An Interactive Map of the 2,000+ Sounds Humans Use to Communicate Without Words: Grunts, Sobs, Sighs, Laughs & More

in Language Lessons, Psychology | February 19th, 2019

When did language begin? The question is not an easy one to answer. There are no records of the event. “Languages don’t leave fossils,” notes the Linguistic Society of America, “and fossil skulls only tell us the overall shape and size of hominid brains, not what the brains could do.” The scant evidence from evolutionary biology does not tell us when early humans first began to use language, only that they could 100,000 years or so ago.

However, the question also depends on what we mean by language. Before the linguistic technologies of grammar and syntax, hominids, like other mammals today and a good number of non-mammals too, had a wordless language that communicated more directly, and more honestly, than any of the thousands of ways to string syllables into sentences.

That language still exists, of course, and those who understand it know when someone is afraid, relieved, frustrated, angry, confused, surprised, embarrassed, or awed, no matter what that someone says. It is a language of feeling—of sighs, grunts, rumbles, moans, whistles, sniffs, laughs, sobs, and so forth. Researchers call them “vocal bursts” and as any long-suffering married couple can tell you, they communicate a whole range of specific feelings.

“Emotional expressions,” says UC Berkeley psychology graduate student Alan Cowen, “color our social interactions with spirited declarations of our inner feeling that are difficult to fake, and that our friends, co-workers and loved ones rely on to decipher our true commitments.“ Cowen and his colleagues devised a study to test the range of emotion vocal bursts can carry.

The researchers asked 56 people, reports Discover magazine, “some professional actors and some not, to react to different emotional scenarios” in recordings. Next, they played the recordings for over a 1,000 people, who rated “the vocalizations based on the emotions and tone (positive or negative) they thought the clips conveyed.”

The researchers found that “vocal bursts convey at least 24 distinct kinds of emotions.” They plotted those feelings on a colorful interactive map, publicly available online. “The team says it could be useful in helping robotic devices better pin down human emotions,” Discover writes. “It could also be handy in clinical settings, helping patients who struggle with emotional processing.” The study only recorded vocalizations from English speakers, and “the results would undoubtedly vary if people from other countries or who spoke other languages were surveyed.”

But this limitation does not undermine another implication of the study: that human language consists of far more than just words, and that vocal bursts, which we likely share with a wide swath of the animal kingdom, are not only, perhaps, an original language but also one that continues to communicate the things we can’t or won’t say to each other. Read the study here and see the interactive vocal burst map here.

via MetaFilter

Why We Say “OK”: The History of the Most Widely Spoken Word in the World

The History of the English Language in Ten Animated Minutes

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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The Strange Dancing Plague of 1518: When Hundreds of People in France Could Not Stop Dancing for Months

in History, Psychology, Science | January 14th, 2019

If you find yourself thinking you aren’t a victim of fashion, maybe take another look. Yes, we can consciously train ourselves to resist trends through force of habit. We can declare our preferences and stand on principle. But we aren’t consciously aware of what’s happening in the hidden turnings of our brains. Maybe what we call the unconscious has more control over us than we would like to think.

Inexplicable episodes of mass obsession and compulsion serve as disquieting examples. Mass panics and delusions tend to occur, argues author John Waller, “in people who are under extreme psychological distress, and who believe in the possibility of spirit possession. All of these conditions were satisfied in Strasbourg in 1518,” the year the Dancing Plague came to the town in Alsace—an involuntary communal dance festival with deadly outcomes.

The event began with one person, as you’ll learn in the almost jaunty animated BBC video below, a woman known as Frau Troffea. One day she began dancing in the street. People came out of their houses and gawked, laughed, and clapped. Then she didn’t stop. She “continued to dance, without resting, morning, afternoon, and night for six whole days.” Then her neighbors joined in. Within a month, 400 people were “dancing relentlessly without music or song.”

We might expect that town leaders in this late-Medieval period would have declared it a mass possession event and commenced with exorcisms or witch burnings. Instead, it was said to be a natural phenomenon. Drawing on humoral theory, “local physicians blamed it on ‘hot blood,’” History.com’s Evan Andrews writes. They “suggested the afflicted simply gyrate the fever away. A stage was constructed and professional dancers were brought in. The town even hired a band to provide backing music.”

Soon, however, bloody and exhausted, people began dying from strokes and heart attacks. The dancing went on for months. It was not a fad. No one was enjoying themselves. On the contrary, Waller writes, “contemporaries were certain that the afflicted did not want to dance and the dancers themselves, when they could, expressed their misery and need for help.” This contradicts suggestions they were willing members of a cult, and paints an even darker picture of the event.

