The Power of Mindful Learning (20 page)

Galileo embodied this ambiguity in human accomplishments. Galileo relied on direct observation to transform the
nature of truth in Western culture. Empiricism is commonplace today, but for Galileo's contemporaries it was a novelty.
The vast majority of Galileo's contemporaries, following Aristotle, believed that a heavier object would fall more quickly
than a lighter object. Galileo demonstrated that, if one could
account for differences in air resistance, objects of unequal
weight would fall at the same rate. He overturned the worldview that dominated his age merely by testing it empirically.

Yet we may also see Galileo as a person trapped by his own
ideas. Insisting that only what could be seen was believable,
Galileo dismissed the work of his contemporary Johannes
Kepler. From Galileo's perspective Kepler relied on a mysterious, unseen and therefore unbelievable force. Today this force is
called gravity. By discounting Kepler's assertion that the moon
caused the tides, Galileo failed to recognize a force that today is considered self-evident. Galileo's strength, his reliance on direct
observation, also proved to have limitations.

Those of us who teach are often tolerant of students' mistakes-especially when we believe that the students are of limited intelligence-but it does not occur to us to view their
answers not as mistakes, but as responses to a different context.

To view an answer as right or wrong, we must freeze the
context in which the answer is being evaluated. Take, for example, "The shortest distance between two points is a straight
path." This statement might be right in the context of plane
geometry, but try to get to the bank from your home and note
the quickest way. As another example, try fitting the equation 2
+ 2 = 4 with "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts."

When we are mindful, we recognize that every inadequate
answer is adequate in another context. In the perspective of every
person lies a lens through which we may better understand ourselves. If we respect students' abilities to define their own experiences, to generate their own hypotheses, and to discover new
ways of categorizing the world, we might not be so quick to evaluate the adequacy of their answers. We might, instead, begin listening to their questions. Out of the questions of students come
some of the most creative ideas and discoveries.

Perhaps it was because of a desire to provide at least one
dimension on which each person could compare favorably that J. P. Guilford developed a model of intelligence having 150 distinct dimensions. He hoped that this model would be useful "in
guiding students into courses and majors" and "pointing to
undemonstrated abilities."20

Although the proliferation of dimensions of intelligence
may help prop up students' sense of self-worth, in the process
of identifying strengths we may be unintentionally undermining students' development. Not only do the students who are
helped lose the potential benefit of generating a view of their
own abilities, but the recipients of most remedial efforts usually
accept a devaluation of self.21 Such devaluation sometimes
causes people to compensate by devaluing others. In other
words, people accept the ways others have been shown to be
better than they by identifying ways in which they are better
than others.22 Adding dimensions of intelligence encourages
such labeling and competition.

Such comparisons may also lead to devaluing certain aspects of experience in order to draw comparisons that are personally favorable. People tend to value activities that they do
well and to devalue activities at which they are not successful.

From their inception intelligence tests have encouraged this
negative labeling. They have been used to identify students who
would benefit from programs other than the normal school curriculum. The first intelligence test was developed to assist the
French Ministry of Education in identifying students who
needed to be placed in remedial schools. We continue to view
testing of intelligence as a means of sorting students into groups
of one kind or another: college bound, vocational, gifted, and so on. Too often, rather than encouraging students to discover the
usefulness of their failures or to identify the abilities embedded
in their disabilities, our educational system seeks to help students by steering them in directions that avoid such challenges.

By valuing some activities-subjects, sports, courses-and
devaluing others, we ignore the many perspectives from which
any activity may be viewed. At every moment in a mindful state,
we are learning something, we are changing in some way, we are
interacting with the environment so that both we and the environment are changed. From this perspective, a moment spent on
one activity as opposed to another is not consequential. Once we
realize that whenever we tackle any particular task we are learning and growing, we do not measure ourselves by the type or
program or course we are in. By the same token, once we realize
that the reason we did not accomplish one task was because
another task was accomplished, we no longer need to evaluate
ourselves negatively for not accomplishing the first task.23

As we saw earlier, at the heart of many theories of intelligence is
a belief that it is possible to identify an optimum fit between
individual and environment. However, we can see that how we
interact with our environment is not a matter of fitting ourselves
to an external norm; rather, it is a process by which we give form,
meaning, and value to our world. If there is no best fit, then an
ability to identify an optimum fit may not be a useful concept.

I do not mean to suggest that intelligence tests do not
measure something, but the dimension these tests measure
may be a neutral trait. The abilities measured by intelligence
tests may be useful in certain situations, much as it is sometimes useful to be tall. Yet being small, although burdensome
in an environment constructed for taller people, could be an
advantage for working in certain conditions, and it is not difficult to imagine a world in which tallness would be a disadvantage. If the world had been designed by small people, imagine
how uncomfortable others would be. It is more difficult to
imagine an environment in which low intelligence would be
advantageous. Nonetheless, mindfulness theory asks us to
imagine it. The degree to which we are unable to do so is an
an indication of how comprehensively our world has been
organized around the category of intelligence.

