One day in the fall of 1981, 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. This was to be the men’s home for five days as they participated in a radical experiment, cooked up by a young psychologist named Ellen Langer.
1981年秋季的一天，新罕布什尔州一座经改建的修道院前，八名70多岁的老年男子走下了面包车。他们步履蹒跚，其中一些人像关节炎患者一样弯腰驼背，还有两位拄着拐杖。他们进门后，就像进入了一条时间隧道。老式收音机里传来佩里·科莫（Perry Como，人称“C先生”，美国歌手、电视明星）的低声吟唱。黑白电视机上，埃德·沙利文（Ed Sullivan，美国娱乐作家和电视节目主持人）正向嘉宾们表示欢迎。这里的一切——包括书架上的书和四下里散落的杂志——都是为营造出1959年的氛围而设计和布置的。在五天的时间里，这里将成为这些老人暂时的家园。他们所参与的，是年轻的心理学家埃伦·兰格(Ellen Langer)精心策划的一项“激进实验”。
The subjects were in good health, but aging had left its mark. “This was before 75 was the new 55,” says Langer, who is 67 and the longest-serving professor of psychology at Harvard. Before arriving, the men were assessed on such measures as dexterity, grip strength, flexibility, hearing and vision, memory and cognition — probably the closest things the gerontologists of the time could come to the testable biomarkers of age. Langer predicted the numbers would be quite different after five days, when the subjects emerged from what was to be a fairly intense psychological intervention.
虽然受试者们的健康状况都相当不错，但衰老已经在他们身上留下了痕迹。“那时还没有‘75岁是新的55岁’这样的概念，”兰格说，如今67岁的她是哈佛大学任职时间最长的心理学教授。这些老人在抵达实验地点之前接受了一系列检查，如灵巧性、握力、柔韧性、听觉和视觉、记忆力和认知功能——当年，这些很可能是老年学家掌握的最接近年龄测试生物标志物的指标。兰格预测，五天之后，当受试者们结束大强度心理干预的时候，这些指标都将大为改观。
Langer had already undertaken a couple of studies involving elderly patients. In one, she found that nursing-home residents who had exhibited early stages of memory loss were able to do better on memory tests when they were given incentives to remember — showing that in many cases, indifference was being mistaken for brain deterioration. In another, now considered a classic of social psychology, Langer gave houseplants to two groups of nursing-home residents. She told one group that they were responsible for keeping the plant alive and that they could also make choices about their schedules during the day. She told the other group that the staff would care for the plants, and they were not given any choice in their schedules. Eighteen months later, twice as many subjects in the plant-caring, decision-making group were still alive than in the control group.
在此之前，兰格已经进行了两项涉及老年患者的研究。其中一项发现，在奖励的激励下，处于记忆力减退早期阶段的养老院老人能够在记忆力测试中获得更好的成绩。这说明，在许多情况下，对外界漠然被错误地当作大脑退化。在另一项如今被公认为社会心理学经典的研究中，兰格将室内植物分发给两组养老院老人。她告诉其中一组老人他们要负责养活这些植物，并允许他们对自己的作息安排做出选择。而另一组老人则被告知，植物有工作人员照顾，且他们没有得到作息安排上的任何选择。18个月后，关怀植物、并能对自己的作息时间表做出决策的那一组仍然健在的老人是对照组的两倍。
To Langer, this was evidence that the biomedical model of the day — that the mind and the body are on separate tracks — was wrongheaded. The belief was that “the only way to get sick is through the introduction of a pathogen, and the only way to get well is to get rid of it,” she said, when we met at her office in Cambridge in December. She came to think that what people needed to heal themselves was a psychological “prime” — something that triggered the body to take curative measures all by itself. Gathering the older men together in New Hampshire, for what she would later refer to as a counterclockwise study, would be a way to test this premise.
在兰格看来，这些证据显示了当时的生物医学模式——即心灵和身体分道而驰——陷入了认识误区。12月，当我在她位于马萨诸塞州剑桥的办公室里见到她时，她说，当时医学界相信“病原体侵入是导致人体患病的唯一途径，而要恢复健康，也惟有摆脱病原体”。她逐渐产生的一个设想是，人需要某种心理上的“触发刺激”来自行痊愈，也就是触发身体自行动用所有的康复手段。让上文提到的老年男性汇聚新罕布什尔州，进行她后来所称的“逆时针”研究，就是测试这个假设的一种方式。
The men in the experimental group were told not merely to reminisce about this earlier era, but to inhabit it — to “make a psychological attempt to be the person they were 22 years ago,” she told me. “We have good reason to believe that if you are successful at this,” Langer told the men, “you will feel as you did in 1959.” From the time they walked through the doors, they were treated as if they were younger. The men were told that they would have to take their belongings upstairs themselves, even if they had to do it one shirt at a time.
她要求实验组的老人不要止步于对旧时光的缅怀，而是要让自己穿越回去，栖息于其中——“从心理层面尝试做回22年前的自己，”兰格向我描述道。她还对他们说：“我们有很好的理由相信，如果你们能成功地做到这一点，你们会觉得自己还是1959年的那个人。”从他们进门的那一刻起，他们就被当做年轻人对待。他们被告知，他们必须自己把行李搬上楼去，哪怕他们一次只拿得动一件衬衫。
Each day, as they discussed sports (Johnny Unitas and Wilt Chamberlain) or “current” events (the first U.S. satellite launch) or dissected the movie they just watched (“Anatomy of a Murder,” with Jimmy Stewart), they spoke about these late-'50s artifacts and events in the present tense — one of Langer’s chief priming strategies. 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.
每天，他们讨论着体育（约翰尼·尤尼塔斯[Johnny Unitas，曾获国家橄榄球联盟最有价值球员]或威尔特·张伯伦[Wilt Chamberlain，前美国NBA联盟职业篮球运动员]）和“时事”（美国发射第一枚卫星），或是评析刚刚看过的电影（詹姆斯·斯图尔特[Jimmy Stewart]主演的《桃色血案》[“Anatomy of a Murder”]）——他们使用现在时态谈论这些50年代末的物品和事件，这也是兰格主要的“触发刺激”策略之一。不会有任何东西，包括镜子和现代服装，来扰乱这种“时光倒流22年”的幻觉，即使有照片，那也是他们自己年轻时的肖像。
At the end of their stay, the men were tested again. On several measures, they outperformed a control group that came earlier to the monastery but didn’t imagine themselves back into the skin of their younger selves, though they were encouraged to reminisce. They were suppler, showed greater manual dexterity and sat taller — just as Langer had guessed. Perhaps most improbable, their sight improved. Independent judges said they looked younger. The experimental subjects, Langer told me, had “put their mind in an earlier time,” and their bodies went along for the ride.
在这段小住结束时，这些老人再度接受了检查。实验组在多项指标上远远优于对照组。后者之前就来到了这所修道院，但研究人员只鼓励他们回忆过去，而没有要求他们想象自己重返年轻时代。实验组老人的身体柔韧性更强，手部更加灵巧，坐姿时腰背也挺得更直——正如兰格所猜测的那样。也许最不可思议的是，他们的视力也有所改善。独立的评委表示他们看上去更年轻了。兰格告诉我，实验组受试者“让自己的心境回到了年轻时代”，他们的身体也随之调整。
The results were almost too good. They beggared belief. “It sounded like Lourdes,” Langer said. Though she and her students would write up the experiment for a chapter in a book for Oxford University Press called “Higher Stages of Human Development,” they left out a lot of the tantalizing color — like the spontaneous touch-football game that erupted between heretofore creaky seniors as they waited for the bus back to Cambridge. And Langer never sent it out to the journals. She suspected it would be rejected.