Certain psychonauts might see in the 1518 Dancing Plague a shared unconscious, working something out while dragging the poor Strasbourgians along behind it. Other, more or less plausible explanations have included ergotism, or poisoning “from a psychotropic mould that grows on stalks of rye.” However, Waller points out, ergot “typically cuts off blood supply to the extremities making coordinated movement very difficult.”

He suggests the dancing mania came about through the meeting of two prior conditions: “The city’s poor were suffering from severe famine and disease,” and many people in the region believed they could obtain good health by dancing before a statue of Saint Vitus. They also believed, he writes, that “St. Vitus… had the power to take over their minds and inflict a terrible, compulsive dance. Once these highly vulnerable people began to anticipate the St. Vitus curse they increased the likelihood that they’d enter the trance state.”

The mystery cannot be definitively solved, but it does seem that what Waller calls “fervent supernaturalism” played a key role, as it has in many mass hysterias, including “ten such contagions which had broken out along the Rhine and Moselle rivers since 1374,” as the Public Domain Review notes. Further up, see a 1642 engraving based on a 1564 drawing by Peter Breughel of another dancing epidemic which occurred that year in Molenbeek. The 17th century German engraving above of a dancing epidemic in a churchyard features a man holding a severed arm.

We see mass panics and delusions around the world, for reasons that are rarely clear to scholars, psychiatrists, historians, anthropologists, and physicians during or after the fact. What is medically known as Saint Vitus dance, or Sydenham’s Chorea, has recognized physical causes like rheumatic fever and occurs in a specific subset of the population. The historical Saint Vitus Dance, or Dancing Plague, however, affected people indiscriminately and seems to have been a phenomenon of mass suggestion, like many other social-psychological events around the world.

Episodes of epidemic manias related to outmoded supernatural beliefs can seem especially bizarre, but the mass psychology of 21st century western culture includes many episodes of social contagion and compulsion no less strange, and perhaps no less widespread or deadly, especially during times of extreme stress.

via Public Domain Review

Behold the Mysterious Voynich Manuscript: The 15th-Century Text That Linguists & Code-Breakers Can’t Understand

A Free Yale Course on Medieval History: 700 Years in 22 Lectures

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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How Music Can Awaken Patients with Alzheimer’s and Dementia

in Health, Life, Music, Psychology, Science | December 10th, 2018

In the late 1950’s, pioneering free jazz bandleader Sun Ra played a gig at a Chicago mental hospital, booked there by his manager Alton Abraham, who had an interest in alternative medicine. The experiment in musical therapy worked wonders. One patient who had not moved or spoken in years reportedly got up, walked over to the piano, and yelled out, “you call that music!”

The anecdote illustrates just one experience among untold millions in which a person suffering from a debilitating neurological condition responds positively, even miraculously, it seems, to music.

As famed neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks puts it in his book Musicophilia, “musical perception, musical sensibility, musical emotion and musical memory can survive long after other forms of memory have disappeared.”

This medical fact makes musical therapy an ideal intervention for patients suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. In the short video above, Sacks describes his visits to patients in various old age homes. “Some of them are confused, some are agitated, some are lethargic, some have almost lost language,” he says, “but all of them, without exception, respond to music.”

We can see just such a response in the clip at the top, in which the barely responsive Henry Dryer, a 92-year-old nursing home resident with dementia, transforms when he hears music. “The philosopher Kant called music ‘the quickening art,’ and Henry’s being quickened,” says Sacks says of the dramatic change, “he’s being brought to life.” Suddenly lucid and happy, Henry looks up and says, “I’m crazy about music. Beautiful sounds.”

The clip comes from a documentary called Alive Inside, winner of a 2014 Sundance Audience Award (see the trailer above), a film that shows us several musical “quickenings” like Henry’s. “Before Dryer started using his iPod,” notes The Week, “he could only answer yes-or-no questions—and sometimes he sat silently and still for hours at a time.” Now, he sings, carries on conversations and can “even recall things from years ago.”

Sacks comments that “music imprints itself on the brain deeper than any other human experience,” evoking emotions in ways that nothing else can. A 2010 Boston University study showed that Alzheimer’s patients “learned more lyrics when they were set to music rather than just spoken.” Likewise, researchers at the University of Utah found music to be “an alternative route for communicating with patients.”

