The Power of Mindful Learning by Ellen J. Langer

engaged in its story and meaning. Before they attempt to learn their lines, they consider the
meaning of the lines in relation to the larger plot and to the
perspectives of the other characters. They begin to know what
would bring the other characters to say what they say." The
illustration stops here, though, because at this point actors need
to memorize the material. After all, each person's lines are cued
by the exact lines that go before. Also, playwrights want to hear
the lines they actually wrote, and directors expect control over
what happens next.

    Noticing new things about any body of information is involving. When students draw distinctions, the distinctions are necessarily relevant to them. Distinctions reveal that the material is
situated in a context and imply that other contexts may be considered. For instance, although few people worry about learning
to watch sporting events, consider how seemingly irrelevant
details in spectator sports can teach us about demographics or
even prejudice. Suppose that a spectator notices that the majority of players on a certain team have blond hair. That person
might wonder whether there is a relationship between hair
color and that sport. This consideration could lead to noticing (caring about/being interested in) what hair color dominates
among players in other sports. Such a seemingly trivial distinction could lead to an awareness of the absence of blacks or
Asians or whites on some teams and to questions of what that
absence might signify. As a more serious example, think about
asking students to examine photographs taken of people at the
time of the Civil War or the depression. Details observers note
about expressions, clothing, and so on are the basis for much
anthropological information about a period.

    Drawing distinctions allows one to see more sides of an
issue or subject, which is more likely to result in greater interest. Teaching students to draw distinctions sets the stage for
mindful learning, that is, as noted in the introduction, for creating new categories, being open to new information, and
being aware of different perspectives. Students learn to create
working definitions that are continually revised and do not
exhaust the potential phenomena. This kind of conditionally
learned information is potentially accessible, even when not in
the forefront of one's mind.
    There is an analogy here in computer science. A computer
that has virtual memory is one that swaps information to create the illusion of having more memory than it has; by swapping, a computer can appear to have much greater memory
than its hardware permits. Computers achieve virtual memory
by managing the activities run on them, so that at any one
time only a fraction of the programs in use are under active
consideration. Computers swap among applications so that
current, but momentarily unused functions remain accessible (more so than when they are on a floppy disk in a drawer)
without using up memory and the computer can effectively
handle more information.

    Recently Matt Lieberman and I examined the effects of a
mindful attitude on the learning of reading selections." We
asked ninth-grade students to study one of two essays from
their high school literature book: Sylvia Plath's "Reflections
of a Seventeen Year-Old-Girl," or O'Henry's "The Ransom
of Red Chief." We asked half the students simply to learn the
material. We expected that this instruction would result in
students' trying to memorize the material. We asked the
other students to make the material meaningful to themselves: "This may entail thinking about how certain parts of
the information remind you of past, present, or future experiences, how the information could be important to yourself or
someone else, or simply finding some significance of the
story in relation to anyone and/or anything. Remember, what
is meaningful to one person is not necessarily meaningful to
another."
    We then