Dr. Ellen Langer

These things together suggest in each case that here I'm thinking that I'm eating, but I'm not eating, and my body is feeling satisfied.

I think I'm eating this pancreas, and it's chicken, which I love, and then I get sick.

Or my mother, however she did it, where the pancreatic cancer goes away.

You know, it wasn't based on anything the medical world could explain.

So what else is left?

Yes, your mind, people have no idea, I think, in general about what we're capable of.

The power is enormous.

And so the way I encapsulate this to make clear it's our physical well-being as well as our emotional, mental way of being is to question what people mindlessly accept without knowing they're accepting it, which is mind-body dualism.

Nobody knows what it means, but everybody acts.

That's why you're here.

Exactly.

Everybody acts as if this is true.

You have a mind and you have a body, as if these are separate.

All right.

And so if they're separate, you run into the problem of how do they speak to each other?

Now, everybody knows that the mind is affecting the body in some way.

Right.

Yeah, but you see somebody vomiting, and all of a sudden you feel like you're going to regurgitate, and there's no reason except that person has stimulated this.

So you're walking down the street in the fall, a leaf blows in your face, and all of a sudden you're startled.

Your blood pressure and pulse increase until you say, oh, it was just a leaf.