Mindfulness

A new year resolution of mine was to kick start my reading habit and start completing books that I start reading. Finally, I've managed to start doing something about it. To keep this thing going, I've decided to blog a small gist of the book that I complete (as I understand it :-)) and possibly be of service to the limited people who read this blog with their own will or are forced to read it because of my constant nagging :-)

A couple of days back I completed a book called "Mindfulness" by Ellen Langer. This book talks about the pitfalls of routine and automatic behavior in our daily lives and also describes the various psychological experiments that were conducted to prove the benefits of mindful behavior.

The book starts off by explaining mindless behavior and some common reasons for such kind of automatic behavior. Some of the reasons discussed are,

1. Pre-Cognitive commitments to categories: In most of the tasks we do, we already have a number of assumptions or prejudices that influence our decisions. Our mind categorizes anything we do and these categories are rigid and are formed from our experiences.
2. Mindless Expertise: Expertise developed by repetition of the same task over and over again is termed "Mindless Expertise". A slight change of context may make the mindless expert fail in his/her endeavor.
3. Narrow Perspective: Single perspective and lack of alternative thinking could lead to mindless behavior. People are locked down on a single solution when alternatives could be viable in solving the problem probably more efficiently at times.
4. Focusing on the ends: Focusing on the effect, rather than the cause may actually hinder mindful thinking. Knowing the end goal but not focusing on the methods could be frustrating.
5. Influences of context: The context we perceive to be in plays an important role in the decisions we make. An interesting quote the authoress makes about the failure of the railroad industry in the US is that the railroad industry thought of themselves as being in the railroad business instead of being in the transportation industry.

The second half of the book deals with the experiments conducted in proving how the above points influence mindless behavior and talks about mindful thinking in aging, at work and health. The book elaborately speaks about how creating new categories, welcoming new information and focusing on process rather than on results can transform mindless thinking.

At the work place, the book talks about the importance of an "outsider" (a person who has a different perspective e.g. a target user in software development) in decision making and also how uncertain managers can influence employees to be more risk taking and successful. "Mindlessness is the application of yesterdays business solutions to todays problems" is a quote in the book that holds true for many business decisions that have led to mishaps (some in front of my own eyes. I guess you know what instance I'm talking about ;-)).

Another significant topic the book touches is decreasing prejudices by increasing discrimination. Though this looks like a contradicting statement, the book speaks about making fine grained distinctions and looking at things on a case by case basis, instead of generalizing things into categories. For example, a person with an eye impairment could be termed as a person with a handicap or a person with that particular eye impairment. The former categorization may influence us to disregard the person for any kind of activity, though the person maybe good at listening and making subtle distinctions in some other activity, say music.

Overall, a pretty good book with lots of illustrations. The first half is more interesting than the second. The book is not very heavy and is around 200 pages. I didn't find it to be a self-help book so if you are looking for shortcuts to increase mindfulness, it is not the book for you. Application of the concepts has to be self-willed. Now that is a hard thing in itself, isn't it? :-)

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