实验结果太棒了，简直让人难以置信。“听起来就像卢尔德（法国南部小镇，著名朝圣地，相传人们可以在那里治愈一切疾病——译注）一样，”兰格说。虽然她和她的学生们在牛津大学出版社(Oxford University Press)出版的《人类发展的较高阶段》(Higher Stages of Human Development)中用一个章节的篇幅介绍这项实验，但他们省略了很多动人的情节，例如，在等巴士返回剑桥时，这些之前很僵硬，仿佛一动就会咯吱作响的老骨头自发组织了一场触身式橄榄球赛。出于对退稿的担心，兰格没敢将这些内容写在投稿给刊物的文章中。
After all, it was a small-sample study, conducted over a mere five days, with plenty of potentially confounding variables in the design. (Perhaps the stimulating novelty of the whole setup or wanting to try extra hard to please the testers explained some of the great improvement.) But more fundamental, the unconventionality of the study made Langer self-conscious about showing it around. “It was just too different from anything that was being done in the field as I understood it,” she said. “You have to appreciate, people weren’t talking about mind-body medicine,” she said.
毕竟，这只是为期五天的一个小样本研究，设计中存在大量潜在混淆的变量。（或许是整个实验令人振奋的新颖性，或者是受试者为了取悦测试者而格外努力，这些都可能在一定程度上解释某些指标的显著改观。）但更为根本的是，这项研究的标新立异使兰格不太好意思到处展示。“在我看来，这跟该领域当时在进行的研究工作相去太远，”她说。“要知道，那时没有人谈论身心医学(mind-body medicine)。”
Langer did not try to replicate the study — mostly because it was so complicated and expensive; every time she thought about trying it again, she talked herself out of it. Then in 2010, the BBC broadcast a recreation, which Langer consulted on, called “The Young Ones,” with six aging former celebrities as guinea pigs.
兰格没有尝试重复这项实验，主要是因为它太复杂，成本也太高，每次她产生再试一次的念头，她都劝阻了自己。直到2010年，英国广播公司(BBC)聘请兰格担任顾问，重复了这项实验，并将其做成一档节目，名为“年轻一代”(The Young Ones)，把六位年迈的前名星当作实验对象。
The stars were squired via period cars to a country house meticulously retrofitted to 1975, right down to the kitschy wall art. They emerged after a week as apparently rejuvenated as Langer’s septuagenarians in New Hampshire, showing marked improvement on the test measures. One, who had rolled up in a wheelchair, walked out with a cane. Another, who couldn’t even put his socks on unassisted at the start, hosted the final evening’s dinner party, gliding around with purpose and vim. The others walked taller and indeed seemed to look younger. They had been pulled out of mothballs and made to feel important again, and perhaps, Langer later mused, that rekindling of their egos was central to the reclamation of their bodies.
这些明星们被老式轿车送到了一幢精心改建成1975年风格（甚至包括那个时期俗气的墙面艺术）的乡间别墅。一周后，他们重新露面，一个个都显得青春焕发，就像当年兰格实验中那些年逾七旬的老人一样。他们的检测指标也出现明显改善。有个人进去时还坐着轮椅，出来时却可以自己拄着拐杖行走了。还有一位，一开始就连穿袜子也要别人帮忙，到实验结束前夕却操办了告别晚宴，意志坚定精神抖擞地忙进忙出。其他人步行时腰杆也挺得更直，确实看起来年轻多了。他们不再被束之高阁，而是再次觉得自己重要，有价值。后来兰格想到，唤醒自我意识也许在他们身体重现活力的神奇变化中起到了核心作用。
The program, which was shown in four parts and nominated for a Bafta Award (a British Emmy), brought new attention to Langer’s work. Jeffrey Rediger, a psychiatrist and the medical and clinical director of Harvard’s McLean Hospital, was invited by a friend of Langer’s to watch it with some colleagues last year. Rediger was aware of Langer’s original New Hampshire study, but the made-for-TV version brought its tantalizing implications to life.
这档分四集播出的节目获得了英国电影学院奖（Bafta Award，相当于英国的艾美奖[Emmy]）提名，并引发人们对兰格的研究产生新的关注。去年，兰格的一个朋友邀请哈佛大学医学院教学附属麦克莱恩医院(Harvard’s McLean Hospital)的精神病学家、医务和临床主任杰弗里·雷迪格(Jeffrey Rediger)与同事们一起观看了这档节目。雷迪格早就对兰格当年在新罕布什尔州进行的研究略知一二，但这个为电视制作的版本生动展现了该项研究的诱人影响。
“She’s one of the people at Harvard who really gets it,” Rediger told me. “That health and illness are much more rooted in our minds and in our hearts and how we experience ourselves in the world than our models even begin to understand.”
“兰格是哈佛大学里真正懂行的几个人之一，”雷迪格告诉我。“也就是说，健康和疾病在更大程度上植根于我们的思想和心情，以及我们在世上如何体验自己，而这是现有医学模式根本不理解的。”
Langer’s house in Cambridge was as chilly as a meat locker when we arrived together, having walked from campus, last winter. The back door had been left open all day so that her aging, coddled Westie, Gus, could relieve himself in the yard. (Langer’s partner, Nancy Hemenway, who normally would be at home, was away.) Gus has a brain tumor. “He was supposed to be dead over a year ago,” Langer said. “But I think he might outlive us all.”
去年冬天，我和兰格从校园里一起步行到她家去，房子里冷得好像冷藏室一样。后门整天敞开着，好让她宠爱的那条老西高地白梗犬格斯(Gus)可以自由地跑到院子里去玩。（兰格的伴侣，南希·海明威[Nancy Hemenway]通常在家，但那天正好出去了。）格斯患有脑肿瘤。“照说它在一年前就会死，”兰格说。“但我觉得它说不定比我们所有人都活得久。”
In the kitchen, Langer began laying out wide noodles for a lasagna she was making for an end-of-term party. It was the last time she would meet with her students for a while; they were about to scatter for the winter break, and she was leaving for a sabbatical in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where she and Nancy have another home. (Langer planned to Skype into weekly lab meetings.)
兰格在厨房里忙活着，拿出宽面条准备做意大利千层面，好在期末聚会上招待大家。这是今后一段时间内她最后一次跟自己的学生碰面了——寒假开始后，大家将各奔东西，而她准备动身前往墨西哥的巴亚尔塔港休长假，她和南希在那里还有一个居所。（兰格计划通过Skype参与每周一次的实验室会议。）
“Family recipe?” I asked of the dinner.
“这是家传的菜谱吗？”我问起了晚餐。
“I don’t follow recipes — you should know that,” she said. She piled on an immoderate amount of cheese. “Besides, if I blow it, what’s going to be the cost?” Langer said. “Is it anyone’s last meal?” She added, “My students aren’t going to love me if my lasagna’s no good?”
