Eliminate the fear of making mistakes. Do NOT eliminate the opportunities for making mistakes.
Successful learning is often associated with getting the answers correct in the test i.e. not making any mistakes. However, true learning (regardless of how one would prefer to define success in the endeavour) takes place only when mistakes are made.
Neuroscience of Making Mistakes
This section of the blog post is based on the wonderful work of Dr Andrew Huberman, do check out his podcast and website.
Neuroplasticity is an almost literal changing of the mind, a remapping of synapses, which makes possible learning and unlearning. The necessary neurochemical milieu for plasticity is the presence of epinephrine, acetylcholine, and dopamine. The question screaming to be asked then is what triggers these neurotransmitters to be released? The answer: making mistakes.
The way to create plasticity is to send signals to the brain that something is wrong, something different, and something isn’t being achieved. - Andrew Huberman
And yet making mistakes is often demonised.
When a mistake is encountered, the brain receives a signal that something is wrong, that alertness and attention are necessary. This triggers the release of epinephrine and acetylcholine respectively. Epinephrine causes agitation so that we would be compelled to take action; therefore alertness is increased. Acetylcholine, on the other hand, increases focus and attention which is not unlike shining a spotlight on the error that has occured. In combination, agitation and focus result in the building up of frustration; at which point, it is indicative that epinephrine and acetylcholine have been released.
Sadly, we are often encultured to treat frustrations as negative and mistakes as evil. As such, as frustration builds up, too often we disengage from the task and learning does not take place. Well, not exactly… The presence of acetylcholine marks the nerve cells to be changed and the subsequent strengthening (and losing) of synapses takes place while we are in deep sleep. Hence, when we back off from frustration, we strengthen the synapses of backing off from frustration!
The third neurotransmitter that causes and accelerates plasticity is dopamine, which is often associated with the reward and pleasure system. However, its more dominant function is that of craving and motivating us to reach out and strive for something. I believe you can see where this is going. Good news, bad news. Good news - the release of dopamine is subjective and dependent on how much we want something. Bad news - the release of dopamine is subjective and dependent on how much we want something. If we desire desperately enough to learn something or perform a particular task well, dopmaine is released and neuroplasticity accessible. So where or what should we pin our craving on? Making mistakes! When we do that, every step on the learning journey, every attempt at getting it right yet not quite getting it right, triggers the release of dopamine and prevents us from quitting out of frustration. Rather, we lean into frustration and come out the other side much better off.
Indeed, errors + dopamine = growth mindset
Growth Mindset
It is easy to dismiss the growth mindset as a self-help construct that is heavily doped in its creator’s imagination whilst lightly supported by empirical data. Initial encounters would feel intuitive, even familiar, hence inviting the question of “So?”. Quite the contrary, the growth mindset construct emerged from empirical studies conducted by Dr Carol Dweck as she seeks to understand how people cope with failures. Her research surprised her with an unexpected observation - people do not just cope or fail to cope with failures, some actually love failures!
This observation brings to mind Nassim Taleb’s search for a term with an opposite meaning to fragile. He was not satisfied with robust nor resilient because they merely meant that the subject does not break when stressed. Rather, Taleb was looking for a word that can describe subjects that not only do not break when stressed but thrive and become stronger due to the stress. He ended up coining the term antifragile.
They (the children in the study) obviously knew something that I didn’t and I was determined to figure it out - to understand the kind of mindset that could turn failure into a gift... Not only weren’t they discouraged by failure, they didn’t even think they were failing. They thought they were learning. - Carol Dweck
The Two Mindsets
At its core, the fixed mindset believes that the qualities of oneself are carved in stone, unchanging in range and quantity. Conversely, the growth mindset believes that these qualities are cultivated through effort, strategies, and help from others. From whence, both eventualities diverge in profound ways.
Can the Mindsets be shifted?
Dr Carol Dweck became concerned when it emerged that those with the fixed mindset had the proclivity for proving themselves and seeking validation. It triggered the question of whether praising our children has the effect of teaching and reinforcing the fixed mindset. She conducted a study and this is what she found out.
In this study, hundreds of students, most of them in their adolescences, were given a set of 10 fairly difficult IQ problems to solve. The students mostly did well and they were praised upon completing the test. One group was praised for being smart - “Wow, you got eight right. That’s a really good score. You must be smart at this.” The other group was praised for their efforts - “Wow, you got eight right. That’s a really good score. You must have worked really hard.” Up to this point, the two groups of students were pretty much equal in terms of performance and enjoyment of the tasks. However, from here on, the research took a drastic turn after the students were subsequently presented with much harder questions which they didn’t do as well.
The students who were praised for being smart began to doubt if they were truly smart to begin with and they stopped liking the task. They generally rejected further challenges. Conversely, the group who were praised for their effort concluded that they needed to work harder on the difficult problems or deploy new strategies to tackle them. 90% of them wanted further challenges and continued to enjoy the tasks. This seems to be just a mild problem of shifting the students’ level of motivation. However, it gets worse.
When both groups of students were subsequently presented with easier problems, the smart group of students performed worse than they had at the beginning; whilst the effort group improved significantly. Further from here, the researchers requested the students to pen their thoughts about the tasks and scores achieved and share this information to help the next group of participants. Dweck and her team found that 40% of the students from the smart group lied about their scores. They bumped the scores higher.
The two mindsets can be triggered, taught, and hence shifted. Good news, bad news. The release of dopamine is subjective and dependent on how much we want something.
Why Can’t We Just Stick to What Works?
Perhaps a strategic mind might argue that we should be clever to slay just one dragon (a success) then live happily ever after with the princess. That way there is no need to tell whether we have a fixed or growth mindset. We can avoid frustration by pinning dopamine to contentment. Sadly, in real life, bigger and badder dragons keep coming after you have slain the last one. Hence, we have two choices - to go into hiding so that the dragons cannot find us or learn to be better at slaying dragons.
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