As senior author of the Utah study, Dr. Norman Foster, says, “language and visual memory pathways are damaged early as the disease progresses, but personalized music programs can activate the brain, especially for patients who are losing contact with their environment.” See the effects for yourself in this extraordinary film, and learn more about Sacks’ adventures with music and the brain in the 2007 discussion of Musicophilia, just above.

Discover the Retirement Home for Elderly Musicians Created by Giuseppe Verdi: Created in 1899, It Still Lives On Today

The French Village Designed to Promote the Well-Being of Alzheimer’s Patients: A Visual Introduction to the Pioneering Experiment

In Touching Video, People with Alzheimer’s Tell Us Which Memories They Never Want to Forget

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Psilocybin Could Soon Be a Legal Treatment for Depression: Johns Hopkins Professor, Roland Griffiths, Explains How Psilocybin Can Relieve Suffering

in Health, Psychology, Science, TED Talks | November 23rd, 2018

Much of the recent scientific research into psychedelics has picked up where researchers left off in the mid-20th century, before LSD, psilocybin, and other psychoactive drugs became countercultural means of consciousness expansion, and then banned, illegal substances the government sought to control. Scientists from several fields studied psychedelics as treatments for addiction, depression, and anxiety, and end-of-life care. These applications were conceived and tested several decades ago.

Now, thanks to some serious investment from high-profile institutions like Johns Hopkins University, and thanks to changing government attitudes toward psychoactive drugs, it may be possible for psilocybin, the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms,” to get legal approval for therapy in a clinical setting by 2021. “For the first time in U.S. history,” Shelby Hartman reports at Rolling Stone, “a psychedelic drug is on the fast track to getting approved for treating depression by the federal government.”

As Michael Pollan has detailed in his latest book, How to Change Your Mind, the possibilities for psilocybin and other such drugs are vast. “But before the Food and Drug Administration can be petitioned to reclassify it,” Brittany Shoot notes at Fortune, the drug “first has to clear phase III clinical trials. The entire process is expected to take about five years.” In the TEDMED video above, you can see Roland R. Griffiths, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Johns Hopkins, discuss the ways in which psilocybin, “under supported conditions, can occasion mystical-type experiences associated with enduring positive changes in attitudes and behavior.”

The implications of this research span the fields of ethics and medicine, psychology and religion, and it’s fitting that Dr. Griffiths leads off with a statement about the compatibility of spirituality and science, supported by a quote from Einstein, who said “the most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It’s the source of all true science.” But the work Griffiths and others have been engaged in is primarily practical in nature—though it does not at all exclude the mystical—like finding effective means to treat depression in cancer patients, for example.

“Sixteen million Americans suffer from depression and approximately one-third of them are treatment resistant,” Hartman writes. “Depression is also an epidemic worldwide, affecting 300 million people around the world.” Psychotropic drugs like psilocybin, LSD, and MDMA (which is not classified as a psychedelic), have been shown for a long time to work for many people suffering from severe mental illness and addictions.

Although such drugs present some potential for abuse, they are not highly addictive, especially relative to the flood of opioids on the legal market that are currently devastating whole communities as people use them to self-medicate. It seems that what has most prevented psychedelics from being researched and prescribed has as much or more to do with long-standing prejudice and fear as it does with a genuine concern for public health. (And that’s not even to mention the financial interests who exert tremendous pressure on drug policy.)

But now, Hartman writes, “it appears [researchers] have come too far to go back—and the federal government is finally recognizing it, too.” Find out why this research matters in Dr. Griffiths’ talk, Pollan’s book, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, and some of the posts we’ve linked to below.

New LSD Research Provides the First Images of the Brain on Acid, and Hints at Its Potential to Promote Creativity

Artist Draws 9 Portraits While on LSD: Inside the 1950s Experiments to Turn LSD into a “Creativity Pill”

When Aldous Huxley, Dying of Cancer, Left This World Tripping on LSD, Experiencing “the Most Serene, the Most Beautiful Death” (1963)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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How to Practice Effectively: Lessons from Neuroscience Can Help Us Master Skills in Music, Sports & Beyond

in Neuroscience, Productivity, Psychology | October 29th, 2018

Practice makes perfect, so the cliché says, although like many clichés, it has also spawned corrective variants. “Practice makes permanent,” a common one of them goes, and what it lacks in catchiness it may well make up for in neuroscientific truth. We’ve all recognized that, when we do things a certain way, we tend to keep doing them in that certain way; in fact, the more we’ve done them that way before, the more likely we’ll do them that way next time. What holds true for simple habits, formed over long periods of time and often inadvertently, also holds true for deliberately perfected — or anyway, permanent-ified — tasks. But what happens in our brains to cause it?