“我从不拘泥于菜谱的——这你知道，”她一边说，一边往面上大量地堆奶酪。“再说，就算我搞砸了又怎么样？这又不是谁最后的晚餐；就算我做的千层面不好吃，难道我的学生们就会因此不爱戴我？”
Langer was born in the Bronx and went to N.Y.U., becoming a chemistry major with her eye on med school. That all changed after she took Psych 101. Her professor was Philip Zimbardo, who would later go to Stanford and investigate the effects of authority and obedience in his well-known prison experiment. Human behavior, as Zimbardo presented it, was more interesting than what she’d been studying, and Langer soon switched tracks.
兰格出生于布朗克斯，在纽约大学攻读化学专业，想着以后进医学院。然而，在她听了《心理学101》(Psych 101)课之后，一切都改变了。她师从的菲利普·津巴多(Philip Zimbardo)教授后来去斯坦福大学任教，并在著名的监狱实验中研究了权威和服从的影响。兰格从津巴多教授的讲课中发现，人类行为比她之前学的东西更有意思，于是她很快换了专业。
She went on to graduate work at Yale, where a poker game led to her doctoral dissertation on the magical thinking of otherwise logical people. Even smart people fall prey to an “illusion of control” over chance events, Langer concluded. We aren’t really very rational creatures. Our cognitive biases routinely steer us wrong. Langer’s notion that people are trained not to think and are thus extremely vulnerable to right-sounding but actually wrong notions prefigured many of the tenets of “behavioral economics” and the work of people like Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize in economic sciences. But unlike many researchers who systematically work out one concept until they own it, Langer’s peripatetic mind quickly moved on to other areas of inquiry. “I was never — and maybe this is a character flaw — the type of person who is going to take one idea and beat it to death,” she said. “Part of that is that I have so many ideas. If whatever it is I’m excited about now doesn’t happen, it doesn’t matter, because there’s always the next possibility.”
她的研究生阶段在耶鲁大学(Yale)度过，在那里，一场扑克游戏给了她启迪，使她写出一篇有关通常讲究逻辑的人们迸发突发奇想的博士论文。兰格的结论是：即使聪明人也容易陷入对于偶然事件的“控制错觉”。我们真的算不上一种高度理性的生物。认知偏见经常将我们导向错误的方向。兰格认为，人们养成了不假思索的习惯，这使他们很容易被似是而非的理念误导。这一观念的形成早于许多流派的“行为经济学”，也早于诺贝尔经济学奖得主丹尼尔·卡尼曼(Daniel Kahneman)等人的研究。但与许多锲而不舍地钻研某个概念、直到它为自己所有的研究者不同，兰格的思维经常信马由缰地转向其他研究领域。“我从来不是能追着一个问题打破砂锅问到底的人，或许这是一种性格缺陷，”她说。“部分原因是我总是有太多的想法。如果现在让我激动不已的东西没能搞出名堂，那没关系，因为始终存在下一个可能性。”
By the 1970s, Langer had become convinced that not only are most people led astray by their biases, but they are also spectacularly inattentive to what’s going on around them. “They’re just not there,” as she puts it. When you’re not there, Langer reasoned, you’re very likely to end up where you’re led. She set up a number of studies to show how people’s thinking and behavior can easily be manipulated with subtle primes.
到了20世纪70年代，兰格逐渐确信，多数人不仅被自己的偏见带上歧途，还对身边发生的事情极其漫不经心。就像她所说的，“他们就是心不在焉。”兰格的推理是，当你心不在焉的时候，你很容易被牵着走。她设立了多项研究，旨在揭示人们思路和行为很容易被细微的“触发刺激”所操纵。
In one, she and her colleagues found that office workers were far more likely to comply with a ridiculous interdepartmental memo if it looked like other official memos. In another, created with her Yale mentor, Robert Abelson, they asked behavioral and traditional therapists to watch a video of a person being interviewed, who was labeled either “patient” or “job applicant,” and then evaluate the person. The behavioral therapists regarded the interviewee as well adjusted regardless of whether they were told the person was a patient or an applicant. But the traditional therapists found the interviewee labeled “patient” significantly more disturbed. Even trained observers “were mindlessly led by the label,” Langer says.
在一项研究中，她和同事们发现，只要看起来跟其他官方的内部通知差不多，哪怕是一份内容荒谬的跨部门通知，也会让上班族们照办。在另一项与她在耶鲁大学的导师罗伯特·艾贝尔森(Robert Abelson)合作创建的研究中，他们要求行为治疗师和传统治疗师观看某个身份被标注为“患者”或“求职者”的人接受采访的视频，然后对此人做出评估。无论是对所谓的“患者”还是“求职者”，行为治疗师认为这位受访者相当自如得体。但是在传统治疗师眼里，“患者”身份的受访者明显更加不安。兰格指出，这说明，即使训练有素的观察者“也很容易被标签搞得没头没脑”。
If people could learn to be mindful and always perceive the choices available to them, Langer says, they would fulfill their potential and improve their health. Langer’s technique of achieving a state of mindfulness is different from the one often utilized in Eastern “mindfulness meditation” — nonjudgmental awareness of the thoughts and feelings drifting through your mind — that is everywhere today. Her emphasis is on noticing moment-to-moment changes around you, from the differences in the face of your spouse across the breakfast table to the variability of your asthma symptoms. When we are “actively making new distinctions, rather than relying on habitual” categorizations, we’re alive; and when we’re alive, we can improve. Indeed, “well-being and enhanced performance” were Langer’s goals from the beginning of her career.
兰格表示，如果人们能够学会多留点心，始终察觉到身边可以把握的选择，那么，他们将能充分发挥自己的潜能，并改善自己的健康。兰格所说的达到专注状态的技巧与在当今大行其道的东方式“正念禅修”不同，后者是对你的脑海中飘过的思想和感受达到不加评判的认知。而兰格强调的是留心你身边每时每刻的细微变化，从早餐桌对面配偶脸色的差异，到你的哮喘症状的改变。当我们在“积极主动发现新的差别，而不是依赖于习惯性的”分类时，我们会真正觉得自己活着；而当我们觉得自己活着，我们就能改善。的确，在职业生涯伊始，兰格就以“福祉和增强的表现”为目标。
Martin Seligman in the past two decades has come to be recognized as the father of positive psychology. Tal Ben-Shahar, who taught a popular undergraduate course at Harvard on the subject until 2008, calls Langer “the mother of positive psychology,” by virtue of her early work that anticipated the field.
过去20年里，马丁·赛里格曼(Martin Seligman)被公认为积极心理学之父。而凭借其在该领域的早期研究工作，兰格被2008年之前在哈佛大学讲授一门深受欢迎的本科课程的塔尔·班夏哈(Tal Ben-Shahar)誉为“积极心理学之母”。
Langer came to believe that one way to enhance well-being was to use all sorts of placebos. Placebos aren’t just sugar pills disguised as medicine, though that’s the literal definition; they are any intervention, benign but believed by the recipient to be potent, that produces measurable physiological changes. Placebo effects are a striking phenomenon and still not all that well understood. Entire fields like psychoneuroimmunology and psychoendocrinology have emerged to investigate the relationship between psychological and physiological processes. Neuroscientists are charting what’s going on in the brain when expectations alone reduce pain or relieve Parkinson’s symptoms. More traditionally minded health researchers acknowledge the role of placebo effects and account for them in their experiments. But Langer goes well beyond that. She thinks they’re huge — so huge that in many cases they may actually be the main factor producing the results.
