The New York Times has an article that is getting widely circulated right now about the benefits of positive thinking. The article focuses on the research of Harvard Psychologist, Ellen Langer, and her research. She found that people who have a positive attitude and feel younger, will age better. She talks about the power of the placebo effect. That seems to make sense. She’s also trying to show that positive attitudes help to create better outcomes for cancer patients. That research isn’t really happening.
My great aunt Edna is 102. She benefitted from heredity low blood pressure and a good Italian diet. She also kept herself really busy from a young age, when her mother suddenly died, and she became the mother to the younger siblings, including my grandmother. Yes, she has a good attitude, but good genes, a purposeful life, and a proper diet is probably more important.
Langer’s ideas are less interesting to me than how she’s capitalizing on them. She’s setting up international resorts for people to gain positive attitudes and play golf.
Langer says she is in conversation with health and business organizations in Australia about establishing another research facility that would also accept paying customers, who will learn to become more mindful through a variety of cognitive-behavioral techniques and exercises. She has already opened a mindfulness institute in Bangalore, India, where researchers are undertaking a study to look at whether mindfulness can stem the spread of prostate cancer.
Langer makes no apologies for the paid retreats, nor for what will be their steep price. (This, too, is calculated: In the absence of other cues, people tend to place disproportionate value on things that cost more. Dan Ariely, a psychologist at Duke, and his colleagues found that pricier placebos were more effective than cheap ones.) To my question of whether such a nakedly commercial venture will undermine her academic credibility, Langer rolled her eyes a bit. “Look, I’m not 40 years old. I’ve paid my dues, and there’s nothing wrong with making this more widely available to people, since I deeply believe it.”
Making money from the academic brand is the hip thing to do. Dan Gilbert does it. I guess that academics in the sciences have been able to do this for a long time. I’m trying to think of applications for social sciences.
Apt. 11d 
Back when I was a graduate student (second time around), a social science professor called me a “resource”. He always used entrepreneur-type words, except that he never called me a resource again after I laughed.
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I’m thinking with all your experience navigating the special needs world that you could carve out a specialized segment, make a living from it (consulting? Advising? Managing tutors?), and then do your writing as a side project. Neither have to be full time.
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I’ve been giving out a whole of lot of free advice about social media lately. Another possible niche.
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Definitely! A variety of revenue streams would work too – outside of traditional employee-type employment, I don’t know many who have just one job anymore. And if some/one of those is creative, it takes the heat off of having to accept (in your case) every writing-type gig that comes along.
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Social media advice is the “productivity consultant” of today. Set up a consulting business, learn how to talk about analytics and do it. The money is there right now.
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I’m doing it for free right now. A friend from HS is a big mucky-muck on wall street and she wants to start a consulting business for wall street investors. Asked me for help with websites and twitter. I am not charging writers and academics, but investment banking consultants can afford my fees.
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Well, that certainly sounds like something you should get paid for. I always offer to pay, when I’m asking for feedback like this (say, I’d never ask a photographer or a designer to work for free). I myself, though, never accept payment, because I want the work (usually photographs) to be work (but, that also means people can’t really depend on me).
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Laura, stop doing it for free! I work in media and we have no money as everyone knows and yet we pay our social media consultants. Not to rant about them too much, but because it’s a young industry there are a lot of “social media gurus” who are not great analytical or critical thinkers, and also who do not actually know how to build communities — they might know how to get attention, but that’s it. It’s been frustrating. I think you, on the other hand, would be really an asset to a strategy team and I hope you do go after larger fish.
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Langer is selling snake oil, but, sure, let’s admire her. Barf.
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I second Tulip’s barf. yikes. But I also think Sandra’s suggestion(s) to you are great. You can also become an entrepreneur!
As for the living long genes, I may have them too (both grandmas lived until they were 96 — not that great genes on the grandpas’ side) and I’m not too excited about the prospect of living that long. Do you ever think about that?
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I think one thinks this when one is still relatively young, or at least, most of us do. But, I also think as more and more people can live to 90++, more people are going to really think about how long they want to live and how.
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Death stalks us all.
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Here’s a link to a 2012 interview that Sally Quinn did with Ben Bradlee. He would have been 91. If I can stay that sharp til then, I’d be fine living to my 90’s.
http://wapo.st/1x8awUr
Based on my sample of one, genes have a big impact. My FIL was a junk dealer, exposed to heavy metals all of his working life and lived til his 90’s.
I think if you are reasonably healthy and engaged in life, it can be quite fine. You’ll need to make new younger friends (whipper snappers in their seventies) though.
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Yes to barfing. I feel the same way about lumosity (and “game your brain” stuff). The problem isn’t that none of it works . I do think that games are going to be a means for mitigating cognitive decline and that they can, sometimes, be used to treat learning disabilities and developmental delays. But, the “entrepreneurs” always oversell the benefits. and, when the benefits don’t meet the hopes, the business morph into true snake oil sales (high priced “treatments’ offered to vulnerable and desperate people). The stuff that works becomes incorporated into the mainstream, and can’t really be capitalized on in the same way (anyone can make a video game based on a brain principle or a psychology theory).
Langer’s plan to sell out at the point where her academic credibility makes no difference to her is an interesting analysis on her part. Also, the purposeful high price model, designed to limit mass availability of the exploitation of the research. She’s at Harvard, but a lot of these startups come out of Stanford, which seems to support entrepreneurship (or selling out and capitalizing).
