Season 1 Episode 1 – Neuroscience of Growth Mindset

[MUSIC] Welcome to the Mindset Neuroscience Podcast. I'm Stephanie Fay and I'll be sharing insights into how human brain architecture and biology are influenced by our unconscious fears and social behaviors. I'll also give you science-based strategies on how to skyrocket the brain's learning potential. By focusing on the power of mindset, relationship, and psychological safety. Thanks for listening. [MUSIC] In this episode, I'll share some of the neuroscience behind the idea of growth mindset, including how our experiences build brain architecture. We'll also look at two types of neuroplasticity that can help us reprogram our behaviors and we'll see how struggle and failure build powerful and creative changes in the brain. Finally, we'll explore why celebrating effort and grit can sometimes be a bad idea. [MUSIC] So let's get right into the concept of growth mindset. It's a term coined by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck and it reflects the belief that intelligence, talent, and potential are things that can be developed over time with the right processes, strategies, reflection, and effort. This is in contrast to a fixed mindset, which is a belief that we are born only with fixed amounts of intelligence or talent and that these are things that can't be changed or developed over time no matter what we do. We only get a certain amount and that's all we get. So the first thing we need to get straight right away is that fixed mindset is just wrong. It's wrong because it's neurologically inaccurate. Old outdated science said that the human brain basically stopped developing in childhood and there wasn't much that happened to it afterwards. What we got was what we got. But we now know that's just not true. The brain is constantly evolving and growing and the experiences we have, the data and stimulus and environments that we get exposed to, that's what really influences how our brains change from cradle to the grave. [MUSIC] The human brain is known to be highly experienced dependent. So you're going to hear me say a couple of sentences that are real important. The first is from the Harvard Center for the Developing Child and that sentence is that experience builds brain architecture. Genes lay the blueprint, but there's only a limited amount of information that is encoded in the genes and we especially know that the human brain and very particular parts of the human brain that make us very unique, the frontal areas, the prefrontal cortex, that's where there are areas that are associated with what is called executive functioning, which is impulse control, thinking of future consequences, weighing up pros and cons, moral reasoning, all of those things are housed in that prefrontal cortex. The thing is we are not born with those skills. We are not born with executive functioning skills and the way our brains develop, they develop in waves from the back to the front and the very last region of the brain to be fully accessible and what we would call highly malinated, meaning that there's been enough firing of the neurons over and over and over again that they create established pathways. If you want to call it that, that the frontal areas of the brain only develop later in life and actually what we see from the research is that only around the age of 25 does that become fully malinated and developed. So what that tells us is that there are massive features of the brain that are not something we are born with and the only way these these develop is through experience, through the different data and stimulus and the conditions that we get exposed to in life. And so the other phrase that is also really important and it comes from many different scientists and researchers, but I'll pull from Dr. Robert Sapolsky from Stanford. Also, Max Tagmark, a physicist from MIT. And that sentence is that we are the most nurture dependent species that has ever existed on the planet. We have a certain amount of hardware and genes do code a lot of this hardware. So there's structures that basically get developed in the womb and we are born with those structures. But the especially the human species has a lot of software. A lot of stuff gets downloaded into our brains basically through everything we go through in life, through the data, the stimulus, the environments, the conditions. That software is really a huge part of our experience and that software gets downloaded from generation to generation through how we treat the next generation, how we nurture relationships, how we nurture other people in our life. That is the the software downloads that are happening. The cool part about that is that that can be updated and that can be evolved. And we can choose the type of software that we download to the next generation and also to the people that we encounter. All of us are engaging in what Harvard calls serve and return relationships. All of us are serving stuff out and we are waiting for what gets returned. And that serve in return dynamic is what builds our brain. And the womb, the the months that we spend in the womb, that is also an environment. The womb is incredibly important and the stress levels, the hormones that are going through a mother while she's pregnant also affects brain architecture. So we are more nurture dependent than any other species that has ever existed, meaning that genes are not the only destiny that we have. The nurture piece is what really shapes us and affects us. And the other piece for nurture is the sense of intimacy and social connectedness that we create. The warmth and attachment and trust that we build in relationships, that component of what we mean by nurture. That is also extremely important for building not just brain architecture, but the architecture that allows us to be flexible in our thinking, creative problem solvers. And that is our ability to be creative problem solvers is the most brilliant and beautiful part of what the human species does. Just a little piece of that also is from a book by David Deutsch, the beginning of infinity. He's a physicist and works in Oxford lab for quantum computing. But he talks about how just for example the planet Earth is not particularly habitable for