兰格认为，增强福祉的途径之一是利用各种各样的安慰剂。安慰剂并不只是伪装成药物的糖丸（尽管那确实是字面上的定义）；没有危害、接受者相信有效，能够产生可测量的生理变化的任何干预措施都可称为安慰剂。安慰剂效应是一种引人注目的现象，至今仍未获得很好的理解。目前已经涌现出了心理神经免疫学和精神内分泌学等完整的研究领域，专门探讨心理与生理过程之间的关系。神经科学家试图跟踪记录当仅凭期望就减轻疼痛或缓解帕金森氏病症状时，大脑中究竟发生了哪些变化。意识较为传统的医学研究人员承认安慰剂效应的作用，并在自己的实验中计入这些效应。但兰格走得更远。她认为，安慰剂效应是巨大的——在许多情况下，它们实际上可能是产生结果的主要因素。
As an example, she points to a study she conducted in a hair salon in 2009. She got the idea from a study undertaken nearly a decade earlier by three scientists who looked at more than 4,000 subjects over two decades and found that men who were bald when they joined the study were more likely to develop prostate cancer than men who kept their hair. The researchers couldn’t be sure what explained the link, though they suspected that androgens (male hormones including testosterone) could be affecting both scalp and prostate. Langer had another theory: “Baldness is a cue for old age,” she says. “Therefore, men who go bald early in life may perceive themselves as older and may consequently be expected to age more quickly.” And those expectations may actually lead them to experience the effects of aging. To explore this relationship between expectations of aging and physiological signs of health, Langer and her colleagues designed the hair-salon study. They had research assistants approach 47 women, ranging in age from 27 to 83, who were about to have their hair cut, colored or both. They took blood-pressure readings. After the subjects’ hair was done, they filled out a questionnaire about how they felt they looked, and their blood pressure was taken again. In a paper published in 2010 in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, they reported that the subjects who perceived themselves as looking younger after the makeover experienced a drop in blood pressure.
她援引自己2009年在一家美发沙龙进行的研究作为例证。该研究的灵感来源于近10年前三位科学家进行的另一项研究，他们在20年期间追踪调查了4000多名受试者，发现在加入研究时秃顶的男性比头发丰茂的男性更容易患前列腺癌。研究人员不能肯定这种关联从何而来，但他们怀疑这也许是因为雄激素（包括睾酮）对头皮和前列腺都有影响。兰格则提出了另一种理论：“脱发是衰老的暗示之一。因此，早早秃顶的男性可能感觉自己更老，结果预期自己会更快衰老。”而这种预期实际上可能导致他们遭遇衰老效应。为了探讨对衰老的预期与健康的生理体征之间的这种关系，兰格和她的同事们设计了一项在美发沙龙进行的研究。他们让研究助理们去接触来美发沙龙剪发、染发或者先剪后染的47名女性（其年龄从27岁到83岁不等），并记录下她们的血压读数。受试者们做好发型之后，就各自对自己外貌的观感填写了一份调查问卷，并再次测量血压。在这篇2010年发表于《心理科学透视》(Perspectives on Psychological Science)期刊的论文中，他们报告称，那些认为自己在做好发型后显得更加年轻的受试者血压有所下降。
A few years earlier, Langer and one of her students, Alia Crum, conducted a study, published in the journal Psychological Science, involving 84 hotel chambermaids. The maids had mostly reported that they didn’t get much exercise in a typical week. The researchers primed the experimental group to think differently about their work by informing them that cleaning rooms was fairly serious exercise — as much if not more than the surgeon general recommends. Once their expectations were shifted, those maids lost weight, relative to a control group (and also improved on other measures like body mass index and hip-to-waist ratio). All other factors were held constant. The only difference was the change in mind-set.
几年前，兰格和她的学生阿莉娅·克拉姆(Alia Crum)进行了一项研究，并发表在《心理科学》(Psychological Science)杂志上。该研究涉及84名酒店客房女服务员。她们大多报告称，自己在典型的一周工作期间没有什么锻炼机会。研究人员引导实验组的女服务员换一种心态看待自己的工作，告诉她们：打扫房间其实是一种强度不小的锻炼，运动量不比卫生局局长所建议的要少。在她们的预期改变后，这些女服务员的体重相对于对照组有所减轻（其他指标，如身体质量指数[BMI]和腰臀比也有所改善）。其他所有因素都保持恒定。唯一变化的只有受试者的心态。
Critics hunted for other explanations — statistical errors or subtle behavior changes in the weight-loss group that Langer hadn’t accounted for. Otherwise the outcome seemed to defy physics. “To which I would say, ‘There’s no discipline that is complete,’ ” Langer responds. “If current-day physics can’t explain these things, maybe there are changes that need to be made in physics.”
批评者寻找其他解释，如统计错误，或者兰格未能计入的体重下降组的细微行为变化。否则，那样的结果似乎有悖于物理学。“对此我想说，‘没有一个学科是绝对完美的’，”兰格回应道。“如果当代的物理学无法解释这些现象，也许是物理学本身需要一些改变了。”
In the course of her career, Langer says, she has written or co-written more than 200 studies, and she continues to churn out research at a striking pace. Just before winter break, in her final meeting with two dozen or so students and postdocs, Langer went around the table checking the progress of nearly 30 experiments, all of which manipulated subjects’ perceptions. Some used a special clock that could be set to run at half-speed or double-speed. In one study, sleeping subjects were fooled, upon awakening, into thinking they had more or less sleep than they actually did. She posits that the scores on measures of short-term memory and reaction time will vary accordingly, regardless of how long the subjects actually slept. In a yet-to-be-published diabetes study, Langer wondered whether the biochemistry of Type 2 diabetics could be manipulated by the same psychological intervention — the subjects’ perception of how much time had passed. Her theory was that the diabetics’ blood-glucose levels would follow perceived time rather than actual time; in other words, they would spike and dip when the subjects expected them to. And that’s what her data revealed. When a student emailed her with the results this fall, she could barely contain her excitement. “This is the beginning of a psychological cure for diabetes!” she told me.
兰格说，在她的职业生涯中，她已经独立撰写或与他人合作撰写了200多篇研究论文，如今她继续以惊人的速度发表大量研究。就在寒假前，她与二十多个学生和博士后最后一次开会时，兰格围着桌子检查着近30项实验的进展，这些实验都涉及操纵受试者的感知。一些实验使用了特制的时钟，这些钟能够以正常时钟的一半速度或者两倍速度运转。在某一项研究中，受试者一觉醒来后受到蒙骗，让他们以为自己睡得比实际时间更久或者更短。兰格设想，这些受试者的短期记忆和反应时间等指标的得分将发生相应变化，而无论他们的实际睡眠时间有多长。在一项尚未发表的糖尿病研究中，兰格想知道2型糖尿病患者的生化检查结果是否也能通过同样的心理干预——即受试者对于已经过去了多长时间的感知——来操纵。她的理论是，糖尿病人血糖水平会跟随受试者感知到的时间（而不是实际时间）波动；换句话说，它会按照受试者的预期上升或者下降。而实验数据揭示的情况正是这样。今年秋天，当学生通过电子邮件向她报告实验结果时，她几乎无法抑制自己内心的激动。她告诉我说：“这是用心理疗法治疗糖尿病的开端！”
Some of the new experiments rely on variables that change self-perception. In a study using avatars, scheduled to take place at the popular gaming facility Second Life, subjects will watch a digital version of themselves playing tennis and gradually getting thinner from the exertion. Langer is exploring whether watching an avatar will have a physiological effect on the real person. “You see yourself, you’re playing tennis,” Langer said. “The question is: Will people lose weight? We’ll see.”
