The age-old "mind/body" problem (i.e. How can something non-material, such as a thought, affect the material body?) continues to challenge philosophers and scientists alike. The implicit assumption, however – that mind and body are separate entities – may be the problem that needs to be addressed. From Plotinus to Nagarjuna to Spinoza, a long line of thinkers through the ages have proposed that mind and body are but two sides of the same coin. That many such thinkers were often dwelling over concerns of philosophy or religion when they developed this idea may unfortunately have caused this insight to be met with suspicion, even outright derision, by the modern scientific academe. Current findings from fields as diverse as social psychology, neurobiology, and cognitive science, however, indicate that the tides of popular sentiment may again be turning.

As early as 1976/77, Judith Rodin and I gave nursing home elders mindful choices to make in a controlled randomized trial and found an increase in longevity (Langer and Rodin, 1976; Rodin and Langer, 1977). We replicated the effect of a mindfulness intervention on longevity in other experimental investigations (Alexander, et al, 1989; Langer, et al 1984) as well. Our research indicated that merely changing the pattern of one's thinking could indeed generate significant effects in the body and that mind and body were not as divorced from one another as the dominant scientific paradigm at that time had theretofore assumed. Today it is more or less taken for granted that mind effects body although the pathways are still unknown but mind-body monism is not accepted by the modern scientific world because pathways are still unknown.

In this essay, I am proposing a reworking of our understanding of the relationship between mind and body where the search for pathways from one to the other may be misguided, and do so from the perspective of mindfulness theory. To better understand the context of this proposal, it will perhaps be helpful to first review just what I mean by mindfulness and its counterpart, mindlessness.

Mindfulness is defined as an active state of mind characterized by novel distinction–drawing that results in being 1) situated in the present; 2)sensitive to context and perspective and 3) guided (but not governed) by rules and routines. The phenomenological experience of mindfulness is the felt experience of engagement. The process of noticing or creating novelty reveals inherent uncertainty. When we recognize that we don’t know the person, object, or situation as well as we thought we did, our attention naturally goes to the target.

Mindlessness, by contrast, is defined as an inactive state of mind characterized by reliance on distinctions and categories drawn in the past. Here 1)the past over-determines the present; 2)we are trapped in a single perspective but oblivious to that entrapment; 3)we are insensitive to context; and 3)rules and routines govern rather than guide our behavior. Moreover, mindlessness typically comes about by default rather than by design. When we accept information as if unconditionally true, we become trapped by the substantive implications of the information. Even if it is to our advantage in the future to question the information, if we mindlessly processed it, it will not occur to us to do so (Chanowitz and Langer, 1981). The same rigid relationship results from mindless repetition (Langer and Imber, 1979).

Mindfulness allows for doubt and that allows for choice and thus free will. Being in a mindful state, removed from rigid routines, introduces possibilities from which one can make alternative choices and thus exercise their free will. When mindless, by contrast, our behavior is predetermined by the past, closing us off to choice and new possibilities. We live in a world governed by the principles of science. The precision with which we can now measure the world in and around us is, however, only as useful as the degree of mindfulness we employ to analyze it. Science becomes mindless when we automatically begin to conflate precision with certainty. Certainties lead to mindlessness; when we think we know, there is no reason to find out. Too often scientists observe a phenomenon, create a theory to explain it and then collect data to prove their theory. Not surprisingly, confirmation is found. Theory is supposed to be understood as possibility but at least in the social sciences, most often is taken as absolute fact leaving little experienced difference between laws and theories. These theories build upon each other with the result of a series of concatenated probabilities making it harder and harder to question the basic assumptions of the original proposition. Scientific evidence can only yield probabilities but science in use takes these probabilities and converts them into absolutes. This practice makes it hard to question basic assumptions.

Take medicine for example. Many diseases are labeled chronic. Chronic is understood as uncontrollable. If something is understood to be uncontrollable we would be foolish to try and control it. Yet no science can prove uncontrollability. All science can prove is that something is possible or it is indeterminate. Indeterminate is very different from uncontrollable. Moreover, by generalizing the findings to the general population because of methodological considerations like random assignment without due regard to the subject population used (i.e. all of those people who self heal are missing from the medical experiment) we are discouraged from trying to self heal. In any experiment the researcher has to make many hidden decisions regarding the parameters of the study (i.e. who the subjects are, the time and circumstances in which they’ll be tested, the amount of the independent variable to administer, etc). With these dimensions out of mind, findings seem more certain than they might otherwise seem. Couple this with the mistaken tendency of people to seek certainty and confuse the stability of their mindsets with the stability of the underlying phenomena, and we end up with an illusion of knowing and unnecessary limits to what we might otherwise find out.