humans. We have made it that we wouldn't survive long if we were not capable of this flexible, adaptive, creative problem solving. That is what allows us and has allowed the human species to do what it did to overpopulate the Earth to take over literally any microcosm, any little ecosystem we can think of. A human is capable of adapting to because of our creative problem solving skills. And so he calls us the universal constructors. We would be able to inhabit any corner of any environment because of this ability. So it is just so important for us to understand that this concept of fixed mindset is so wrong neurologically because it is just simply not how the human brain works. We are capable of constantly updating what our brain is doing, the wiring and rewiring the activation of different neural circuitry. We are capable of influencing that in two ways. In a bottom-up way which is that our environments and what we get exposed to can affect what neural circuitry gets activated. So an enriched environment that has a lot of different diverse stimulus in it that can activate our brain in a lot of ways. But also a top-down way which is where we don't use the five senses. We don't use what we see here touch smell taste to activate neural circuitry but we can activate neural circuitry through our imagination. Just awareness, self-awareness, noticing. And those are top-down processes or some people will call the mind technologies and that's where mindfulness and meditation come in. So we are constantly capable of changing our brain, of activating it in new ways. And so fixed mindset, the idea that intelligence and talent are something we have in fixed amounts is just wrong and just quickly I'll say morally wrong because if we believe that we are not acknowledging every human's ability to develop skills and develop their intelligence in some way. That is bit about what is growth mindset. A sub topic on that is what is a mindset. A mindset is another word really for belief and a belief is just a thought that we've had many many times. And we have thoughts based on stuff that comes in from the environment that affects us, triggers different neural circuitry, that whole serve and return thing I've been talking about. The brain sees this basically as a high priority thought or high priority activity because the environment is clearly calling upon whatever this is over and over and over again. The brain doesn't decide between there's no evaluation in terms of this. Whatever circuitry is being kept busy will be myelinated and what that means is once circuitry has been activated enough times, the brain sends a white fact so that the signals travel faster and they're not able to be interrupted. So it becomes like a high speed well-developed pathway. That's called myelination. So this happens for anything from skills like walking and talking. We need to do things enough time until these neural circuits or circuitry has that white fat that's covering them to make them now semi-automated or automated that they become just autopilot. And we don't have to use a lot of brain glucose to develop that skill anymore. It becomes something that we just do naturally. We can even call that a subroutine or a schema. That's when we see this idea of doing something effortlessly. We, when we learn to walk, it takes a lot of brain glucose for our brain to make the calculations to figure out how to put the angle, the weight, the pressure, all of that stuff to get us to have a step that gives us good balance because actually walking with the weight of our head is a pretty incredible feat when you think about it. So doing something where you're not good at it, you're making a lot of mistakes, you're fumbling, you're falling, you're failing. It means your brain is using a lot of brain glucose to do this. It means that there's a lot of activity happening. And we actually see in research that making mistakes grows your brain. There are a lot of different sources for this, but Stanford's math department has a paper that is entitled Mistakes Grow Your Brain where we see electrochemical activity that only happens when we make mistakes. Dr. Lara Boyd has a TED talk on this. I think it's entitled Your Brain Will Never Be The Same After You Watch This. And her quote is that increased struggle leads to increased structural change in the brain. When there is struggle, when there is failing and fumbling and not doing well at something, the brain is working really hard. It's activating stuff that it never activated before. What this means is that we can reframe what failure means. We can reframe what mistakes mean. And what we see from a lot of the growth mindset research, if you go to mindsetkit.org. What we see is that when teachers and supervisors is also in businesses, acknowledge that mistakes are part of. They are necessary ingredient to doing something new, to acquiring a new skill. When that is acknowledged is something to be celebrated. We see higher levels of engagement because mistakes have already been reframed as they're welcome. They are welcome in this setting, in this environment. That's something that is not ingrained in us because we have been brought up in a factory model of school that says that there are certain standards and results that need to be achieved. And if you don't mark the correct box, that's a sign of you being inferior, not capable of learning weak. So to move out of that factory model of seeing mistakes is something bad, we can reframe mistakes and acknowledge what they really are, that they are indicating that we are moving into new territory. Where people have gone overboard on this and where there's a lot of resistance is that people are saying it's just about being positive and just saying mistakes are great, but if someone is adding one plus one and getting three, it doesn't mean you continuously celebrate that mistake and don't adjust how you teach what they're learning or any of their processes or how they're getting to that result. You don't have them self-reflect on it and you keep saying, "Great, you made a mistake, your brain's growing." The thing is, learning is not happening at that moment. If they're getting to the same incorrect answer over and over and over again, it means that