The Value of Uncertainty

Excerpted from
On Becoming an Artist : Reinventing Yourself Through Mindful Creativity
By Ellen J. Langer, Ph.D.

We don't often question information when it comes to us from an authority or is presented in absolute and unconditional language. We simply accept it and become crapped in a fixed mindset, oblivious to the fact that authorities are sometimes wrong or overstate their case, or that language can be highly manipulative. Indeed, most all the information passed on to us is couched in such absolute language. A child is cold that a family consists of "a mommy, a daddy, and a child," and all is fine until one parent leaves home. Then, just like when the fork is placed co the right of the place, the child doesn't feel right when now cold, "We are still a family." It would be much better if the child were taught that one understanding of a family is a mother, a father, and a child, but there are others. Then there wouldn't be such a problem were the circumstances to change.

The language of authority too often binds us to a single perspective, one that limits our ability to respond creatively to the world. There is, however, a better way available, one that allows for a more mindful use of information. As students of general semantics say, the map is not the territory. By presenting (and accepting) information conditionally, we can enhance its usefulness across many contexts.

In order to investigate how language can limit or enhance our ability to use information, psychologist Alison Piper and I conducted a study in which we used either absolute or conditional language. We showed one group of participants unfamiliar objects using absolute language and another group the same objects using conditional language. For example, the first group was told that one of the objects "was" a dog's chew toy, the second that it "could be" a dog's chew toy. Conditional language implicitly suggested to the second group that the objects under certain conditions might not be just what we chose to call them. After we had presented all the objects, we gave both groups a form, and asked them to evaluate the objects from most to least expensive. After they had begun to write, we told them that we didn't have any more forms and we had made an error in our instructions. It was supposed to be from lease to most expensive. Who would chink to use the "chew coy" as an eraser? The answer was that only those in the second group, who were told the object "could be" a dog's chew coy, did so. The names we give co things often denote only one way they can be understood. If we learn their names as if "the map is the territory," then creative, mindful uses of the objects will not occur to us.

I'm often told chat there must be some value in our mindlessness, especially when I'm asked whether automatic behavior doesn't make life faster and easier for people. Not having co chink about things is more efficient, or so the argument goes. This line of thought deserves special attention, starting with asking, How often is speed really of the essence? We may achieve the same response either mindfully or mindlessly, but as we will see, when we choose to respond mindfully, the difference in speed is likely to be trivial, but the other consequences of mindfully or mindlessly responding are not. People correctly assume that we cannot be in a constant state of mindfully drawing distinctions about everything. It would seem, then, that the alternative is to be mindless with respect to some things so we can be mindful of others.

We need another alternative. Mindlessness freezes our responses and closes us off to the possibility of change. To argue that mindlessness is rarely, if ever, beneficial is really to argue that we do not want to close ourselves off to possibility. Another alternative is to be either mindful with respect to some particular content or "potentially" mindful. We don't want to learn about anything in such a way that we take as a given that now we know it for certain. Things change. We may not want to notice the myriad ways each cornflake is different from the others, for example, but we also do not want to be so automatic in what we do notice chat we fail to see if a metal nut has slipped into the bowl. Eating a mindful breakfast can cake the same time as eating a mindless breakfast, not to mention be more pleasurable and safer.

In situations where milliseconds might matter, as when a driver muse swerve to avoid hitting a child, it is also arguable that if we were mindfully driving in the first place, we would not have found ourselves needing to avoid disaster in the second place. When mindful, we often avert the danger not yet arisen. Regardless, milliseconds are unlikely to be of the essence in our search for engagement with a more creative life, so I need not pursue the issue any more in this context.

Appreciating uncertainty, however, is relevant. We don't realize the power of uncertainty. Most aspects of our culture currently lead us to cry to reduce or eliminate uncertainty, which is the essence of mindlessness. We learn to do so in order to know what things are, so that we can control them. Instead, we should consider exploiting the power of uncertainty, so that we can learn what things can become and so that we can become more than we previously thought possible.

The antidote, then, is to avoid becoming mindless and to learn to be more mindful, which we can do by understanding the differences between the two states of mind. Mindfulness makes us sensitive to context and perspective. When we are mindless, our behavior is governed by rules and routines. Essentially we freeze our understanding and become oblivious to subtle changes that would have led us to act differently if only we were aware of them. In contrast, when we are mindful, our behavior may be guided (not governed) by rules and routines, but we stay sensitive to the ways our situation changes. When we are mindless, we are trapped in rigid mind-sets, oblivious to context or perspective. When we are mindful, we are actively drawing novel distinctions rather than relying on distinctions drawn in the past.

And it is just these rules, routines, and mind-sets that are the roadblocks to living a more creative life. People often recognize that the concepts of mindfulness as I describe them are similar to those found in Eastern religions. But mindfulness as I've researched it comes about in a different, more immediate way. My work on mindfulness springs from a Western, scientific perspective. For me, the two ways of becoming mindful are not at odds with each other. Becoming more mindful does not involve achieving some altered state of consciousness through years of meditation. It requires, rather, learning to switch modes of thinking about ourselves and the world. It is very easy to learn to be mindful, which makes doing so appealing to those unwilling to sit still for twenty minutes twice a day. Mindfulness is simply the process of noticing new things. It is seeing the similarities in things thought different and the differences in things taken to be similar.