Who doesn’t want to make the world a better place?

If I were a political editorialist and a mean-spirited sort, I’d do more than just pose that question. I’d name names.

But I’m a health-and-fitness writer, and I’d like to think a uniter instead of a divider, so even though creating such a list is tempting, I won’t. The question will remain rhetorical to explain what comes next.

It’s not, however, what it very well could be. A thank-you to Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer for writing The Mindful Body (Ballantine, 2023), a book that eased as well as excited my mind.

Instead, it’s about how that book could do the same for you and make your world a little better place.

In last week’s column, I suggested reading The Mindful Body solely as a way to better comprehend one of Langer’s most controversial beliefs. Which is “there is no natural endpoint to the amount of information we can consider for any decision, [so] don’t try to make the right decision, make the decision right.”

Even though I joked reading that hit me like a 2 by 4 across the forehead, it really eased my mind. For if you believe what Langer believes is true, and I do, you’ll never hesitate or have any doubt about making a decision again.

You’ll just make one that makes sense to you and then proceed accordingly to see it through.

What makes sense to me today is to share one of Langer’s ideas that excites my mind and might also make you healthier. That the mind and body are not separate entities, but instead are unified and function as one.

To demonstrate how that’s so, Langer tells of a time she got ill from a restaurant meal. She was honeymooning in Paris and ordered the mixed grill even though it contained one item she had never eaten, ris de veau — and the thought of doing so made her queasy.

For those not well-versed in French, ris de veau translates as sweetbread, a culinary euphemism if there ever was one. Most often it’s made from the pancreas of a calf, pig, or lamb.

Upon the meal’s arrival, Langer asked her husband which piece of meat was the pancreas and decided to eat that last. When the “dreaded moment” came, she became “more and more nauseated.”

Her husband found this amusing. She wanted to know why.

Because he had lied to her about which piece of meat was the pancreas, he explained, and she had eaten it a while ago. What now was making her ill, somehow, was her attempt to eat a piece of chicken.

Sharing her husband’s prank illustrates what Langer sets out to show in her book. “That the mind is a primary determinant of the body’s health and that simple interventions to change the way we think can dramatically improve our well-being.”

How dramatically? Dramatically enough to improve the vision and hearing of elderly men in one week.

In 1979, Langer and colleagues recruited elderly men to live for a week at a retreat that had been “retrofitted to resemble life twenty years earlier — in every way possible.” Once there, the men “watched news broadcasts and other television shows and movies of that era, listened to jukebox favorites.”

Beforehand, however, about half had been asked “to talk about it all in the present tense, as if these things were happening in real time.” The others had not.

Comparing posttests to pretests showed the time at the retreat helped all the elderly men in a number of biological, psychological, and physical ways, but there were certain measures — joint flexibility, manual dexterity, posture, and gait to name a few — where those who had spent the week speaking in the present tense outperformed those who hadn’t.

What may even be more noteworthy, though, is that all the men recorded better hearing and vision scores after a week at the retro-retreat, a fact Langer calls remarkable “since hearing and vision ... rarely improve without medical intervention in any age group and especially in an older population.”

It’s also a fact that proves “we can make bodily changes by changing the mind.”

Better still, what’s come to be known as the counterclockwise study doesn’t appear to be an outlier. When Langer and colleagues replicated it in 1989, they again found an improvement in physical functioning.

Moreover, Langer also cites in The Mindful Body other studies that refute the once widely held belief in the Western world that thoughts and emotions do not cause disease.

One led by Abiola Keller at Marquette University, for instance, found it is “not stress that is harmful as much as the perception that stress is harmful.” That those who do indeed lead stressful lives but don’t feel that is true live just as long as people whose lifestyles create very little stress.

Another done in the form of a survey and headed by a former student of Langer’s uncovered that those who didn’t see themselves as being physically active were more likely to die compared to those who thought they were physically active but really weren’t.