollars.

She has long been at work on a book on mindfulness and tennis, a sport she plays avidly. And her recent books are concerned less with how mindfulness works than how we all might better use it to improve our lives.

Terapia Existencial

terça-feira, 17 de agosto de 2010

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