Dr. Ellen Langer

Let's take the average.

Okay, you want six?

Okay, we'll take five because I'm in charge now.

Okay, so the doctor tells you it's going to take five weeks to heal.

You can't possibly believe

that everybody who's broken their arm is going to take five weeks to heal.

You know, if somebody is an Olympic athlete and somebody else is a couch potato, it doesn't feel like they're both going to, you know.

So what is determining who heals more quickly?

There's always some give.

And what we do is we align ourselves with this absolute, and then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

We did so many of these mind-body studies, a study on diabetes.

We take people who have type 2 diabetes.

We give them a host of tests.

We're now going to have them sit in front of a computer, and we're asking them to play computer games.

This will all be clear in a moment.

And there's a clock next to it.

I'm big on clocks.

A clock next to the computer.

And we tell them, we want you to change the game you're playing every 15 minutes or so.

So they have to look at that clock.