Curiosity - Professor Ellen Langer

Professor Ellen Langer is indeed one of the grandmothers of positive psychology.  In her long career, she was curious about different aspects of wellbeing long before positive psychology was a thing.  Her experiments in the 1970s and 80s highlighted looked at the process of ageing from a different perspective. 

But seriously where do we even begin with Ellen Langer? We have so much admiration for this Professor, who might we add happened to be the first woman ever to be tenured in psychology at Harvard.

Her curious experiments lead to some interesting insights about people:

 When elderly people have more choice over their daily lives and are given responsibility to care for another thing like a plant, they are more likely to live longer.

 When elderly people are given the opportunity to live in a time when they were much younger, through recreating this era and treating these people as if they were younger, they begin to act, feel and even look much younger.  A strong theme throughout her work is mindfulness. She defines mindfulness as actively noticing things. Time and time again her work has highlighted that when we are mindful versus mindless we are enlivened. One example she gives is when you next see someone you know try to find 5 new things about them that you notice, and this will help bring the relationship alive.

Ellen (pictured above) is surrounded by her own works in her home studio as she wields a brush. A self- taught painter who took up the avocation in midlife, she describes her autodidactic approach to art in “On Becoming an Artist: Reinventing Yourself Through Mindful Creativity (2005)”. by Jim Harrison: credit of Harvard Magazine