When shown a sentence with a word repeated in it, people
almost always miss the extra word. For instance, try out the last
sentence of the preceding paragraph on your friends or colleagues. When a small group of people with head injuries was
shown such a sentence, all of them caught the double word, an
in the example. Why is this so? We can only hypothesize that
those who have lost some of their familiar abilities are no
longer able to take the world for granted. (Experienced meditators also found the double word with no problem.)

Any disability may function as an ability if we are able to
view it from a new perspective.24 When we are mindful, we recognize that the way in which we tend to construct our world is
only one construction among many. We might consider recon structing this world for ourselves whenever it does not fit our
abilities or perceived lack of abilities, whenever we feel stunted or
less than fully effective. From a mindful perspective, when we are
not feeling smart we are not being stupid; rather, we are being
sensible from some other perspective. Even when we are feeling
brilliant, we still have a lot to learn from those of so-called low
intelligence about alternative ways of constructing our world.

The widespread failure to recognize the insights that can be
found in all different perspectives may itself constitute a disability. Indeed, those of us who are intelligent enough to be
writing or reading about such an abstract concept as intelligence may suffer severely from this disability. Should we continue to teach this disability to our children?

One day Soshi was walking on the bank of a river with a
friend. "How delightfully the fishes are enjoying themselves in the
water, " exclaimed Soshi. His friend spoke to him thus, "You are not
a fish, how do you know that the fishes are enjoying themselves?"
"You are not myself, " returned Soshi, "how do you know that I do
not know that the fishes are enjoying themselves?"

KAKUZO OKAKURA

Japanese Philosopher

How can we know if we do not ask? Why should we ask if
we are certain we know? All answers come out of the question.
If we pay attention to our questions, we increase the power of
mindful learning.

INTRODUCTION

1. New York Times Magazine, August 11, 1996.

2. Langer, E. Mindfulness. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1989.

1 WHEN PRACTICE MAKES IMPERFECT

1. Saint-Exupery, A. de. The Little Prince, trans. Katherine
Woods (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1943, 1971).

2. Langer, E., and Imber, L. "When Practice Makes Imperfect: The Debilitating Effects of Overlearning, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37 (1979): 2014-25.

3. Dudkin, D., Brandt, D., Bodner, T., and Langer, E., unpublished data, Harvard University.

4. Langer, E., Mindfulness (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley,
1989).

5. Milgram, S., Obedience to Authority (New York: Harper and
Row, 1974).

6. Pietrasz, L. and Langer, E., unpublished manuscript (Harvard University).

7. Langer, E., Mindfulness (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley,
1989).

8. Pierce, A., and Pierce, R., Expressive Movement: Posture and
Action in Daily Life, Sports and the Performing Arts (New York:
Plenum Press, 1989).

9. Feldman, D., Nature's Gambit: Child Prodigies and the
Development of Human Potential (New York: Basic Books,
1986).

10. Anderson J. R., Cognitive Science and It's Implications (San
Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1980).

11. Payzant, G. Glenn Gould, Music and Mind (Toronto: Key
Porter Books, 1984).

12. Bodner,T, Waterfield, R., and Langer, E., "Mindfulness in
Finance" (manuscript in preparation, Harvard University).

2 CREATIVE DISTRACTION

1. Langer, E., Janis, I., and Wolfer, J., "Reduction of Psychological Stress in Surgical Patients,",journal of Experimental Psychology 11 (1975): 155-65.

2. Yarbus, A. L. Role of Eye Movements in the Visual Process
(Nauka: Moscow, 1965).

3. Langer, E., and Bodner, T., "Mindfulness and Attention"
(manuscript, Harvard University, 1995).

4. Langer, E., and Bayliss, M., "Mindfulness, Attention, and
Memory" (manuscript, Harvard University, 1994).

5. American Psychiatric Association, DSM IV Washington,
DC, 1994 (also APA WWW page on Childhood Disorders);
"Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder" (Rockville, MD:
National Institute of Mental Health, 1994).

6. Batshaw, M. L., and Perret, Y. M., Children with Disabilities:
AMedical Primer (Baltimore: P H. Brooks, 1992).

7. Levy, B., "The Dopamine Theory of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)," Australian and New Zealand
Journal of Psychiatry 25(2), (1991), 277-83; Lou, H. C., Henriksen, L., and Bruhn, P., "Focal Cerebral Dysfunction in
Developmental Learning Disabilities," The Lancet 335, no.
8680 (Jan. 1990): 8; Zametkin, A. J., Nordahl, T. E., Gross,
M., King, C. A., et al. "Cerebral Glucose Metabolism in Adults
with Hyperactivity of Childhood Onset," New England Journal
of Medicine 323, no. 20 (Nov 1990):1361-66.