LIFESTYLE/HEALTH
New research from Harvard University reveals a crucial factor influencing the speed of our recovery from, say, a cut or a bruise and maybe other things is how we perceive the passing of time.
In a first-of-its-kind experiment, psychology professor Ellen Langer from Harvard University and her team used what’s called cupping therapy to test their theory. Cupping — which has been used for thousands of years in China and ancient Egypt to treat diseases, pain, and more — employs the placing of glass cups on various parts of the body. When the rim of each cup is in position, the vacuum “sucks” the skin into the cup, breaking the capillaries in the area and causing a blood blister that sometimes lasts several hours, manifesting as a red mark on the skin. The object of the experiment: to see how quickly participants would recover from this controlled “injury”; they were given 28 minutes.
Each of the 33 participants underwent the process three times on different days. Each time, a researcher placed a cupping glass on the participant’s arm for about half a minute. The researcher then photographed the red mark immediately after removing the cup and again 28 minutes later.
During the 28 minutes of each stage of the experiment, participants played Tetris on a computer with a small clock next to it. In one stage, the clock next to the computer moved at twice the normal speed, making the participant believe 56 minutes had passed. In another, the clock moved at half the normal speed, so the participant thought only 14 minutes had passed. In a third instance, the clock wasn’t manipulated. The researchers didn’t tell the participants they were manipulating their sense of time.
When 25 judges, unaware of the experiment’s conditions, compared the pictures of each wound immediately after the cups were removed, they were asked to rate the healing on a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 being “completely healed”.
For those participants who thought only 14 minutes had passed, five of 33 showed almost complete healing, and the average healing rate was 6.17. When time was not manipulated, eight participants reached almost complete healing, with an average healing rate of 6.43. For those who believed 56 minutes had passed, 11 achieved near-complete healing — the red mark had almost completely disappeared — resulting in an average rating of 7.3.
“We saw that the healing rate of the wound depended on the duration of time as perceived by the participant,” Langer explains. “Our results contribute to a growing body of evidence suggesting that abstract psychological precepts, such as those that guide how we perceive the passage of time, can significantly impact physical health outcomes.”
The idea of the mind’s influence on the body has intrigued Langer from the start of her academic career. In a groundbreaking study she conducted in 1979, male participants in their 70s and 80s, spent a week in a facility entirely designed to resemble the 1950s, a period when they were 20 years younger. The pictures on the walls, the books on the shelves, the magazines on the table, and even the radio and TV broadcasts were all tailored to events from 1959. Not only were the participants asked to imagine themselves being 20 years younger and to converse as if it were true, but they were also required to be unusually self-reliant. They had to take care of everything themselves: preparing meals and even carrying their luggage to the second-floor rooms, even if it meant doing so in stages, one item at a time.
“The results were astonishing. In just one week, their hearing improved, their vision sharpened, and their memory and physical strength increased. They even visibly appeared younger, all without any medical intervention,” Langer shared in an interview about the study she conducted that was published in her book, “Counter Clockwise, Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility” (2009).
However, an unexpected event of a different kind led her to delve deeper into understanding the connection between our perception of time and the actual healing process. “My mother had breast cancer,” Langer says. “It spread to her pancreas, which is usually considered the end of the road.”
Langer did everything possible to help her mother maintain optimism, pretending that one day this nightmare would be behind them. “One day, the cancer miraculously disappeared, and the doctors couldn’t explain it. It was a ‘spontaneous remission.’”
“These two events led me to try to understand better how something as vague as a thought can influence the physical world — the body,” she explains. This issue has intrigued scientists since the time of the French philosopher René Descartes in the 17th century when the concept of “mind-body dualism” took root, suggesting the mind and body are separate entities. Thousands of years before Descartes, philosophers believed in monism — the unity of body and mind, Langer explains.
According to this view, the body is a single system encompassing both body and mind, changing as a whole. “It suddenly occurred to me, who decided we need to split people into these two separate components?” continues Langer. “Why not bring the body and mind back together, treat them as one unit, and see where that takes us? Usually, the crucial question is ‘How do we get from the mind to the body?’ But if they are one, this question no longer exists.”
Another study from 2007 and published in “Counter Clockwise, Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility” involved hotel cleaning staff, who were asked how much exercise they did. “Although they worked physically throughout their workday, they didn’t perceive this work as exercise. This is because they thought, according to common belief, that exercise is something done after work hours. But by that time of day, they were too tired,” Langer explains. “We randomly divided the 84 participants into two groups. In the experimental group, we simply explained that their work was actually physical exercise. We showed them, for example, that changing bed sheets was equivalent to working out on a specific gym machine.” Participants in the control group did not receive similar guidance.
“So we had two groups: one where participants believed their work was exercise, and the other where participants didn’t. We measured them on various parameters and found during the month of the study, they didn’t make significant changes to their eating habits or worked any harder. Nonetheless, participants in the experimental group lost weight, their blood pressure dropped, their body mass index (BMI) improved, and there was also an improvement in their waist-to-hip ratio. All of this happened just due to a change in mindset.”
In the control group, however, the changes were random and sometimes even negative.
There have been other studies since. The first in a series begun in 2016 involved 47 patients with Type 2 diabetes and yielded similar results to the cupping experiment, as did a follow-up study in 2020 involving perceptions of sleep.
“We found that when people perceived they had slept only five hours, having actually received eight hours time in bed, their cognitive performance was significantly worse than those who slept eight hours and were ‘informed’ that it was eight hours. Consistent with this finding, we also found that those who slept five hours but perceived that it was eight hours performed significantly better than those who slept five hours and thought it was five hours,” the researchers say.
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