Familiarity breeds liking

I noted recently Alain de Botton's comment that our mind-set when traveling is marked by receptivity: “Receptive, we approach new places with humility. We carry with us no rigid ideas about what is or is not interesting… We find a supermarket or a hairdresser's shop unusually fascinating...” It seems that mindfulness can put us in a similarly receptive state, according to Ellen Langer, author of Mindfulness and her new book, On Becoming an Artist. For instance, we become more receptive when we deliberately interest ourselves in something we already have rigid ideas about:

We've asked people who dislike rap music to listen to rap, for example, and women who dislike football to watch the Super Bowl. And we found that when we asked half of the subjects to notice new things about the music, or the football game, that they tended to enjoye the experience more than the subjects who weren't asked to notice new things. So I've come to champion what might be called art for life's sake because mindfulness is good for us - familiarity with things breeds liking, not contempt. (Boston Globe interview)