Business owners and entrepreneurs always are looking for an edge to help increase sales, revenues, and productivity. Neuroscientists are helping to understand how we change our brains in response to experiences, known as neuroplasticity. There is a body of work done by Dr. Earl Miller at MIT studying how environmental feedback triggers plasticity. That feedback is success. In studies using monkeys performing simple tasks with feedback, their rewards on successful task completion led to firing of neurons in the prefrontal cortex and striatum, higher order areas of our brain. The brain apparently tracked success and made the monkeys more efficient in subsequent tasks. It appeared that the brain stored information about what made the monkey successful. Interestingly, failure resulted in little brain activity.

In moving from monkeys to humans, the definition of mindset is the series of beliefs we hold about ourselves. Dr. Carol Dwieck of Stanford University has studied fixed (rigid) vs. growth (belief we can learn through effort) mindsets. In research studies, humans with different mindsets were faced with task failures. Depending on the different mindset, different areas of the brain were stimulated. People with more growth oriented mindsets showed more brain activity in the caudal anterior cingulate cortex, bordering on the frontal lobes, our higher brain area. In contrast, people with fixed mindsets had more activity in the rostral anterior cingulate cortex, closer to the more emotional areas of our brain. It is worth noting that the caudal anterior cingulate cortex is the area stimulated during yoga, meditation, and other mindful states.

So what can we take from this? It is clear that mindsets affect brain activity and that success helps the brain learn so as to make our functioning more efficient. Combining growth mindsets with success stimulates brain areas increasing our chances of improvement and efficiency. However, it also is clear that failures and fixed/negative mindsets do not help us from a brain perspective. How do we respond to failure so as to limit a negative mindset? I will take that up in a subsequent post. But for now, change your thoughts, change your brain, change your results.