This illusory sense of knowing is pervasive, extending even to the point where we misconstrue the nature of our own mental processes. What are we actually doing when we hold a certain concept in our mind's eye? Picture a car, for example. Now, start taking away individual elements that seem essential to the "car-ness" of it all, and ask yourself if you'd still know it's a car. A car without wheels? Still a car. Minus a steering wheel, or a bumper or an engine? Still seen as a car (albeit perhaps not one you'd want as yours.). A Jeep and a station wagon and a Smartcar all somehow fit into this same category of "car" despite their clear diversity in features and appearance. Wittgenstein (1953) famously performed a similar dissection of conceptual categories, effectively demonstrating (in his case, with the concept of "game") the inherent illusion that our mental categories for things are actually based upon some identifiable set of core features. So what is it that makes a car a car? Not much, as it turns out.

Recent findings in the field of cognitive neuropsychology have begun to indicate that this assertion – that conceptual categories lack inherent unifying features – is backed by more than just sound logic. Barsalou (2009) and Wilson-Mendelhall et al. (2010) have established that the brain doesn't actually use a set of core concepts to define mental categories of objects and phenomena – rather, our thought processes remain in a perpetual state of collection, assessment, and reaction to incoming information. It is only at the point of higher-level cognitive processes that we begin to grow lazy and assume that all examples of cars have some inherent "car-ness" about them (Or, for that matter, that all instances of fear, or anger, or pride, must necessarily be connected by some unifying element). In reality, the idea of "car" (or "fear", or any other concept) is actually represented in our brains as a loose amalgam of instances (this morning on the way to work in traffic, on a showroom floor, in a junkyard), specific examples (a smartcar, a station wagon, a jeep), functions (creating momentum, providing shelter, controlling climate), and other characteristics of certain objects that we learn at some point to clump together. In short, there's no core element that makes a car a car every time, all the time. Mindfulness requires that we engage the world with this same degree of dynamism and flexibility.

No matter what we are doing, we are doing it mindlessly or mindfully and the consequences of being in one state or the other are enormous. Research described in over 150 research papers and four books on the topic of mindfulness reveals that the simple processes of creating and noticing novelty are literally and figuratively enlivening. We’ve found increases in well being, health, competence, relationship satisfaction, effective leadership and creativity to name a few of the many findings. Perhaps the most startling findings are the most recent. In one study we instructed a group of symphony musicians to play a familiar piece of music and "make it new in very subtle ways that only they would know." Another group of musicians was told to "recall a performance of the music that they were very pleased with and replicate it." We taped the performances and played them for audiences, blind to our instruction, and they overwhelmingly preferred the mindfully played piece. The musicians showed a similar preference (Langer, Russell, and Eisenkraft, 2009). An interesting aspect to this work is that rather than cacophony, when everyone "did it their own way," superior coordinated performance resulted. In other work we also showed that mindfulness seems to leave its imprint in the products of our labor.

More important to the present discussion is recent work that follows up on research originally conducted in 1981. The idea was and is deceptively simple. Mind and body are just words, concepts to which we rigidly adhere. Consider artificial boundaries like North vs South Korea or old (>65) vs. young (<65), where the concepts may have been mindfully generated initially but then took on a life of their own.

What would happen, we asked, if we got rid of the distinction between mind and body? If we put the mind and body back together so to speak, then wherever the mind is, so too would be the body. Within this understanding there is no reason to search for mediating mechanisms. Whatever is going on at the level of the brain is happening simultaneously with the thought and is just another level of analysis. With this view in mind we conducted a series of investigations where we put minds in healthy places and took physical measurements.

In the first of these studies, elderly men were taken to a timeless retreat retrofitted to 20 years earlier. To firmly anchor their minds in that earlier time they would speak in the present tense about the past for the full week they spent there. A comparison group of men lived the week at the retreat reminiscing about the past. For them, their minds were firmly in the present. The results were notable, especially considering that the study was conducted back in 1981 before there was much mind-body research and before 80 became the new 60. Despite how enfeebled these men in their 8o’s were at the start of the study, both groups improved significantly from where they started. Hearing, vision, memory and grip strength were significantly different after the week. The experimental group showed greater improvement differing significantly from the comparison group with respect to manual dexterity, IQ: 63 % > (only 44% of the control group); height, gait, posture, joint flexibility, diminished symptoms of arthritis. We photographed everyone before and after the week and found that all the experimental participants looked noticeably younger at the end of the study.

