1: In the fall of 1979, Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer set out to build a time machine.
But this wasn’t the kind of time machine from Back to the Future. There was no DeLorean with gull-wing doors.
Instead, Ellen rented an empty monastery in the woods near Peterborough, New Hampshire.
“The color television was swapped for a black-and-white version,” Daniel Coyle writes in Flourish: The Art of Building Meaning, Joy, and Fulfillment. “The stereo was swapped for a vintage record player.
“Every newspaper and magazine, every program playing on the television, every piece of clothing, every stick of furniture was from twenty years before.”
2: After Ellen finished preparing the house, she ran a newspaper ad looking for men in their seventies who were willing to be part of what she called a “unique experience.”
She chose eight men to take part. She measured their dexterity, strength, posture, and mobility, and also gave them intelligence and visual memory tests.
When the participants arrived at the house, most moved slowly.
“Some were stooped,” Daniel writes, “one used a cane.”
Ellen explained that for the next five days they were all to live as if it were 1959.
“Some laughed; others shrugged skeptically,” Daniel notes.
“Then they walked inside. They watched Jack Benny and Ed Sullivan on the television,” Daniel shares.
“They chatted about sports stars Johnny Unitas and Wilt Chamberlain as if they were still playing; they discussed ‘recent’ books like Phillip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus and listened to Rosemary Clooney and Perry Como on the radio.”
Then something began to change.
“The residents started standing taller, speaking with more confidence, and moving more quickly,” Daniel notes. “One started walking without his cane.”
One night at dinner, a participant named John was eating so quickly that another man warned him to slow down, saying eating too fast might not be healthy.
John looked up good-naturedly and said, “Who says so?”
That statement became the group’s go-to saying, “a playful battle cry to push back against the invisible rules they’d lived by until now,” Daniel observes.
“Who says so?” they started saying to one another.
On their last day, as the men waited on the porch for the bus home, they started tossing a football back and forth.
“Before anyone knew it,” Daniel writes, “a playful game of touch football had broken out.”
As Ellen later wrote, “No one would mistake it for the NFL, but at the start of the study, no one would have predicted this was possible.”
3: Not only that. The changes weren’t just behavioral.
When Ellen reassessed the participants, they “exhibited more manual dexterity, more joint flexibility, improved vision, and higher scores on memory and intelligence tests.
“By almost every measure,” Daniel writes, “their scores exceeded those of another group that lived in the same house but were only encouraged to reminisce, not to imagine themselves in 1959.”
Ellen’s results challenged conventional assumptions about aging and vitality.
“Normally,” Daniel writes, “you think that those things depend mostly on personality traits, habits, and values that are stable and thus difficult to change.
“Yet here,” he notes, “we are seeing a bloom of cohesive aliveness caused by a blatantly fictional charade—one that every person involved knows is a charade.”
So what exactly happened here?
We’ll dig into that question tomorrow!
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Reflection: What assumption about your age, abilities, or stage of life have you accepted without ever asking whether it’s actually true?
Action: The next time you catch yourself saying, “I’m too old,” “I’m not that kind of person,” or “I can’t do that anymore,” borrow the men’s favorite question: Who says so?
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