Are You Smart?
10/9/11 - Although modesty may make you hesitate to answer
with a resounding "yes!," when asked the question above,
you should at least be thinking in the affirmative. Regular visitors
to this website and subscribers to The Mind Power Report
know that I am an advocate of having the right mind set and looking
for examples of one's intelligence. I have also mentioned more
than once that it helps to have the belief that you can become
smarter. Now I can report on some new research that backs this
up.
Specifically, the new study found that those who believe they
can learn from mistakes have different reactions to them in their
brains, and then do learn more than those who have more of a
belief in intelligence being less malleable. The research will
be published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association
for Psychological Science. As reported on the site psychologicalscience.org;
“One big difference between people who think intelligence
is malleable and those who think intelligence is fixed is how
they respond to mistakes,” says Jason S. Moser, of Michigan
State University, who collaborated on the new study with Hans
S. Schroder, Carrie Heeter, Tim P. Moran, and Yu-Hao Lee...
For this study, Moser and his colleagues gave participants
a task that is easy to make a mistake on. They were supposed
to identify the middle letter of a five-letter series like “MMMMM”
or “NNMNN.” Sometimes the middle letter was the same
as the other four, and sometimes it was different. “It’s
pretty simple, doing the same thing over and over, but the mind
can’t help it; it just kind of zones out from time to time,”
Moser says. That’s when people make mistakes—and they
notice it immediately, and feel stupid.
Electrical activity in the brain was monitored during the
experiments. Two reactions are noted when a mistake is made.
The first is a "something is wrong" brain signal, and
the second happens when there is conscious recognition of the
error an attempt to correct it. Those with a stronger belief
that they can learn from mistakes produced a bigger signal of
the second type in their brains. They subsequently did better
in the tests. The article noted:
The research shows that these people are different on a
fundamental level, Moser says. “This might help us understand
why exactly the two types of individuals show different behaviors
after mistakes.” People who think they can learn from their
mistakes have brains that are tuned to pay more attention to
mistakes, he says. This research could help in training people
to believe that they can work harder and learn more, by showing
how their brain is reacting to mistakes.
So are you smart? Careful how you answer that. The research
is showing what we all should have suspected anyhow; that how
we think about how we think affects how we think. (I'll have
to save that one for a word puzzle on how many times you can
have a phrase in a sentence while still making sense.)
|
