Dr. Ellen Langer, Ph.D., is a social psychologist and the first female professor to gain tenure in the Psychology Department at Harvard University. She is the author of eleven books and more than two hundred research articles written for general and academic readers on mindfulness for over 35 years. Her best selling books include Mindfulness; The Power of Mindful Learning; On Becoming an Artist: Reinventing Yourself Through Mindful Creativity; and her most recent book, Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility. Her recently published book, the Wiley Mindfulness Handbook, is an anthology on mindfulness in which leading researchers integrate work derived from her western scientific theoretical base of mindfulness with research on eastern derived forms of meditation.
Dr. Langer has been described as the “mother of mindfulness” and has written extensively on the illusion of control, mindful aging, stress, decision-making, and health. Among other honors, she is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and three Distinguished Scientist Awards, the World Congress Award, the NYU Alumni Achievement Award, and the Staats award for Unifying Psychology.
The citation for the APA distinguished contributions award reads, in part, “…her pioneering work revealed the profound effects of increasing mindful behavior…and offers new hope to millions whose problems were previously seen as unalterable and inevitable. Ellen Langer has demonstrated repeatedly how our limits are of our own making.”
Dr. Langer has been a guest speaker all over the world, including Japan, Malaysia, Germany, Australia, Mexico, Switzerland, Argentina and China. Her websites can be found at www.langermindfulnessinstitute.com and www.ellenlanger.com.
She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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Hi Dr. Dave,
I too think that there is some adaptive purpose to our automatization but may not now be current adaptive. Dr. Langer substituted the word advantageous for adaptive in this discussion and I think the word advantageous has different connotation than adaptive. Also, I’ve recently learned of a neurosystem called the default mode network which is the brain activity when we are mind wandering or mindless. Again to me it seems there must be some evolutionary adaptive function to this network. Great episode!