The Brain That Changes Itself

"For me it was exciting to read this book because while my research shows a growth mindset is really good for you, this book shows that a growth mindset also has a strong basis in modern neuroscience. It illustrates, though fascinating case histories and descriptions of recent research, the amazing power of the brain to change and even to reorganise itself with practice and experience. For over 400 years, science said that the brain and its anatomy were fixed, and even in the recent past the brain was viewed as a static organ. Scientists thought we were born with a certain brain and it more or less stayed that way until it declined with age – and if the brain was injured, too bad. In other words, people who had limitations would always have those limitations. But in the last decades we have discovered neuroplasticity. This book describes how many brain circuits, even reflexes, are not hardwired the way we thought they were. It shows how a damaged brain can be reorganised. It presents research suggesting that if brain cells die they can sometimes be replaced. The book also gives many examples of people who had limitations and trained their way out of them – for example people who had had strokes decades before and used neuroplastic training to recover functions, or people who rewired their brains through their thoughts to alleviate obsessions or recover from traumas. Even more astonishingly, new research is showing that thinking and learning can even turn our genes on and off, further shaping the brain. In our interventions, we teach people that the brain is like a muscle that can grow with exercise. This book demonstrates that what we teach is not just true on a metaphorical level. The brain can in fact literally change with exercise. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter There are several ongoing studies and several completed studies showing that growth mindset interventions can raise students’ grades, achievement test scores and most important their motivation to learn. Teachers report marked changes in their students. They pay more attention in class, want more challenging work, study more, persist longer on hard tasks, turn in their homework on time, seek and learn from feedback. We are very excited about these findings. No, it’s never too late to change your mindset. Our research and that of others has produced striking changes in mindsets in adulthood. Research has even shown that when you teach adults in their sixties through eighties a growth mindset about their memory, their memory performance improves. There are so many important avenues to explore."