I love the way that you look at things that we take for granted as operating one way through this different perspective. Our mutual friend, Allie Crump, told me the story that at one point she was in a conversation with you and you said, "Well, maybe exercise and all its effects on our health is just an epiphenomenon." I mean, could you talk a little bit more about that?

I think first of all, I don't think most people are familiar with what epiphenomena are, but this idea of looking at things through a different portal seems so valuable, regardless of what the experimental outcome turned out to be, and perhaps we should touch on that experimental outcome about labor versus non-labor.

There's so much there, I don't know where to go. I mean, we want to talk about that, the research. Let's talk about the study. Before we go to the study, though, let's go to the reason for the study, way back when. Okay, so there's so many paths I can take here.

Let's take them all. Okay, we'll start with one. So I did some research back in the '70s with people in nursing homes, and why did I do that? Because I had somebody in the family who was in a nursing home, it was very distressing to see people just sitting there doing nothing and barely existing.

And so we had the idea that if we gave people choices, that might get them more engaged in their living. And so we did that. We gave people encouragement to decide where to see people, whether to visit them in your room, in the lounge. You have to remember, you can't go into an establishment, a business, and turn the whole power structure around.

So within reason, we came up with choices people could make. We gave them an opportunity to see a movie, you could see it on Tuesday or Thursday. We gave them a plant to take care of. The comparison group, the tender loving care group, we told them, "People will be visiting you and we'll set it up so you'll be visiting in the lounge." Everything was controlled in that way.

"You're going to see a movie, and we'll let you know if you're going to see it on Tuesday or Thursday, here's a plant, and the nurses will care for it for you." So we do this. We come back, I think it was three weeks, actually, I don't remember, it's been so long.

18 months later, first we took initial measures, come back 18 months later, those people who were given these choices live longer. And that was the beginning of all of my work on health in some sense. How could it be that making choices results in a longer life? All right, so what is there about choice making?

And then the choices were Mickey Mouse choices, you know, and you always have choice available too. You can turn on a light switch. You can do it with your right hand, your right hand, your left hand, one finger, three fingers, lift your foot, so many choices that you can bring to the table.

If choice making is good for you, why don't people do this? And that got me more into the mindlessness and mindfulness work now. So we have people living longer. How can it be that you're making choices, your mind is active, and your body complies? And so then I thought about it, not in one fell swoop, but realized that this whole notion of mind and body, these are just words.

We come together, here I am, all of me, my fingers, my shoulders, my thoughts, as one thing. And if we put the mind and body back together, then the amount of control we have is enormous, right? So wherever I put my mind, I'm also putting my body. So in the Mindful Body, which started off as a memoir, I have lots of stories that show the leading up to this idea.

Let me just tell you two very quickly. One was I got married, Andrew, you won't believe it, I was obscenely young. And you'll find that if you read the book, I was even younger than admitted, because I was secretly married years before that. Okay. So I go, I'm 19 years old, I think.

I go to Paris on my honeymoon, we go into this restaurant, I order a mixed grill. One of the foods there was a pancreas. My then-husband, who was more sophisticated than I, more worldly, I said, "Which of these is the pancreas?" He says, "That." I said, "So I eat everything, I'm a big eater." Now comes the moment of truth.

Can I eat the pancreas? Why I thought that being married meant I had to eat the pancreas, I still haven't figured out. So anyway, I start eating it, and he starts laughing. Not good for newlyweds. And I ask him, "Why are you laughing?" He said, "Because that's chicken. You ate the pancreas a long time ago." So I made myself sick.

The other side of that, my mother had breast cancer that had metastasized to her pancreas, and then magically it was gone. Somehow she had made herself well. So I had many of these sorts of experiences, and talk about, I've been talking about this since, gosh, when did we first, since '79.

So now people are talking about mind-body connection. It's not a connection. If you're talking about a connection between two things that says they're separate, and you still have to deal with what's connecting them, and you've put them back together, it's one thing, you don't have to deal with that mediator.

And so the study you're asking me about, which I'm surprised, I'm having a junior moment that I actually remembered the question you asked, rather than a senior moment, that before I tell you about the study with Allie, the first study we did testing this mind-body unity was a counterclockwise study.

So here what we did was we took elderly men, we were going to have them live in a retreat that had been retrofitted to 20 years earlier, and had them live there as if they were their younger selves. So they talked about things from the past as if they were just unfolding.

The results were incredible. Their vision improved, their hearing improved, their memory, their strength, and they looked noticeably younger. So that was very exciting and began all this mind-body unity work. Now comes the study that you're talking about with Allie, where in a conversation that she and I had, she was my student, and she made proclamations about exercise and any proclamation, this is the short answer to your question, anybody proclaims anything, my mind immediately goes, "So when might not that be true?" I'm starting to pick up on that.

It's a gimmick, I guess. It's a gift, is what it is. So the question was that how important was the understanding of exercise to the effects of exercise? So we take chambermaids, and interestingly, the first question we asked is, "How much exercise do you get?" And they say they don't get very much exercise because to them, exercise is what you do after work.

It's like a surgeon general who sits behind a desk all day. So you would imagine whether they realized they were getting exercise or not, since they're getting so much exercise, that they're going to be healthier than other people who are not getting them, and they weren't. That's interesting. So now we divide them into two groups, very simple study, randomly divide them into two groups.

In one group, we simply teach them their work is exercise. Making a bed is like working in this machine at the gym, doing the windows, whatever. So you have two groups, one who thinks their work is exercise, one who doesn't realize. We take many, many measures, and they're not eating any differently, one group from the other.

They're not working any harder. Nevertheless, the group that changed their mind and now saw their work as exercise lost weight. They made a change in waist to hip ratio, body mass index, and their blood pressure came down.