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How to turn the model into a business model you ca use without being evil? Offer a high price service with customization targeted at individuals who can afford the status product; tie in plausible research ideas; tie in credentialing that implies special access to ideas/resources/etc,
(How not to be evil — actually help people, which is what makes Langer feel OK, about it, too).
I think the high priced NY tutoring models and college consulting services (I recently did a google search, after hearing that people were hiring consultants to apply to private middle schools! and discovered that’s where former admission officers go to make money). Without the research history behind you (Harvard credentials 30+ years of research papers, like Langer), I think those business have to start with individual service. But, eventuality hey can grow into companies (like Michele Hernandez’s college consulting services).
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I suppose I have a side gig now – assessing online courses. Doesn’t make a lot of money, but if I do one a week instead of one a month, eventually that would keep me busy and engaged in retirement.
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I join the barfing at Ellen Langer but my barfing will turn to rage the day she offers cancer patients positivity lessons.
One interesting guy in this area is Michael Merzenich – he is a neuroscientist and academic who helped develop a software that for $4500, did freaking amazing things for my oldest’s auditory processing, and a company to license it. (FastForward and Scientific Learning) (And I don’t want to understate how integral that program was to my son’s progress – it was huge.)
The company was both awesome and dishonest – their licensed providers would sell to anyone without being honest about what the software could do. So we spent another $4500 on the second program that was designed to help poor readers – not excellent readers with auditory processing problems like my son. Wish someone had been willing to tell us that before we spent the money and more than anything, I wish they’d developed more software that helped develop auditory processing. Can you other parents of kids on the spectrum imagine something, for example, that would help kids’ brain filter out extraneous input?
My takeaway is, I guess, that it can be a win-win when academics implement their findings in such a way that we have access to them (and they make money). But any ethics go out the window, as well.
That doesn’t help the social scientist, does it?
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Fascinating, artemisia, that Fast Forword was dramatically helpful to your son. Merzenich and his collaborators were the first of the brain startups — they launched their company at the height of the first dotcom boom (1998 or so) and I heard him (and Pat Tallal, of Rutgers) talk about the program when it was first made available.
The big question at the time was what model they were going to use for delivery, and I remember the therapists in the audience asking about availability of the program. I remember hearing the answer, that it was going to be provided through therapists, as a high value item (and a value added item that therapists were going to sell) and being troubled. I was familiar with the design of the software at the time (they used the same software I did and I interacted with their programmer when they were working on the software). I suspected that selling it that way, as secondary market, was going to result in overselling and, also, making the product more expensive and less accessible than it needed to be. People were tingly with the money they were going to make, and without any of the frustrating regulations/testing required for pharma. People were tingly about the amount of money they were going to make, and it changed a few lives (other than the children the software might have helped). Merzenich now has some other game-based interventions, including Posit Science (which is like Lumosity).
Did you find the therapists services valuable in addition to the training software? Or could the software have been made available, at a lower price, and provided the same benefits? In their defense for upselling, I think they don’t really know what will work. The data for brain-based plasticity interventions is always quite variable (as it was with the ABA interventions for autism profiled in the NY Times recently). My issue with the selling model is that I think these interventions should be available at a lower marginal price, at least partially because they won’t necessarily work.
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So interesting! I wish your programmer friend or someone would continue the auditory processing software work. Are you still in touch with him? If I win the lottery, I will develop the games I wish existed.
Scientific Learning make not have known exactly what would work, but I found out later that the first module was specifically for auditory processing (they posited that kids with reading problems had auditory issues) and the second module was specifically for phonetic decoding or something completely unnecessary for my particular kid (or the other kids with autism for whom the auditory processing deficit is primary that made such gains after completing the first module).
In our case, the therapists added no value at all. None. Zero. I specifically chose therapists who realized we didn’t need their help and charged much less than the norm. Some families paid much much more.
I can see how a therapist might have been helpful if the child was extremely non-compliant.
The cost definitely impacted access. It was a constant topic of conversation among UMC autism families who were already spending a metric shitload on other services – can you afford it? Is it worth it? Will your school pay for it? I can’t imagine that kids whose families has less money and pull got it.
I just can’t bring myself to investigate Posit Science. What a waste.
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Unfortunately, most of the people in that group moved on, not completely independent I believe, of starting the company. But, I also think that the different products and the theoretical backing of the two main products of the company aren’t well separated. In research settings, differences between auditory processing deficits/phonetic processing deficits/reading deficits aren’t purely separable. People do work on the differences, but, pre-diagnosing without just trying the intervention hasn’t been particularly useful, I think. It’s easier to just try the intervention and see if it helps (as, frankly, people do with pharma interventions, like meds for depression and adhd).
“If I win the lottery, I will develop the games I wish existed.”
I think there’s room for developing this kind of software now, without winning the lottery. I know that there have been a few “hacker” events for autism, in which programmers spent a day or a weekend working on projects they thought would be useful for people with autism or that people with autism/parents suggested would be useful. That’s what you need, to implement the game/idea, not the research folks like Merzenich/Jenkins/Tallal. That work provides theoretical backing and clinical significance (Merzenich & Tallal, respectively). But, if you have an idea, games can certainly be developed around them, and, there could be money in it, int he same way that there’s money in apps. Selling to schools/getting insurance coverage requires the research/clinical justifications (or, at least, it should). But, an app doesn’t.
(here’s an old Maker Faire on hacking autism: http://makezine.com/2011/09/15/hps-hacking-autism-initiative/, but I’m guessing others also exist).
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