Mindfulness

Ever wonder how people can be so stupid?

Sociologist Ellen Langerís book is about ìmindfulness and mindlessness,î and she says both are so common ìfew of us appreciate their importance.î She is concerned about the ìpsychological and physical costs we pay because of pervasive mindlessness.î

She describes the personal experience surrounding the death of her grandmother. Born and raised in the old country, her grandmother complained about a snake crawling around beneath her skull, giving her headaches. Her doctors couldn't take that description seriously and diagnosed senility. After the old woman's death and an autopsy, it was discovered she had a brain tumor. The mindsets in this experience struck Langer: the doctors had mindsets about senility; she and her mother had mindsets about not questioning doctors.

She explored the idea of mindlessness, which she describes as information treated as though it were context-free. She looked into the issue of choices and responsibilities, which are involved in control, in a nursing home. Some of the residents were given a house plant to choose and care for. A year-and-a-half later, the house plant groups were more cheerful, active, and alert , and less than half as many died. Thus, she learned, mindlessness kills. She cites as further example the pilots accustomed to warm weather, taking off in winter from an icy airport, who mindlessly checked as "off" the de-icer that should have been on, with fatal consequences. As she says, " When we blindly follow routines or unwittingly carry out senseless orders, we are acting like automatons, with potentially grave consequences for ourselves and others (p. 4)."

She describes three aspects of mindlessness. The first is "entrapment by category. " The second is automatic behavior. The third is acting from a single perspective.

To cope with the multitude of sensory input and experience, we sort that input and those experiences by creating categories. We make distinctions, draw boundaries: this is land, that is sea, and that up above is sky. Inside this skin is me, inside the skin of that body is you . The problem is that our categories become fixed, become assumptions, take on life and momentum of their own, and become not ideas that were decisions we have made, but reality. And suddenly our mental constructs become fixed, and rigid: a prison. We can see only through the filter of our pre-structured categories. When we become mindless, we accept the trap those categories create and we consent to live there, in mindlessness.

The second aspect is what Langer calls automatic behavior, which occurs when we take in and use only a limited number of signals from the world without letting other signals penetrate as well. Thus, automatic behavior is defensive in nature, a mode which protects us from too much information at once. Unfortunately, that mode can become habitual. If we do it enough, automatic behavior results from sheer habit and not need. It also can result from sheer laziness -- an unwillingness to do the work of paying attention. Ordinary people on a daily basis participate hugely in highly complex behavior, such as driving on a freeway, without paying real attention to it. Automatic behavior is also the result of refusing to apply principles of critical thinking that challenge perceptions, or ideas, or language, or requests.

A third aspect is allowing ourselves to be programmed by initial realities that chain us to a single perspective. If someone needs something with which to pry something open and asks for a knife to use, and we go in search of it but cannot find it, we will more often as not report back we can't find something, even though a screw driver that could be used is lying in plain sight. Programmed to look for a knife, that's what we seek, when any prying instrument would do. Sometimes instructions which are too specific are self-defeating.

The Roots of Mindlessness

Langer argues mindlessness stems from need to find general organizing principles and operative rules of things. Once found, they are repeated and we thus practice using them until they become almost second-nature to us. We then get into what is called premature cognitive commitment -- that is, we think we know -- indeed, sometimes are sure we know -- what's going when we really don't. Anything we repeat regularly drops out of our conscious mind. It almost becomes body knowledge. Tying our shoes becomes automatic and we can think, talk, listen to something else without paying attention to the process. But if we now stop and try to think our way through the motions or try to describe them to someone else, even if we are tying our shoes in the process, the speed with which we complete the act will have been significantly reduced. Trying to bring body knowledge back into our minds is not easy.

Familiarity with patterns, or tracking, also lull us into mindlessness. Her example:

An acorn is an oak.
A funny story is a joke.
Frogs make a noise we call a croak.
The white of an egg is a yolk.

Oops! The white of an egg is the white, not the yolk. We were patterned by the word sounds and fell into it and responded accordingly.

