Dr. Ellen Langer

I'm at this horse event.

Remember that I'm a straight-A student, obnoxiously so, right?

And this man asked me, can I watch his horse for him because he wants to get his horse a hot dog?

But I say yes because I say yes to virtually everything.

He came back with the hot dog and the horse ate it.

And that's when I realized that everything I thought I knew could be wrong.

Now, a normal person would be scared about that.

For me, I was thrilled because that opened up a world of possibilities.

And then I thought about it.

Now, people don't know a lot about science, but what's very important for people to understand is science only gives us probabilities.

So if you were to do this experiment with horses, you'd have horses of this kind weighing this amount on this particular day who've been not eaten for this number of hours, given this amount of grain mixed with this amount of meat.

When you do all of that, most of them don't eat meat.

It's a mouthful.

So it's shortened, horses don't eat meat.

And that's the way we live our lives.

And the hard part is that everything you mindlessly took in when you were younger is firmly there guiding your behavior when you're older.

And just think about it.

Do you want your 30-year-old self

what you're doing to be dictated by your 15-year-old self or your 30-year-old self to dictate what's coming when you're 40 and 50 and 60.

And we're oblivious to all of this.