“Practice is the repetition of an action with the goal of improvement, and it helps us perform with more ease, speed, and confidence,” says the narrator of “How to Practice Effectively… for Just About Anything,” educators Annie Bosler and Don Greene’s TED Ed video above. It then goes on to explain our two kinds of neural tissue, grey matter and white matter. The former “processes information in the brain, directing signals and sensory stimuli to nerve cells,” and the latter “is mostly made up of fatty tissue and nerve fibers.” When we move, “information needs to travel from the brain’s grey matter, down the spinal cord, through a chain of nerve fibers called axons to our muscles,” and those axons in the white matter “are wrapped with a fatty substance called myelin.”

Myelin, and the sheath it forms, is key: “similar to insulation on electrical cables,” it “prevents energy loss from electrical signals that the brain uses, moving them more efficiently along neural pathways.” (You’ve probably read about the weakening of myelin sheaths as a factor in ALS and other movement-related neurological disorders.) Recent studies performed on mice suggest that repeating a motion builds up the layers of those axon-insulating myelin sheaths, “and the more layers, the greater the insulation around the axon chains; forming a sort of superhighway for information connecting your brain to your muscles.” This, though it has no direct effect on our muscles, may be what we’re building when we say we’re building “muscle memory.”

All interesting facts, to be sure, but how can they help us in or own practice sessions, whatever those sessions may find us practicing? Bosler and Greene provide a series of tips, each quite simple but all in alignment with current neuroscientific knowledge. They include:

Focus on the task at hand. “Minimize potential distractions by turning off the computer or TV and putting your cell phone on airplane mode.”
Go slow. “Coordination is built with repetitions, whether correct or incorrect. If you gradually increase the speed of the quality repetitions, you have a better chance of doing them correctly.”
Frequent repetitions with allotted breaks. “Studies have shown that many top athletes, musicians, and dancers spend 50–60 hours per week on activities related to their craft. Many divide their time used for effective practice into multiple daily practice sessions of limited duration.”
Practice in your imagination. “In one study, 144 basketball players were divided into two groups. Group A physically practiced one-handed free throws while Group B only mentally practiced them. When they were tested at the end of the two week experiment, the intermediate and experienced players in both groups had improved by nearly the same amount.”

If you’d like more suggestions on how to practice effectively, have a look at the list of twelve tips from Wynton Marsalis we featured here on Open Culture last year. He takes a more expansive approach, encouraging those who practice — not just music but sports, art, or anything else besides — to adopt strategies like writing out a schedule, avoiding showing off, and staying optimistic. We must also stay realistic: optimism, even optimism backed by science, can’t make our skills perfect. None of our skills are perfect — not even Wynton Marsalis’ — but with the right techniques, we can at least give them some degree of permanence.

Wynton Marsalis Gives 12 Tips on How to Practice: For Musicians, Athletes, or Anyone Who Wants to Learn Something New

What Are the Most Effective Strategies for Learning a Foreign Language?: Six TED Talks Provide the Answers

How Buddhism & Neuroscience Can Help You Change How Your Mind Works: A New Course by Bestselling Author Robert Wright

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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Free Guided Imagery Recordings Help Kids Cope with Pain, Stress & Anxiety

in Health, Psychology | October 23rd, 2018

I don’t have to tell you modern life is full of stressors that exacerbate hypertension, depression, and everything in-between. Therapeutic stress reduction techniques based in mindfulness meditation, trauma research, and a number of other fields have proliferated in our daily lives and everyday conversation, helping people cope with chronic pain, career anxiety, and the toxic miasma of our geopolitics.

These methods have been very successful among adult populations—of monks, veterans, clinical subjects, etc.—but adults process information very differently than children. And as every parent knows, kids get majorly stressed out too, whether they’re absorbing our anxieties second-hand or feeling the pressures of their own social and educational environments.

We can’t expect young children to sit still and pay attention to their breath for thirty minutes, or to change their mental scripts with cognitive behavioral therapy. It’s far easier for kids to process things through their imagination, channeling anxiety through play, or art, or—as pediatric psychologists at the Children’s Hospital of Orange County (CHOC) explain—guided mental visualization, or “guided imagery,” as they call it. How does it work?

Guided imagery involves envisioning a certain goal to help cope with health problems or the task or skill a child is trying to learn or master. Guided imagery is most often used as a relaxation technique that involves sitting or lying quietly and imagining a favorite, peaceful setting like a beach, meadow or forest.