they haven't learned what one plus one means. They haven't learned what the symbol of the squiggles and lines on the page mean that they represent something in reality in this particular example. So it's celebrating mistakes and celebrating. The effort it takes to refine and think about a new way to teach something, a new way to learn it, self-reflection on how we got there. So that's a bit on the importance of struggle and effort and celebrating those things as part of the learning process, but I do want to raise a counterpoint to that, which comes from critical race theorists as one example, and I'll add a link to a paper by Ebony McGee and David Stovall on this, and that is this idea of weathering. And what they're talking about is that there are many people in learning environments right now that are already going through a lot of obstacles, and they are challenged enough through the different structures and systems that are really there to keep things maintained at their status quo. And so there's already a lot of grit that is needed in order to just stick with this kind of system. And when we are talking about trying to get more grit out of some students, more perseverance, more resilience, the thing is those students already have enough of that. They already have plenty grit and perseverance and resilience. And by continuously acting as though these are things to only be celebrated and only to be elevated, we are really just in some situations asking people to just constantly sprint on a treadmill to the point of sheer exhaustion. So one aspect of this is that it also loses a bit of focus on some of the things that we should also be questioning in this entire scenario, which is that do we want people to continue to be gritty and perseverant on a treadmill towards an outcome that we're not even really sure is really our goal in the end? If standardized test scores and these different performance evaluations and outcomes, are they really what is going to lead to what we consider to be human thriving and well-being? So these are questions to be asking ourselves instead of only saying that we need to add this concept of growth mindset to achieve certain outcomes in school. We might need to also just be questioning what these outcomes are and also be questioning if some of these students are really in need of more of that or if we actually need to question even how we are teaching certain things. And to acknowledge that going into your genius zone where things do feel effortless and flawless, those should also be celebrated. And we might need to expand the number of categories that we call intelligence in schools in order to allow certain people to get into that genius zone where they finally get to feel like something is effortless and natural to them. So that's one aspect that I think is really important to think about. On the other flip side too of that is that when I'm talking about celebrating effort and challenges and that increased struggle leads to changes in the brain, what I'm talking about more is that this is a counter argument to the idea that when we are learning new behaviors or skills that should immediately feel effortless, natural and easy. And that is really what this concept of fixed mindset is about is that there is a belief structure in place that has been learned over time that things should inherently, naturally feel and be effortless the moment we try them. And if they don't, then it means that we're not inherently capable of developing that talent in that area. And this also goes in line with some of the research from University of Chicago, the consortium for Chicago School of Research. And what they see in a lot of meta studies on learning is that around the age of nine or 10, students start to equate effort with lack of innate ability. What that means is as soon as something feels challenging or hard, it means they're not innately good at it. And at around the same time, we see the emergence of self-consciousness, different areas of the brain are coming online that make us recognize or believe that people are watching us. Slightly different than theory of mind that comes earlier and that's the idea that someone has a different perspective than us. This is the emergence of self-consciousness. And combining those together with this concept that if skills and talents are supposed to be inherent and innate and there's no ability to develop them, then we might not have value in a group if we don't have that. So all of this combined gets students around that age and beyond to start believing that as soon as something feels hard, there's really no point in trying it because it means that I'm not inherently even capable of developing any kind of ability in that area. So again, to me, one of the most important things that anyone can bring into any learning environment is to help people recognize their capacities simply because they are human and the architecture of the human brain. Simply because of that, they are capable of developing new adaptations and flexible ways of achieving their goals. And that is really what intelligence and learning is all about. That wraps up our first episode. We talked about what a growth mindset is and that it's really a proper and accurate understanding of how the human brain works. We are, as David Deutsch calls us, universal constructors. We are flexible, adaptive, creative problem solvers, which means also that our brains are very, very dependent on the stimulus and the stuff that happens to us. And we are constantly capable of evolving our brain, of making it work in new ways, activating new circuitry. And this is also why fixed mindset is just wrong on many levels. We also talked about the importance of celebrating mistakes and why it's important not just to celebrate them, but to talk about self-reflection and refinement. So I hope you enjoyed that. And I would love to hear comments and feedback from you. And also, it would be great if you can leave a review on iTunes. That is a really big help to me. And if you have any questions that you'd like me to touch on in future episodes, I would love to get those. So you can email those to me at [email protected]. So thanks so much for listening. And I hope to hear from you.