Ellen J. Langer

Ellen Langer (born 1947) is an American psychologist and professor of psychology at Harvard University, where in 1981 she became the first woman tenured in psychology. Born in the Bronx, she studied at New York University and took her doctorate in social and clinical psychology at Yale in 1974. She is often called the mother of mindfulness for her studies of mindless behavior and of the illusion of control, decision-making and aging, and she defines mindfulness as the simple act of noticing new things. Her 1979 Counterclockwise study placed elderly men in a setting that recreated their past and found that their health improved, an idea later tested in her 2009 book of the same name, and she argues in The Mindful Body (2023) that the mind and body act as one. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1980.