有些新实验依赖于改变自我感知的变量。在一项拟在流行的虚拟游戏世界“第二人生”(Second Life)中进行的研究中，受试者将观看自己的数字化身打网球，并因为体力消耗而逐渐变得苗条起来。兰格希望研究观察化身会否对真人造成生理影响。“你看到自己在打网球，”兰格说。“问题是：人们会因此减肥么？我们拭目以待。”
Some of Langer’s colleagues in the academy see her as a valuable force in psychology, praising her eccentric intelligence and ingenious study designs. Steven Pinker, the writer and Harvard professor, told me that she filled an important niche within the school’s department, which has often harbored “mavericks with nontraditional projects,” including “B. F. Skinner’s utopian novels and manifestoes and Herb Kelman’s encounter groups between Arab and Israeli activists — not to mention Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert,” who would become Ram Dass.
兰格在学术圈内的一些同事肯定了她在心理学领域的价值和影响力，赞赏她的独到智慧和巧妙研究设计。哈佛大学教授和作家史蒂文·平克(Steven Pinker)告诉我，她在学院内部占有重要的一席之地，该学院经常孕育出“搞出非传统项目的特立独行者”，包括“伯尔赫斯·弗雷德里克·斯金纳(B. F. Skinner)的乌托邦小说和宣言、赫布·克尔曼(Herb Kelman)组织的让阿拉伯与以色列活动人士汇聚一堂的会心小组——更不用说蒂莫西·利里(Timothy Leary)和理查德·阿尔珀特（Richard Alpert，已更名为拉姆·达斯[Ram Dass]）了。”
But Langer’s sensibility can feel at odds with the rigors of contemporary academia. Sometimes she will give equal weight to casually hatched ideas and peer-reviewed studies. She spoke loosely to me of her New Hampshire counterclockwise study as having been “replicated” three times — in Britain, the Netherlands and South Korea. But none of these were lab experiments. They were events made for television. The study that arguably made Langer’s name — the plant study with nursing-home patients — wouldn’t have “much credibility today, nor would it meet the tightened standards of rigor,” says James Coyne, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania medical school and a widely published bird dog of pseudoscience. (Though, as Coyne also acknowledges, “that is true of much of the work of the ’70s, including my own concerning depressed persons depressing others.”) Langer’s long-term contributions, Coyne says, “will be seen in terms of the thinking and experimenting they encouraged.”
然而，兰格的这种感性有时会与当代学术界的严谨格格不入。有时候，她会对信手拈来的灵感和经过同行评议的研究给予同等份量。她含糊地告诉我，她在新罕布什尔州做过的“逆时针”研究，已经在英国、荷兰和韩国“重复”了三次。但这些都不是在严格的实验室条件下开展的实验，而是为制作电视节目而搞的活动。宾夕法尼亚大学(University of Pennsylvania)医学院心理学荣誉退休教授、经常发表文章揭露伪科学的詹姆斯·科因(James Coyne)称，当年那项可以说令兰格成名的研究（养老院老人与植物），“在今天看来并没有多少可信度，也不会满足如今收紧之后的严谨标准。”（但科因也承认，“20世纪70年代的大多数工作，包括我自己的那项‘抑郁症患者可导致其他人抑郁’的研究，也是这种情况。”）科因表示，兰格的长期贡献“将体现于它们所鼓舞的思维和实验”。
Four years ago, Langer and her colleagues published in Psychological Science a study that came closest in spirit to the original counterclockwise study in New Hampshire. Here, too, the placebo was a health prime, a situational nudge. They had two groups of subjects go into a flight simulator. One group was told to think of themselves as Air Force pilots and given flight suits to wear while guiding a simulated flight. The other group was told that the simulator was broken and that they should just pretend to fly a plane. Afterward, they gave each group an eyesight test. The group that piloted the flight performed 40 percent better than the other group. Clearly “mind-set manipulation can counteract presumed physiological limits,” Langer said. If a certain kind of prompt could change vision, Langer thought, there was no reason, that you couldn’t try almost anything. The endgame, she has said many times since, is to “return the control of our health back to ourselves.”
四年前，兰格及其同事在《心理科学》上发表了一项研究，这是与新罕布什尔州“逆时针”研究在精神上最接近的一项研究。这项研究的安慰剂仍是某种健康触发刺激，某种情景暗示。研究者把两组受试者分别送入飞行模拟器，要求其中一组受试者设想自己是空军飞行员，并让他们在操纵模拟飞行时穿着飞行服。而另一组受试者则被告知，模拟器坏了，他们只需要假装在操纵飞机。随后，两组人接受了视力测试。结果“飞行员组”的检测结果比另一组高出40%。兰格总结道，显然“操纵心态可以抵消假定的生理局限”。如果某种提示可以改变视力的话，兰格认为，那就没理由不敢尝试几乎任何东西。在那之后，她多次表示，终极目的是将“健康的控制权交还给我们自己”。
Last spring, Langer and a postdoctoral researcher, Deborah Phillips, were chatting when the subject of the counterclockwise study came up. Over the more than 30 intervening years, Langer had explored many dimensions of health psychology and tested the power of the mind to ease various afflictions. Perhaps it was finally time to run the counterclockwise study again. But if they did, she wanted to raise the stakes: Could they shrink the tumors of cancer patients? Langer often says she has no clue where her ideas come from — but in this case it was crystal clear: Metastatic breast cancer killed her mother at 56, when Langer was 29.
去年春天，兰格和博士后研究员德博拉·菲利普斯(Deborah Phillips)在聊天时谈起了“逆时针”研究。自那以来的30多年里，兰格探索了健康心理学的多个层面，做了很多利用思维的威力来缓解各种病痛的试验。也许现在终于到了再次进行“逆时针”的时候了。但是，如果真的要做，这次她想要加大赌注：他们能够缩小癌症患者的肿瘤么？兰格常说，她不知道自己那些稀奇古怪的想法从何而来，但这一次，她的灵感源泉显而易见：在她29岁时，她的母亲因转移性乳腺癌去世，享年仅56岁。
Phillips suggested that perhaps they should start with early-stage cancers, ones perceived as more curable, but Langer was firm: It had to be a big, common killer that traditional Western medicine had no answer for. She settled on Stage 4 metastatic breast cancer. Treatment of such cases is usually framed in terms of so-called comfort care. “The medical world has given up on these people,” Langer says.
