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?”