Horses eat hot dogs

Posted

“We’re unaware of when we’re mindless,” Ellen Langer argued at a Poptech webinar in 2013.

Langer is an artist, psychology professor and researcher at Harvard University. She offered a humorous anecdote about a time she was dumbfounded by the sight of a horse — an animal widely understood to be herbivorous — eating a hot dog.

This led her to question where she’d gotten the information about horses. Who decided horses are herbivorous? How many horses were tested? How much meat was tested with how much grain? How hungry were the horses? How big were the horses?

“I want to argue that almost all that we think we know is wrong in at least some context,” Langer said. The reason, she purports, is mindlessness.

“This mindlessness is not stupidity,” she said. “It’s behavior that made sense at time one. We took it in without questioning it, we’re using it over and over again, things are slowly changing — and we’re oblivious to it. At some point the behavior that made sense, now doesn’t.”

The antidote to such a condition, she alleges, is mindfulness: An active state of mind in which you are noticing new things, and are fully engaged with the present moment. “Everything is always changing,” she said. “Everything looks different from different perspectives.”

In one of her studies, she asked two different groups of classical musicians to approach performing with different cognitive instructions. “For many symphony musicians, they’re bored to death,” she said. “They’re playing the same pieces over and over and over again.”

The control group was told to try to replicate a recent performance of theirs that they felt was satisfying, and to do the best they could. The mindful group was told to make the performance new in subtle ways that only they would notice — constraining their attention only to the task at hand. Langer said the results of the study found that the mindful performance was overwhelmingly preferred by both audiences and musicians.

“You can hear people’s consciousness,” she said. “It leaves its footprint in everything we do.”

When someone speaks, thinks and acts mindfully — others notice. The absence of such attention is equally obvious — particularly now, in the midst of the enormously polarizing American election cycle we find ourselves in.

There is unrest on both sides of the aisle. A reality show host and a former first lady — both of whom have inherited wealth and privilege beyond what is fathomable for most Americans — are about to face off in an overwrought, superficial, mud-slinging squabble for the presidency.

How exactly did we get here? Are these two candidates qualified to be our representatives? Those are complicated questions for someone smarter than I. But with respect to how we speak and act among each other, I don’t think the solutions have to be so complex.

We all want the same things; we just have different suggestions about how to get there. We are not as divided as we seem.

If you’re red in the face and banging on your keyboard to prove to someone on Facebook that a political candidate is or isn’t insane, you probably aren’t being mindful. I understand that this election cycle is emotional, but part of being mindful is putting your emotions on a shelf and looking at things from a cosmic perspective. To be mindful is to be receptive to all possibilities — including the fact that you could be wrong.

And you know what, maybe you are wrong! Maybe horses eat hot dogs.

It’s hard work being mindful, but it’s work worth doing.

Comments about this column? Nciccone@liherald.com.