Post by the Scribe on Apr 6, 2021 6:15:38 GMT
The 'counterclockwise' study
Imagine, for a moment, living in a nursing home. Your meals are in a cafeteria, your recreation is at scheduled times, and you're surrounded by other old people, mostly strangers. You've been robbed of your autonomy, maybe even your identity — the very things that make you you may be more tied to your past than your present, and nobody expects very much of you anymore.
No matter your age, this is not an environment in which most people thrive. But Langer thought that maybe, just maybe, if you could put people in a psychologically better setting — one they would associate with a better, younger version of themselves — their bodies might follow along. "Wherever you put the mind, you're necessarily putting the body," she explained many years later, on CBS This Morning.
Since Langer couldn't actually send elderly people into the past, she decided to bring the past into the present. "We would recreate the world of 1959 and ask subjects to live as though it were twenty years earlier," she wrote, in her 2009 book "Counterclockwise."
How exactly did that work? Here's how Bruce Grierson described the beginning of this experiment in The New York Times Magazine:
Eight men in their 70s stepped out of a van in front of a converted monastery in New Hampshire. They shuffled forward, a few of them arthritically stooped, a couple with canes. Then they passed through the door and entered a time warp. Perry Como crooned on a vintage radio. Ed Sullivan welcomed guests on a black-and-white TV. Everything inside — including the books on the shelves and the magazines lying around — were designed to conjure 1959.
The men didn't just reminisce about what things were like at that time (a control group did that). They were instructed to behave as if it were actually 1959, while the control group lived in a similar environment but didn't act as if it were decades ago.
They discussed historical events as if they were current news, and no provisions were made that acknowledged the men's weakened physical state; no one carried their bags or helped them up the stairs or treated them like they were old.
"Nothing — no mirrors, no modern-day clothing, no photos except portraits of their much younger selves — spoiled the illusion that they had shaken off 22 years," Grierson wrote.
A week later, both the control group and the experimental group showed improvements in "physical strength, manual dexterity, gait, posture, perception, memory, cognition, taste sensitivity, hearing, and vision," Langer wrote in "Counterclockwise."
And according to Langer's account, most of those improvements were much more significant in the group told to live as if it were actually 1959; a full 63% of them had better intelligence test scores at the end of the experiment than they did at the beginning, compared to 44% in the control group. Four independent volunteers, who knew nothing about the study, looked at before and after photos of the men in the experimental group and perceived those in the "after" photos as an average of two years younger than those in the "before."
On the last day of the study, Langer wrote, men "who had seemed so frail" just days before ended up playing "an impromptu touch football game on the front lawn."
In some ways, the results should not be surprising. Grierson writes that Langer actually said to the participants, "we have good reason to believe that if you are successful at this, you will feel as you did in 1959."
When you believe that something will affect you in a particular way, it often does. That's why placebo controls are baked into every rigorous clinical trial.
Your own expectations, and the expectations of others, are powerful. And expectations of the declining cognitive and physical abilities that come with age are pervasive.
www.amazon.com/Counterclockwise-Mindful-Health-Power-Possibility/dp/0345502043?tag=bisafetynet2-20