In my view, it was the change in mindset, much the same way a placebo works, that accounted for the difference between the two groups. By priming a time when they were vital, their mindsets of old age as a time of debilitation became irrelevant. Of course over the week many things could have varied that we couldn’t possible control in such an ambitious undertaking. We were able to use tighter controls, however, in more recent investigations. Two things should be addressed regardless of the explanation for the findings one may choose. The first is the widespread belief that elders are not supposed to improve their hearing and vision—or indeed improve on any of the measures we took. I’ll return to this in a later discussion of science. The second issue to consider is that the idea of mind-body unity led to these findings and thus, at the least, the theory serves a heuristic purpose.

Ali Crum and I (Crum and Langer, 2007) tested this mind-body hypothesis in a very different setting. We ran the study with chambermaids. We started by inquiring about how much exercise they thought they got in a typical week. Surprisingly, they thought they didn’t get exercise, despite the fact that their work is exercise. Exercise, they thought was what one did after work. If exercise is good for our health and they get more than the surgeon general recommends, then we should expect that they would be healthier than socioeconomically-equivalent others who do not exercise as much or as consistently. Interestingly, they were less healthy. While noteworthy, this was not the focus of the study. We randomly divided the participants into two groups and taught one group to change their mindset and to regard their work as exercise. We took as many measures as we could think of regarding food eaten during the course of the month between tests, exercise intensity at work and exercise outside of work. There were no differences between the two groups on any of these measures. One group continued to see their work as exercise and one group did not. We found significant differences on measures of waist to hip ratio, weight loss, body mass index and blood pressure. We attribute these improvements for the experimental group to the change in mindset.

We tested this mind-body hypothesis in another series of experiments. Here we focused on vision. The standard eye chart has letters that get progressively smaller as one reads down the chart. Implicitly this creates the expectation that soon we will not be able to see. We reversed the eye chart so that the letters get progressively larger, thereby creating the mindset that soon we will be able to see. With the change in mindset, participants tested were able to see what they couldn’t see before. There is also an expectation on the eye chart that we will start to have difficultly around two-thirds of the way down the chart. Accordingly, we created a chart that began a third of the way the standard chart. Again, participants could see what they couldn’t see before.

In another study we took advantage of the assumption that pilots have excellent vision. We had men don the clothes of air force pilots and fly a flight simulator. Control participants simulated flying the simulator. Vision improved for those embodying the mindset of pilot (Langer, Djikic, Pirson, Madenci, & Donohue 2010).

Finally, we wanted to see if we could condition improved vision. Participants read a chapter of one of my books where the font of either the letter "a" or the letter "e" was imperceptibly small or they read the chapter in normal font size. Over time, participants would of course come to know what the "dot" represented. Consider seeing "c.n, t.ke, and m.ny" for example. We found: When participants were exposed to the small a and then later tested for the letter a: 19.3% of the people in the experimental group saw better compared to those in the control group (p=0.036). When exposed to the small a and tested for the letter e: 50.7% of individuals in the experimental group saw better than compared to those in the control group (p<0.001). When exposed to the small a and tested for the letter e : 44% of participants in the experimental group saw better compared to the control group (p <0.001). When exposed to the small e and tested for the letter a: 26.8% of participants in the experimental group saw better compared to the control group (p<0.01). When exposed to the manipulation of both letter a and e and then tested for all letters in Snellen eye chart the experimental group missed 5.44 of the small letters a and the control group missed 8.74 letters. In the Snellen eye chart test, the experimental group missed 5.88 of the small letters e and the control group missed 9.37 letters. (p<.05) (Pirson and Langer, 2010)

Our accepted theories and mindsets tell us that vision is not supposed to improve. But from where do these mindsets come? We accept negative mindsets, e.g. vision will necessarily worsen over time, and we create theories of the eye to show why this must be. The expectation becomes self-fulfilling, further validating the original supposition. Yet with this simple understanding that our own minds may create our seeming limitations, we may come to see and function beyond where alternative mind-body views currently enable.