菲利普斯提出，或许她们应当从被认为治愈希望较大的早期癌症着手，但兰格的态度很坚决：必须是一种死亡率较高、常见、传统的西方医学束手无策的癌症。最后，她选择了4期转移性乳腺癌。此类病例的治疗通常被框定于所谓“舒适护理”的范畴。兰格说：“医学界已经放弃了这些患者。”
The study, which is planned for the spring, is designed to include three groups of 24 women with Stage 4 breast cancer who are in stable condition and undergoing hormonal therapy. Two groups will gather at resorts in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, under the supervision of Langer and her staff. The experimental group will live for a week in surroundings that evoke 2003, a date when all the women were healthy and hopeful, living without a mortal threat hanging over them. They will be told to try to inhabit their former selves. Few clues of the present day will be visible inside the resorts or, for that matter, outside them. In the living areas, turn-of-the-millennium magazines will be lying around, as will DVDs of films like “Titanic” and “The Big Lebowski.” San Miguel de Allende, which has historically been a place known for its nearby healing mineral springs, is a Unesco World Heritage Site, and many of its buildings look as they did a few hundred years ago. “The whole town is a time capsule,” Langer says. (The other group at San Miguel will have the support of fellow cancer patients but will not live in the past; a third group will not experience any research intervention.)
该研究计划将在春季开展，设计招募三组患有4期乳腺癌、病情稳定且正在接受激素治疗的妇女，每组24人。其中两个组将在墨西哥圣米格尔德阿连德的度假胜地集合，接受兰格和她手下研究人员的监管。实验组将“穿越”回2003年——也就是她们仍然身体健康，人生尚未被死亡阴影笼罩，对未来充满憧憬的年代——在这样的环境中生活一周。她们将被告知尽量做回当年的自己。度假区内部不会出现任何与当下有关的东西（就此而言，度假区外也将是这样）。生活区里摆放的将是世纪之交之时的杂志，还有《泰坦尼克号》(Titanic)和《谋杀绿脚趾》(The Big Lebowski)等电影DVD。圣米格尔德阿连德素以其附近具有神秘治愈能力的矿物温泉而著称，被联合国教科文组织列为世界遗产(Unesco World Heritage Site)，这里的许多建筑看起来与几百年前一样。兰格说：“该镇宛如一个时间胶囊。”（圣米格尔的另一组受试者将得到癌症病友的支持，但不会穿越回过去；第三组则不会受到任何研究干预。）
As with the original counterclockwise experiment, subjects will be tested before and after on relevant measures — in this case the size of their tumors and the levels of circulating proteins in their blood known to be made by cancer cells — in addition to variables like mood and energy and pain levels. The experimental group will bring with them the same kinds of primes that the New Hampshire men did, like photographs of their younger selves. “We won’t make them haul their bags up the stairs,” Langer says. But otherwise they will be nudged to do all they can for themselves.
与最初的“逆时针”实验一样，受试者在实验前后会接受相关指标的检测，这一次主要检测的是肿瘤的大小和血液中已知由癌细胞产生的循环蛋白的水平，此外还有情绪、精力以及疼痛程度等变量。实验组还会像当年新罕布什尔州实验的参与者那样，携带一些帮助营造当年氛围的触发刺激，如自己年轻时的照片。“我们不会要求她们自己把行李搬上楼，”兰格说，但在其他方面会鼓励她们尽可能自立。
The staff will encourage the women to think anew about their circumstances in an attempt to purge any negative messages they have absorbed during their passage through in the medical system. This is crucial, Langer says, because just as the mind can make things better, it can also make things worse. The nocebo effect is the flip side of the more positive placebo effect, and she says that one of the most pernicious nocebo effects can occur when a patient is informed by her doctor that she is ill. The diagnosis itself, Langer says, primes the symptoms the patient expects to feel. “You change a word here or there, and you get vastly different results,” Langer says. She told me about a yet-to-be-published study she did in 2010 that found that breast-cancer survivors who described themselves as “in remission” were less functional and showed poorer general health and more pain than subjects who considered themselves “cured.”
研究人员将鼓励这些妇女换一种方式思考自己的处境，力求摒弃她们之前在医疗系统接受治疗期间吸收的负面信息。兰格表示，这一点至关重要，因为正如心态可以让事情向更好的方向发展，它也可能使事情变得更糟。反安慰剂效应是更为积极的安慰剂效应的另一面。兰格称，最糟糕的反安慰剂效应之一可能发生在患者从医生那里得知自己患病的消息时。兰格说，诊断本身就是患者预期自己将会感受到的种种症状的触发刺激。“如果你在这里或那里换一个词，结果可能截然不同，”她表示。她向我介绍了一项她在2010年进行、但尚未发表的研究。该研究发现，与自认为已经“治愈”的乳腺癌幸存者相比，那些认为自己“处于缓解期”的患者身体功能和整体健康状况都较差，还往往感到更加疼痛。
So there will be no talk of cancer “victims,” nor anyone “fighting” a “chronic” disease. “When you’re saying ‘fighting,’ you’re already acknowledging the adversary is very powerful,” Langer says. " ‘Chronic’ is understood as ‘uncontrollable’ — and that’s not something anyone can know.”
因此，实验中将不会提到癌症“受害者”，或者与“慢性”疾病“战斗”。“当你使用‘战斗’这个词时，你已经承认了对手非常强大，”兰格表示。“而‘慢性’往往被理解为‘无法控制’——这不是可以让受试者知道的事情。”
Of course, the subjects hope to get better, and everything about the setup is nudging them in that direction. So the study becomes a kind of open placebo experiment. Langer has long believed it’s possible to get people to gin up positive effects in their own body — in effect, to decide to get well. Last fall, she tested that proposition, but in reverse: She recruited a number of healthy test subjects and gave them the mission to make themselves unwell. The subjects watched videos of people coughing and sneezing. There were tissues around and those in the experimental group were encouraged to act as if they had a cold. No deception was involved: The subjects weren’t misled, for example, into thinking they were being put into a germ chamber or anything like that. This was explicitly a test to see if they could voluntarily change their immune systems in measurable ways.
每个受试者当然都希望自己好转，整个实验的设计都是为了鼓励她们进入好转的轨道。因此，可以说这项研究是某种公开的安慰剂实验。长期以来，兰格一直相信，有可能让人们激发自己体内的积极效应，换句话说就是“决定”让自己好起来。去年秋天，她从反面对这个命题进行了测试：她招募了一批健康的受试者，并交给他们一个任务：让自己感觉不舒服。受试者们观看了人们咳嗽和打喷嚏的视频，周围放了很多纸巾，研究人员鼓励实验组像感冒时那样行为。这项实验没有任何欺骗成分：比如受试者没有受到误导，以为自己身处病菌室之类。这是一场明确的试验，目的是看看他们能否以可衡量的方式从主观上改变自己的免疫系统。
In the study, which is ongoing, 40 percent of the experimental group reported cold symptoms following the experiment, while 10 percent of those in control group did. Buoyed, Langer ordered further analysis, looking for more concrete proof that they actually caught colds by testing their saliva for the IgA antibody, a sign of elevated immune-system response. In February, the results came in. All of the experimental subjects who had reported cold symptoms showed high levels of the IgA antibody.
