Ellen J. Langer

If we could turn back the clock psychologically, could we also turn it back physically? For more than thirty years, award-winning social psychologist Ellen Langer has studied this provocative question, and now, in Counterclockwise, she presents the answer: Opening our minds to what's possible, instead of presuming impossibility, can lead to better health--at any age. Drawing on landmark work in the field and her own body of colorful and highly original experiments--including the first detailed discussion of her "counterclockwise" study, in which elderly men lived for a week as though it was 1959 and showed dramatic improvements in their hearing, memory, dexterity, appetite, and general well-being--Langer shows that the magic of rejuvenation and ongoing good health lies in being aware of the ways we mindlessly react to social and cultural cues. Examining the hidden decisions and vocabulary that shape the medical world ("chronic" versus "acute," "cure" versus "remission"), the powerful physical effects of placebos, and the intricate but often defeatist ways we define our physical health, Langer challenges the idea that the limits we assume and impose on ourselves are real. With only subtle shifts in our thinking, in our language, and in our expectations, she tells us, we can begin to change the ingrained behaviors that sap health, optimism, and vitality from our lives. Improved vision, younger appearance, weight loss, and increased longevity are just four of the results that Langer has demonstrated.Immensely readable and riveting, Counterclockwise offers a transformative and bold new paradigm: the psychology of possibility. A hopeful and groundbreaking book by an author who has changed how people all over the world think and feel, Counterclockwise is sure to join Mindfulness as a standard source on new-century science and healing.From the Hardcover edition.

Can significant advances in development occur after adolescence? What are the highest possible states or stages of human development and how can they be realized? These and related critical issues are addressed in this volume by leading researchers and theorists in adult development. How we conceive of the endpoint, or highest state of development is crucial because it shapes our understanding of the direction, possibilities, and mechanisms of human growth. Even a decade ago, most psychologists believed that qualitative advances in development did not occur after adolescence. Based on recent research on adults, however, psychologists now question whether growth of fundamental human capacities necessarily culminates prior to adulthood. This new volume explores a variety of endpoints beyond the ordinarily proposed limits of human development. In addition to describing advanced forms of cognitive functioning , contributors also discuss other domains integral to adult growth--including affective, moral, self, and consciousness development.

An experiment was conducted in 1979 by Langer on a group of a dozen volunteers who were all elderly men in their late seventies and eighties. The men agreed to live in an isolated environment for a week. The world of 1959 was recreated which at that time would have been twenty years earlier. She asked them to live as though they were twenty years younger.They were speak in the present tense and imagine what it was like to live in 1959. At the close of testing revealed that memory and hearing and joint flexibility were all improved.