Dr. Ellen Langer

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.

Right.

So we have lots of experiences like this.

But way back when, the medical world believed that psychology was independent of health.

And I'm sure doctors in the past still wanted you to be happy.

But I think that they believed it was totally separate from the disease process.

In the medical model, the belief was to get a disease, you have to have the introduction of an antigen.

Now, people, and I think that I might have had some...

part in bringing it about, although people still get it wrong when they talk now about the mind-body connection.

What do they get wrong?

That's better than we have two separate things.

Now they're connected.

Well, the reason it's wrong, how are they connected?

How do you get from this fuzzy thing called a thought to something material called a body?

And you can't explain it.

I say, wait, these are just words.