在这项仍在进行的研究中，40%的实验组受试者报告在实验后出现感冒症状，而对照组中仅有10%的人报告感冒症状。这一结果令兰格大受鼓舞。她要求进行进一步的分析，通过检测受试者唾液中的IgA抗体水平（免疫系统反应升高的表征），寻找他们确实患了感冒的更确凿证据。今年2月，结果出来了。报告出现感冒症状的所有受试者的IgA抗体水平都较高。
Placebo effects have already been proven to work on the immune system. But this study could show for the first time that they work in a different way — that is, through an act of will. “As far as we know today, the placebo responses in the immune system are attributable to unconscious classical conditioning,” says the Italian neuroscientist Fabrizio Benedetti, a leading expert in placebo effects. In Benedetti’s experiments, a suggestion planted in the minds of test subjects produced physiological changes directly, the way a dinner bell might goose the salivary glands of a dog. (In one study, healthy volunteers given a placebo — a suggestion that any pain they experienced was actually beneficial to their bodies — were found to produce higher levels of natural painkillers.) “There’s no evidence that expectations play a role as well,” Benedetti says. Langer plans to further analyze the subjects’ saliva to see whether they actually have the rhinovirus and not just elevated IgA.
此前已经证实安慰剂效应可作用于免疫系统。但这项研究可能首次展示这种效应以一种不同的方式（即一种意志行为）发挥作用。安慰剂效应的权威专家、意大利神经学家法布里齐奥·贝内代蒂(Fabrizio Benedetti)表示：“据我们目前所知，免疫系统中的安慰剂反应可归因于无意识的经典条件反射。”在贝内代蒂的实验中，植入受试者思维中的心理暗示直接引起了生理反应，就像晚餐铃引发狗的唾液腺分泌一样。（在一项研究中，健康的志愿者得到这样一种安慰剂：一种心理暗示，让他们以为自己所经受的任何疼痛其实都有益于身体健康。结果，他们体内产生的天然镇痛剂水平有所提高。）贝内代蒂指出：“尚无证据表明预期也能发挥作用。”现在，兰格计划进一步分析受试者的唾液，看其中是否确实存在鼻病毒，而不只是偏高的IgA抗体水平。
The implications of the open placebo — that is, we know the sugar pill is just a sugar pill, but it still works as medicine — are tantalizing. If placebo effects can be harnessed without deception, it would remove many of the ethical issues that surround placebo work. In a study published in the journal Plos One in 2010, Ted Kaptchuk, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and his colleagues administered a placebo labeled “placebo” to a test group of patients suffering from irritable bowel syndrome. Their symptoms declined significantly as compared with a no-treatment control group. “At some level everybody realizes they themselves are the placebo,” Langer says.
公开安慰剂（即我们知道自己服用的只是糖丸，但它还是会产生药物的效果）的潜在影响是十分诱人的。如果无需欺骗就能收到安慰剂的效果，困扰安慰剂研究的很多伦理问题将不复存在。在2010年发表于《公共科学图书馆期刊》(PLOS One)的一项研究中，哈佛医学院教授特德·卡普特查克(Ted Kaptchuk)及其同事们给予患有肠易激综合征的试验组患者标有“安慰剂”字样的安慰剂。与无治疗的对照组相比，他们的症状显著减轻了。兰格说：“在某种程度上，每个人都意识到自己就是安慰剂。”
Langer’s cancer study has had to clear the hurdles of three human-subjects ethics boards — one from Mexico, one from Harvard’s psychology department and, for a time, one from the University of Southern California’s medical school, where until recently Debu Tripathy, an oncologist who is recruiting subjects for Langer’s study, was a professor of medicine. In June, progress stalled when the board at U.S.C. asked that the language be tweaked. “There’s so much stuff that’s totally outrageous in this world,” Langer told me at the time. “They want me to add a consent form for the people to sign saying there’s no known benefit to them. But that just introduces a nocebo effect!” (The study now has to clear the ethics board at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, where Tripathy presently works.)
兰格的癌症研究在启动之前必须得到三个人类受试者伦理委员会的批准。这三个机构一个位于墨西哥，一个位于哈佛大学心理学系，南加州大学(University of Southern California, U.S.C.)医学院一度也是其中之一，为兰格的研究招募受试者的肿瘤学家德布·崔帕蒂(Debu Tripathy)直到不久前一直是那里的医学教授。今年6月，当南加州大学的委员会要求他们对所用的语言“稍加改进”后，该项目陷入了停滞。“实验的很多内容对这个世界是离谱的，”当时兰格对我表示。“他们要我增加一份同意书，让受试者签字声明：他们知道该实验对他们没有任何已知的益处。但是，这恰恰引入了一个反安慰剂效应！”（目前该研究需要得到位于休斯敦的得州大学安德森癌症中心[University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center]的伦理委员会的批准，崔帕蒂现在在那里工作。）
Like the men in New Hampshire, Langer’s cancer patients in San Miguel will pass a richly diverting week. In this case, art classes, cooking classes and writing classes will help distract them from the brute dread of their circumstances and re-engage them in life. The terror of late-stage cancer can be as debilitating as the physical reality, Tripathy says. Some sufferers, he says, show symptoms akin to PTSD. There’s strong evidence that the support of other people boosts the quality of life for cancer patients. There’s less evidence that it improves their health prospects.
就像新罕布什尔州研究中的老人那样，兰格的圣米格尔研究中的癌症患者也将度过精彩纷呈的一周。这一次将开设美术课、烹饪课和写作课，帮助她们分散对自己病情的极度恐惧，重新投入生活。崔帕蒂表示，像身体现实那样，对晚期癌症的恐惧本身也可能削弱患者的能力。他说，有些患者表现出类似于创伤后应激障碍(PTSD)的症状。目前已经有强有力的证据表明，其他人的支持可大大提高癌症患者的生活质量，但这种支持能够改善患者健康前景的证据相对较少。
I asked Tripathy whether there’s any precedent for what Langer is trying to do. “Well, there are many examples in medicine where improvement in the emotional state seems also to bring about some improvement in the disease state,” he said. “We know, for example, that Tibetan monks can meditate and lower their blood pressure. People with hypertension, they embark on behavioral changes, and you can see the improvement in the medical indexes, like fewer heart attacks. But cancer? That’s a harder thing to fathom.”
我向崔帕蒂请教兰格试图进行的研究有没有任何先例。“嗯，医学上情绪状态的改善似乎带来病情改善的例子还挺不少的，”他说。“例如，我们知道，西藏僧侣可以通过打坐冥想降低血压。高血压患者在做出行为改变后，医学指标会有所改善，比如，心脏病发作减少了。至于癌症，那就更难说清楚了。”
Positive psychology doesn’t have a great track record as a way to fight cancer. Indeed, when James Coyne and colleagues followed 1,093 people with advanced head-and-neck cancer over nine years, they found even the most optimistic subjects lived no longer than the most pessimistic ones.
积极心理学在对付癌症方面的记录并不太好。的确，詹姆斯·科因和他的同事曾经对1093名晚期头颈癌患者进行长达九年的随访，结果发现，即使是最乐观的受试者也并不比最悲观者活得长。
Some cancer patients respond to interventions better than others, Tripathy notes. “But even with high-dose chemotherapy, you rarely see ‘complete response,’ which is total disappearance” of advanced breast cancer. “So if we saw anything like that, boy, that would hit the medical journals in a hurry.”
崔帕蒂指出，有些癌症患者对干预的反应好于其他人。“不过，即使是使用大剂量化疗，你也很少能看到‘完全反应’，即（晚期乳腺癌）完全消失……所以，如果我们能看到那样的结果，那很快会在医学期刊上引起轰动。”
One day in Puerto Vallarta in February, Langer sat on the patio of her hillside home. An iguana the length of a celery rib scooted across a high railing, and the dogs went bananas. “That’s Ada,” Langer said. “Or is it Ida? There are two — it’s hard to tell them apart.” When the iguanas first appeared and began devouring the hibiscus, Langer was startled. Now she and Nancy feed them petals for lunch. “That’s the way it is,” she said. “You can be scared. You give it a name, and then it’s a pet.”