The first organizing principle we adopt has sticky staying power. It creates a mindset, and anytime we run into something that seems like the first instance, we will use the old one. We make what is called a premature cognitive commitment -- we think we know when we don't know or when we can't be certain. When mindless, we are "committed to one predetermined use of the information (p. 22).î When someone does X, having seen Y follow in the past, we expect Y to follow now. But, of course, first impressions possess no predictive power for the future. Langer uses the example of our own spit, which in our mouth is fine -- there it's our own saliva - but when spat into a glass, the ideas of drinking back some of that same liquid is appalling. The product of spitting is nasty, we learned. Even if it's our own.

Langer argues that mindless patterns, once adopted, become inaccessible much in the same way our unconscious reality is inaccessible. We don't tend to bring them back into the present so we can re-process them, unless forced to by a map of reality that simply doesn't work. As useful as mindsets are, for stabilizing the chaos of sensory stimuli and experience, they can also be extremely limiting, and severely narrow the range of possibilities and experience and interpretation and response.

Langer further argues mindlessness is supported by our belief in limited resources -- a kind of poverty consciousness. Clear and stable categories, she says, allow adequate allocation of those limited resources. For instance, admission to college is limited by intelligence, so the smart ones should go, while it is possible that it might do more good for those who are not quite so intelligent -- they need the education more. Many of us feel, for example, that love is limited -- we have only so much to give. If my partner gives some to someone else, that's just so much less for me. No wonder I get jealous.

Another limiting idea is entropy -- that things run down or wear out, move from organization to disorganization. Entropy as an idea makes us feel important and in control -- after all, if the system is running down, we have to do something about it. If it isn't running down, or even if its getting better, our purposes must become very different. Entropy means we can then become energized to do something to stop it or change it. But the mindset of entropy narrows the possibilities enormously -- for instance: if the world is running down, it is appropriate to fix it, but not to enjoy it. As Langer points out, the notion that reality is socially constructed may in fact yield us even greater power and control.

Another limiting idea of is that of linear time. First this happens, and now this, and now this, and now this, and now this. . . . If everything is in sequence, and one thing occurring after another, the possibilities become limited. In Western culture, we believe in linear time: it started back there, with the Big Bang, say, and stretches to here, the present, then through here far forward into the future way out there somewhere. The standby idea of western culture -- progress -- is based on the concept of linear time. Better means now is not as good as it will be at some undesignated future time. The English-language, for instance, is also a linear; it is read from left to right, one word after the other, and powerfully reinforces a sense of movement and direction, a sense of progress.

But other peoples on the earth have had different concepts of time: some believe in a universal present, in which past, present, and future occur simultaneously; some see time as cyclical; and even we know any preparation today for an event in the future means the future is controlling, even causing, the present. As Langer points out, so-called miracle healings deeply violate our sense of linear time.

Langer also points out our educational system, with its focus on outcomes -- final grades, for instance -- focuses attention on success or failure rather than the process. If we have been through the drill and we foresee the outcome, the temptation during the process is to become mindless and stop paying attention. We can also be so focused on the goal that we don't pay attention to what is going on right in front of us. Such an outcome orientation sometimes makes us miss present experience. It also creates an attachment to the outcome that can be debilitating. Langer also argues outcome education presents a model of the world which is certain, which is factual, which is absolute. The living world is none of these.

As we know, context is all important . Our behavior in a hospital is different from our behavior at a party, on many levels--body language, language, tone of voice, attitude, expectation, experience. As we grow up in a culture and are socialized, we learn the importance of contexts. But contexts can quickly become mindsets that lead us to think it is all out there instead of in here, between our ears. The differences in response to the same context are huge. For example, take as a context a ride on a roller-coaster. Two people sit next to each other in the front of the car. One is elated and exhilarated, yet the other is terrified. Our values, our information, our behavior, our sense of value, our immediately preceding experience--for instance, if we dip our hand in cold water and then into lukewarm water, the lukewarm water will feel quite warm; but our hand moved from hot water feels lukewarm water as chilly -- all these factors affect context and us, and especially our reactions and interpretations.

