by Harry Steinharter Have you ever felt tired, ever felt sick, ever wanted to feel 30 years younger? Well, now you can! In just a few easy steps you transform your life and make your mind and body work as they used in the good old days. Ellen Langer, who was at the time, a 67-year-old psychology professor at Harvard, conducted a radical experiment in 1981. She asked 8 men in their seventies to participate in her study. The study involved the eight men staying in a hotel that was specially furnished to recreate 1959. The men stayed in the hotel for two consecutive weeks. She asked the men to not only live in the hotel and embrace the time period but to also recreate themselves as they were in 1959. They were told to talk about events that happened that year in the present tense, and they watched TV and radio programming from that year as well. In all respects, they were living in 1959. At the end of their stay, the eight men were proven to be more flexible, had greater dexterity, better vision, and sat taller than another group of men who stayed there. The difference between the two groups was that the group that didn’t improve was never told to recreate themselves as they were in 1959. Those men were living in the era because of their environment, but they weren’t living in the era in their mind. So what does all this mean? Well for starters it allows you to feel young again. All you have to do is live in an environment made to recreate the era you’re looking for and to embrace who you were during that time period. This is because the brain creates powerful placebos that then affect the rest of your body. The men who improved essentially tricked their body. Their eyes and ears saw and heard 1959, and then by talking in the present tense about 1959, they tricked their brain into believing that it really was 1959. This affected their muscles, eyesight, and everything else because it made their brain feel young again.
1 Comment
Sean Whynot
1/20/2019 01:49:53 pm
This is super cool. It is really surprising that something as simple as pretending to be in a time period of when you were younger can actually make you feel younger and have effects like making you more flexible. I wonder if this has to do with the fact that the world has changed so much in the past 100 years. When the people that were studied were younger, the world was so much different that it was today. I am curious if this will happen to myself when I grow old or if because we are already learning about the advances in the world it wouldn't affect me the same. Another thing this experiment reminded me of is an episode of black mirror when older people about use VR to go back to that time in a virtual world.
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