The therapists at CHOC “teach patients to imagine sights, sounds, smells, tastes or other sensations to create a kind of daydream that ‘removes’ them from or gives them control over their present situation.” In the video at the top, Dr. Cindy Kim describes the technique as “akin to biofeedback,” and it has been especially helpful for children facing a scary medical procedure.

While all of us might need to go to our happy place once in a while, most kids find it hard to relax without some form of creative redirection, like the guided imagery program above from Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital. At the CHOC website, you’ll find over a dozen other audio programs tailored for pain and stress management and relaxation, for both young children and adolescents. Lifehacker’s parenting editor Michelle Woo describes a representative sampling of the programs:

For pain management for young kids, listen to “The Special Cake.” Sample line: “With your next deep breath in, notice the sweet smell of the yummy frosting.”
For pain management for teens, listen to “Climbing a Ladder.” Sample line: “Let’s have a look at the first step. As you put your foot on it, you begin to remember a time when you realize that you can have control over your body.”
For anxiety, listen to “The Magic Kite.” Sample line: “All of the uncomfortable feelings or sadness or anger or pain or worry are all on the ground and you are flying away from it.”

As kids listen to audio, Woo writes, “have them notice how their body feels—their breathing may slow and their muscles might relax.” And hey, there’s no reason guided imagery can’t work for grown-ups too. Try it if you’re feeling stressed and let us know how it works for you.

via Lifehacker

Daily Meditation Boosts & Revitalizes the Brain and Reduces Stress, Harvard Study Finds

How Stress Can Change Your Brain: An Animated Introduction

Meditation 101: A Short, Animated Beginner’s Guide

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.

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How Do You Help a Grieving Friend? Acknowledge Their Pain and Skip the Platitudes & Facile Advice

in Life, Psychology | October 16th, 2018

“What does it mean to protest suffering, as distinct from acknowledging it?” writes Susan Sontag in Regarding the Pain of Others. Acknowledgment, the recognition of unimaginable pain and loss, is central, it turns out, to healing. Grief expert Alan Wolfelt lists “acknowledging the full reality of the loss” as the first in his “Six Needs of Mourning.” But he also notes what so many in his field are quick to point out about contemporary culture: “Normal thoughts and feelings connected to loss are typically seen as unnecessary and even shameful.”

The important work of grieving gets bypassed not only by our own internalized shame, but by the unhelpful interventions of others. Megan Devine—author of It’s OK That You’re Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn’t Understand—explains the central role of acknowledgment, simply being with others in the full scope of their pain, in the short animated video above. Many of us are taught to do anything but, to throw out advice and platitudes instead. (Illustrated here by an animated bunny tossing out rainbows.)

Our motives may not be “nefarious,” she says, but—to use Sontag’s phrase—trying to fix someone’s suffering amounts to a form of protest against it. And it only makes things worse. Devine is a psychotherapist and bereaved person herself. Her book, notes Jane Brody at The New York Times, “grew out of the tragic loss of her beloved partner, who drowned at age 39 while the couple was on vacation.” She speaks not in the jargon of a clinician but in the frank language of a fellow sufferer and survivor.

“You don’t need platitudes,” she writes on her website, “You don’t need cheerleading. You don’t need to be told this all happened for a reason. You certainly don’t need to be told that you needed your pain in order to learn something about life. Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.”

Being with someone in their grief is “a radical act,” says Devine. “In order to really support you, I have to acknowledge that things really are as bad as they feel to you.” Offers of cheer or advice create defensive barriers. Turning toward someone’s suffering gives them what they need the most: “Being heard helps. It’s the best medicine we have. It makes things better, even when they can’t be made right.”

via Laughing Squid

Stephen Fry on Coping with Depression: It’s Raining, But the Sun Will Come Out Again

How Stress Can Change Your Brain: An Animated Introduction

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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You’re Only As Old As You Feel: Harvard Psychologist Ellen Langer Shows How Mental Attitude Can Potentially Reverse the Effects of Aging

in Harvard, Health, Psychology, Science | October 8th, 2018

You’re only as old as you feel, right? The platitude may be true. In a scientifically verifiable sense, “feeling”—a state of mind—may not only determine psychological well-being but physical health as well, including the natural aging processes of the body.

Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer has spent decades testing the hypothesis, and has come to some interesting conclusions about the relationship between mental processes and bodily aging. In order to do the kind of work she has for decades, she has had to put aside the thorny “mind-body” problem—a longstanding philosophical and practical impasse in figuring out how the two interact. “Let’s forget about how you get from one to the other,” she tells CBS This Morning in a 2014 interview above, “and in fact see those as just words…. Wherever you’re putting the mind, you’re necessarily putting the body.”

What happens to the one, she theorized, will necessarily affect the other. In a 1981 experiment, which she called the “counterclockwise study,” she and her research team placed eight men in their late 70s in a monastery in New Hampshire, converted to transport them all to 1959 when they were in their prime. Furniture, décor, news, sports, music, TV, movies: every cultural reference dated from the period. There were no mirrors, only photos of the men in their 20s. They spoke and acted as though they had traveled back in time and gotten younger.

The results were extraordinary, almost too good to be true, she felt. “On several measures,” The New York Times reported in 2014, “they outperformed a control group that came earlier to the monastery but didn’t imagine themselves back into the skin of their younger selves, though they were encouraged to reminisce.” The “counterclockwise” participants “were suppler, showed greater manual dexterity and sat taller…. Perhaps most improbably, their sight improved” as well as their hearing. Given the seemingly miraculous outcomes, tiny sample size, and the unorthodoxy of the experiment, Langer decided not to publish at the time but continued to work on similar studies looking at how the mind affects the body.

Then, almost thirty years later, the BBC contacted her about staging a televised recreation of the monastery experiment, “with six aging former celebrities as guinea pigs,” who were transported back to 1975 by similar means. The stars “emerged after a week as apparently rejuvenated as Langer’s septuagenarians in New Hampshire.” These experiments and several others Langer has conducted over the years strongly suggest that chronological age is not a linear clock pushing us inexorably toward decline. It is, rather, a collection of variables that include psychological well-being and something called an “epigenetic clock,” a mechanism that UCLA geneticist Steve Horvath has discovered directly correlates with the aging process, and may show us how to change it.

But while Horvath has yet to answer several pressing questions about how certain genetic mechanisms interact, Langer has put such questions aside in favor of testing the mind-body connection in a series of experiments, which engage the aging—or people with specific conditions—in studies that stretch their minds. By creating illusions like the monastery time machine, Langer has found that perception has a significant effect on aging. If we perceive ourselves to be younger, healthier, more capable, more vibrant, despite the messages about how we should look and act at our chronological age, then our cells and tissues get the message. Not only can a change in perception affect aging, but also, Langer theorizes, obesity, cancer, diabetes, and other chronic or life-threatening conditions. Much of her research here gets spelled out in her book, Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility.

“Whether it’s about aging or anything else,” says Lager, “if you are surrounded by people who have certain expectations for you, you tend to meet those expectations, positive or negative.” The social expectation for the aging is that they will get weaker, less capable, and more prone to deterioration and illness. Ignoring these expectations and changing our perception of what chronological age means—and doesn’t mean—Langer says, seems to actually slow or partially reverse the decline and to ward off disease. Those psychological changes can come about through interventions like caring for children, plants, or animals and using mindfulness practices to learn how to be attentive to change.

You can read more about Langer and Horvath’s specific findings on aging, psychology, and epigenetics at Nautilus.

Note: you can get Langer’s book–Counterclockwise Mindful Health and the Transformative Power of Possibility–as a free audiobook through Audible.com’s free trial program. Get more details on the free trial here.

How Mindfulness Makes Us Happier & Better Able to Meet Life’s Challenges: Two Animated Primers Explain

How the Japanese Practice of “Forest Bathing”—Or Just Hanging Out in the Woods—Can Lower Stress Levels and Fight Disease

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

An Interactive Map of the 2,000+ Sounds Humans Use to Communicate Without Words: Grunts, Sobs, Sighs, Laughs & More

The Strange Dancing Plague of 1518: When Hundreds of People in France Could Not Stop Dancing for Months

How Music Can Awaken Patients with Alzheimer’s and Dementia

Psilocybin Could Soon Be a Legal Treatment for Depression: Johns Hopkins Professor, Roland Griffiths, Explains How Psilocybin Can Relieve Suffering

How to Practice Effectively: Lessons from Neuroscience Can Help Us Master Skills in Music, Sports & Beyond

Free Guided Imagery Recordings Help Kids Cope with Pain, Stress & Anxiety

How Do You Help a Grieving Friend? Acknowledge Their Pain and Skip the Platitudes & Facile Advice

You’re Only As Old As You Feel: Harvard Psychologist Ellen Langer Shows How Mental Attitude Can Potentially Reverse the Effects of Aging

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