Dr. Ellen Langer

So that's a change that's come about slowly.

Now, for me personally, once we had those data, I did several studies where we simply make elderly people, every time I say the word elderly, I stop now being older myself, but we make seniors.

more mindful and they live longer so it's important for you to know that mindfulness as i study it has nothing to do with meditation meditation is fine it's just different okay when you meditate you take yourself out of the world and you say your mantra to yourself over and

Mindfulness, as I study it, couldn't be more in the world.

That what you're doing is not a practice, it's a way of being.

You actively notice new things about the things you thought you knew, you come to see you didn't know them at all, and then your mind naturally goes to them.

Now, if we start off with the realization that everything is changing,

Everything looks different from different perspectives.

The idea of being certain of anything becomes silly because you can't know.

It's not what it was the last time you looked.

And if you could adopt just one mindset, it's the only one I believe is good for you, that uncertainty is the rule, not the exception, then you don't know, so then you tune in.

The problem is our parents, our schools,

the media virtually everything is trying to teach us absolutes and when you think you know something you don't pay any attention so i'll do what i do probably too frequently now let me ask you a simple question this is the one that everybody knows how much is one plus one

Two?

Okay, and that's what everybody says.

I feel like this is a trick question.

Well, it is, though, because one plus one isn't always two.

That if you are adding one wad of chewing gum plus one wad of chewing gum, one plus one is one.

If you add one pile of laundry plus one pile of laundry, one plus one is one.

You had one cloud plus one cloud, one plus one is one.