2月的一天，兰格坐在她位于巴亚尔塔港的山景房的露台上。一条有芹菜茎那么长的鬣鳞蜥飞快地翻越了高高的栏杆，几只狗狂躁不已。“这是埃达，”兰格说。“是艾达吗？它们有两个，很难分得清。”当鬣鳞蜥第一次出现，并开始狼吞虎咽地吃芙蓉花时，兰格吓了一跳。现在，她和南希自在地把花瓣喂给它们吃。“事情就是这样的，”她说。“你可能会害怕。你也可以给它取个名字，让它变成一只宠物。”
Langer peered out over the deep blue sea, in the direction of a lagoon, where early in her career she conducted experiments on whether dolphins were more likely to want to swim with mindful people. In the last few days, she had been exchanging emails with a writer who wanted to come stay with her for a couple of weeks, taking notes for a screenplay for a Hollywood biopic.
兰格凝视着环礁湖方向上深蓝色的大海，在她的职业生涯早期，她曾做实验研究海豚是否更愿意跟处于正念状态的人一起游泳。在过去的几天里，她在与一位作家互通电子邮件，那人想要和她一起待上一两个星期，为一部好莱坞传记片的剧本采集素材。
Langer told me that she chose San Miguel for her new counterclockwise study primarily because the town had made “an offer I couldn’t refuse.” A group of local businesspeople, convinced of the value of having Langer’s name attached to San Miguel, arranged for lodging to be made available free to Langer. They also encouraged her to build a Langer Mindfulness Institute, which will take part in research and run retreats. (A local developer donated a beautiful casa, next to his Nick Faldo-designed golf course, to serve as staff quarters for the institute.) Starting sometime next year, adults will be able to sign up for a paid, weeklong counterclockwise experience, presumably with a chance at some of the same rejuvenative benefits the New Hampshire test subjects enjoyed.
兰格告诉我，她选择在圣米格尔进行新的“逆时针”研究，主要是因为该镇提供的优厚条件让她“无法拒绝”。一群当地商人深信将兰格的名字与圣米格尔联系在一起将很有价值，于是他们为兰格的实验安排了免费住宿。他们还鼓励她建设一座兰格正念研究所(Langer Mindfulness Institute)，既开展研究，又运营静思休养之地。（当地的一位开发商还捐赠给她一栋精美的城堡，用作研究所员工的宿舍，这座城堡位于他那由尼克·佛度[Nick Faldo，英国职业高尔夫球手]设计的高尔夫球场旁边。）从明年的某个时候开始，成年人将可以报名参加为期一周的“逆时针”付费体验，想必将和新罕布什尔州实验的受试者们一样，有机会享受某些返老还童的益处。
Langer says she is in conversation with health and business organizations in Australia about establishing another research facility that would also accept paying customers, who will learn to become more mindful through a variety of cognitive-behavioral techniques and exercises. She has already opened a mindfulness institute in Bangalore, India, where researchers are undertaking a study to look at whether mindfulness can stem the spread of prostate cancer.
兰格说，她也正在与澳大利亚的一些保健和商业组织商谈建立第二家研究机构，该机构也将接受付费客户，他们将通过多种认知行为技巧和练习来学习变得更加专注。她已经在印度班加罗尔开设了一家正念研究所，那里的研究人员正在进行一项研究，探讨正念能否阻止前列腺癌的扩散。
Langer makes no apologies for the paid retreats, nor for what will be their steep price. (This, too, is calculated: In the absence of other cues, people tend to place disproportionate value on things that cost more. Dan Ariely, a psychologist at Duke, and his colleagues found that pricier placebos were more effective than cheap ones.) To my question of whether such a nakedly commercial venture will undermine her academic credibility, Langer rolled her eyes a bit. “Look, I’m not 40 years old. I’ve paid my dues, and there’s nothing wrong with making this more widely available to people, since I deeply believe it.”
兰格不认为这种静养机构将会收费，而且价格高昂有什么错。（这一点其实也是经过盘算的：在缺乏其他暗示的情况下，人们倾向于超出比例地注重比较昂贵的东西。杜克大学[Duke]心理学家丹·艾瑞里[Dan Ariely]及其同事们发现，价格较高的安慰剂比便宜安慰剂更有效。）我问她，此类明显商业化的项目会不会削弱她的学术可信度？兰格微微转了转她的眼睛。“你看，我不是40岁的人了。我已经做出了自己该做的贡献，再说，将它推广给更多的人并没有什么不妥，因为我深信它一定有效。”
Medical colleagues have asked Langer if she is setting herself up to fail with the cancer study — and perhaps underappreciating the potential setbacks to her work. It’s also possible that subjects who don’t improve could feel more demoralized by the experience. In her memoir, “Bright-sided,” the journalist Barbara Ehrenreich wrote scorchingly about the sunshine brigade that bombarded her with “positive thinking” as she suffered through breast cancer. Under those conditions, patients who don’t get better might feel as if they themselves were somehow to blame.
医学界的同事们问兰格，她这项癌症研究会不会弄巧成拙，害自己栽个跟头？或许她低估了自己一辈子的研究成果因此遭遇挫折的潜在风险？还有一个可能性是，病情没能好转的受试者因这一体验而更加意志消沉。记者芭芭拉·埃伦赖希(Barbara Ehrenreich)在她的回忆录《失控的正向思考》(Bright-sided)中，尖锐地批评了当她身患乳腺癌时，各路“阳光族”向她狂轰滥炸“积极思维”。在那种情况下，病情未见起色的患者会觉得仿佛是自己做错了什么。
After a lecture in 2010, in which she’d discussed how when we talk about “fighting” cancer we actually give the disease power, a man buttonholed Langer and laid into her. His wife had died of breast cancer. “He said she had fought it, and I made it seem that it was her fault,” Langer told me.
2010年，兰格在一个讲座上谈到，当我们说“与癌症战斗”的时候，我们实际上赋予了疾病威力。讲座结束后，一名男子拦住了她，劈头痛斥了她的观点。原来他的妻子死于乳腺癌。“他说她一直在与病魔抗争，而按照我的说法，似乎这全是她的错，”兰格向我转述道。
Langer apologized to the man. “Those are good points, and I’m sorry I didn’t address them,” she said. “But let me explain to you that it’s the culture that teaches us that we have no control. I’m not blaming your wife; I’m blaming the culture.” Langer imagines a day when blame isn’t the first thing people reach for when things go awry. Instead, we will simply bring to bear the power of our own minds — which she believes will turn out to be far greater than we imagined.
兰格向那名先生道了歉。“你说的这些都很有道理，我很抱歉我没有应对这些问题，”她说。“但请让我解释，是文化让我们觉得自己无能为力。我并没有埋怨你的妻子；我只是在谴责这种文化。”兰格梦想着有那么一天，当事情出错时，人们最先做出的反应不是责备。相反，我们将只是充分发挥自己的思维威力——她相信，这力量将比我们所想像的大得多。
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