If one has parents, let's say, who are "slowing down" a bit, and they're talking a little bit about some aches and pains, and there's a stairwell in the house, for instance, and they're starting to say things like, "You know, at some point, we're either going to have to move into a place that doesn't have a stairwell or put one of those chair lifts and things, or maybe just move into the downstairs," do you think that in just thinking about that, they're going to accelerate the demise of their locomotor ability?

I do, actually. I think that when we start entertaining these negative thoughts and evaluating ourselves, we're always going to find evidence. As you get older, you start, "Oh, my God, am I forgetful?" You pay attention each time you forget, and that makes it even worse. I said to my students in this health class, smart kids at Harvard, this is on Thursday, I teach Tuesday and Thursday, I said, "What was the last thing I said in class on Tuesday?" Nobody remembers.

I said, "You must be getting dementia," so that when a young person forgets, it's okay, they don't pay any attention to the forgetting. As you get older and you forget, you get less involved in what you're doing. If you're trying to learn something, you have the competing part of you saying that you're not going to remember this, and so on.

Independent of all of this, I think a lot of the loss in memory has nothing to do with memory. When I was young, and you're introducing me to people, I thought it was important for me to remember their names. Andrew, I know, doesn't speak well of me. I don't really care.

You're going to introduce me to five of you, what do I care? If I'm going to need their names, chances are I will meet them again. Afterwards, if you say to me, "Remember Jim," and I say to you, "Which one was Jim?" It wasn't that I forgot. To forget means I had to have learned it in the first place.

If you don't learn it in the first place because you don't care, because your values change as you get older, then it's not a matter of forgetting when you don't know it in the second place. I think that if we turn it around, because now I'm doing this because I know you expect it of me, and we say, "What if you remembered everything?" Everything.

That would be terrible. How would you get through? It's a picture. You wouldn't get to experience anything new. Everything serves a purpose. I never tested this. We came up with this years ago, and I think it's probably wrong, but it's kind of fun. People as they get older, they become hard of hearing, but it also happens that the older you get, the more you realize nobody is really saying anything.

Being hard of hearing protects you from a lot of that noise. My grandfather used to turn off his hearing aid. I've always had glasses for reading at night when my eyes would get fatigued or something, but recently I came to my awareness that my vision at a distance is very, very sharp.

I'm like an eagle. I can read numbers very far away, but my vision up close has been diminishing. I find myself straining a bit more even than it is, so I started wearing eyeglasses. Or you should have the book further away. Or I should have the book further away, but I've just defaulted to eyeglasses.

I realized that because I understand the neuroplasticity of the visual system that I'm certainly accelerating the demise of my near vision by wearing glasses, and so I'm trying to balance the two. Do you know our vision study? This is kind of fun. I'm in the doctor's office, and like everybody else, I'm given the Snellenite chart.

The Snellen is the letters and numbers, yeah. But I'm different from most people, and I resent that the letters are getting smaller and smaller because it's creating an expectation that soon I won't be able to see. So I ask, "What would happen if the letters got larger and larger?" Which would be to change the expectation that soon I will be able to see.

So when we do that, people are able to see what they weren't able to see before. Now, most of us have trouble around two-thirds of the way down the chart, so what we did was start the chart a third of the way down, so the letters are smaller than on top.

So now two-thirds of the way down, that starting point, the letters are really small, and what happens is, again, people can see what they couldn't see before. Awesome. Yeah. So the idea that your vision has to get worse, I think there are many, many instances where that's not the case, but also the whole test of vision is bizarre.

How often in your life are you looking at letters that make no sense? If I don't want to see you, I'm going to see you a lot sooner than being able to run away from you. If I'm hungry, I can see the restaurant sign much quicker than if I'm not hungry.

I see things in color that are different in black and white, so on and so forth, and to lose all of that with a two-dimensional eye test seems to me ... And again, we haven't touched on this, but it's probably important with respect to vision. It's true with everything.

In fact, I tell people, "You're wearing glasses. Try it without glasses. You want to see when you can see and when you can't see." With almost everything, we again hold things still when they're varying. Now what I mean by this is that, let's say with vision, my guess is that 11 o'clock in the morning, my vision is better than at 7 o'clock at night.

The data says yes. Okay. I mean, it'd be hard for it not ... So what does this say? This says maybe I should either have a nap. I don't nap, so I should have an energy bar, and even an energy bar is cute. It's just a candy bar, but you call it an energy bar.

You're allowed to eat it. It's like you take a piece of cake, put it in a muffin tin. It's called a muffin. It's healthier than the piece of cake. Anyway, I'll leave that as it may. That control, a great amount of control over our physical well-being comes about by attention to variability, which is just a fancy way of talking about mindfulness.

Mindfulness is noticing change. That's what it means to be variable. All right. So if you took your glasses off and you saw for yourself, what are the times, what are the moments that you're having ... I'm not talking about people who are almost blind, where I can't see and when I can see, and then you ask yourself why, and then it may be the case that it's a particular font, or more likely that you're tired, and then you have other options.

But once you start wearing them, it's like taking a laxative. Take a laxative once, it's fine. If you're taking a laxative all the time, you're teaching your body to depend on the laxative. You can teach ourselves by some of these things that are supposed to be helpful, and we teach ourselves to need them in ways we otherwise wouldn't.

And so he did this attention to symptom variability with big diseases. So when you have a chronic illness, the way most people understand chronic illness is that there's nothing that can be done about it. Yeah, the word chronic implies that. Exactly. What it means is the medical world doesn't have a fix.

It doesn't mean there's nothing can be done. Now, you have your symptoms of the chronic illness, the presumption most of the time, I would think, is that the symptoms are going to stay the same or get worse. Nothing only moves in one direction. Sometimes it's a little better, sometimes a little ...

The stock market, if it's going up, it doesn't go up in a straight line, it goes up, down a little, and so on. So when it's better, why is it better? So we do this, we call people periodically, and we simply ask them, "How is the symptom now? Is it better or worse than the last time we called, and why?" Several things happen.

The first, by engaging in the whole process, people feel less helpless, and that turns out to be good for your health. Second, once you start noticing that now it's a little better, it can even be a little worse, you feel better because you thought that it was always maximally, "I'm always in pain, I'm always stressed," whatever it is, third, or whatever I'm up to.

By asking the question, "Why now? Is it better or worse than before?" you engage in a mindful search. I have decades of evidence that that mindfulness itself, the neurons are firing, that itself is good for your health. And then finally, I believe you're more likely to find a solution if you're looking for one.

So we've done this with multiple sclerosis, chronic pain, Parkinson's, stroke, biggies, and in each case have very positive results. And the good thing about these sorts of things is that there are no negative side effects, and it doesn't mean that you have to stop doing any medical procedures you may be doing.

But you're asking, you're back in charge of your own healthcare. Why does this hurt now? Stress. There are some people who think they're stressed all the time. Nobody is anything all the time. So I call you, Andrew, and I say, "How stressed are you now, and why?" And we go through this over time, and then you find out you're stressed when you're talking to Ellen Langer.

Well, then the solution is easy, don't talk to me.