This effect will also result in a context confusion most easily seen when we project our understandings or feelings onto another person, often resulting an enormous confusion and miscommunication. We all too often assume the other person is operating out of that the same context we are. These causes of mindlessness -- repetition, premature cognitive commitment, belief in limited resources, the notion of linear time, education-for-outcome, and the powerful influence of context--all these impinge on our experience daily.

One writer has argued that humankind's major modern preoccupation is the avoidance of boredom. Life is routine, repetitive, sometimes really boring. To overcome the boredom we sometimes just switch off, become mindless. We have the scripts, the scenarios, fore-knowledge of what the next 15 minutes will be, so we simply stop paying attention. In a kind of zombie state, we go through the motions, wool-gathering, day-dreaming, or mentally dealing with something else, and in the process often make mistakes: put things in the wrong drawers , dial the wrong number, even forget who we're calling. These mistakes can range from the trivial to the catastrophic -- remember the pilots who forgot to turn on the plane's de-icer.

Other serious consequences can be an unnecessarily limited self-image. "Oh, I couldn't do that." Many women have encountered their narrowed self-image when they become divorced or on the death of their husband when they had to take on much more responsibility. This same kind of unnecessary limitation can also occur for businesses. Langer's example for this is the fact that railroads lost customers and went into decline because they thought they were railroads and forgot or never thought they were in the transportation business.

Limited self-images also result from our outcome orientation, in which we compare others' achievements to our own without recognizing the processes involved. Most of us have a limitation mindset -- "Oh, I can't do that." Can't be an artist, or draw, or dance, or save money, or get anywhere on time, or do math, or write a school paper, or be organized, or become a star anything. And, of course, with that mindset, it's true. Mindlessness also allows us to resolve many of the contradictions we face. Someone who would not kill a fly cheerfully dines with lip-smacking pleasure on a prime piece of dead cow. People have been sucked into what ultimately became criminal behavior one small step at a time -- criminal careers usually start with petty crime. Many money laundering schemes, for instance, apparently start innocently enough, then escalate.

A small lie can balloon into a grand deception. Mindlessness prevents intelligent choices, limits our choices, and so reduces our personal power and control. Life is complicated and nothing is simple, but mindlessness leads us to attribute problems to a single cause. When this happens, as in divorce when the other partner is blamed, healing is slowed. If we decide our alcoholism is genetic, our own power to change is compromised and eroded. It is mindlessness and habituation that makes us stick with an old, familiar way of doing something even when a newer, more efficient process is available. The old way creates a mindset and the first pattern is the easiest.

Mindlessness also results in what Dr. Martin E. P. Seligmann, in Learned Optimism (Pocket Books, 1990) calls learned helplessness. Lack of success, the failure to achieve the positive outcome we expect and want, discourages and demoralizes and teaches us that we are helpless -- that no matter what we do, we will not succeed. We are indoctrinated with the idea that past performance predicts future success. Losers lose and winners win, but losers don't win.

Finally, mindlessness imprisons us. Our mindsets predetermine the possibilities for us, closing off alternatives and options. A simple decision that we already know the answer -- our adoption of a premature cognitive commitment -- confines us to only a few of the many possibilities. We have seen potential of our own and in others wasted and wither over time by learned mindsets that work against us. Talent and ability go by the wayside for lack of time or attention and permission to act upon them. We listen too often when people tells us "You can't do that," until it becomes "I can't do that." And, of course, we can't.

Mindlessness is about old categories, old information, old and single perspectives. Thus, the cure for mindlessness, which is mindfulness, is the ability to create or adopt new categories, to get and accept new information, and to adopt a different or additional perspectives. Children do all these things naturally and easily. But these processes sometimes ossify as we grow up.

Ellen Langer
Mindfulness
Addison-Wesley, 1989