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Aug 12, 2007

"The greatest discovery of my generation is that man can alter his life simply by altering his attitude of mind." --William James

The Brain Is A Muscle

Stanford's Carol Dweck has found that individuals succeed or fail based on how they think about intelligence, and she says people have one of two mind-sets on the matter. People with a fixed mind-set believe that intelligence is static. The second group, Dweck says, are those with a growth mind-set, who see intelligence to be much like a muscle. Earlier this year, Dweck and two colleagues ran an experiment on junior high schoolers. If they trained the students to have a growth mind-set, would the kids' math grades improve? In less than two hours over eight weeks, they taught the students concepts such as: Your brain is like a muscle that can be developed with exercise; just as a baby gets smarter as it learns, so can you. The results were astonishing: the brain-is-a-muscle students significantly outperformed their peers.