provided we invest the necessary time and energy. While people with a fixed mindset see mistakes as a dismal failure — a sign that we aren’t talented enough for the task in question — those with a growth mindset see mistakes as an essential precursor of knowledge, the engine of education.

The experiment began with a flanker task, a tedious assignment in which subjects are supposed to identify the middle letter of a five-letter series, such as “MMMMM” or “NNMNN.” Sometimes the middle letter is the same as the other four, and sometimes it’s different. This simple change induces frequent mistakes, as the boring task encourages people to zone out. Once they make a mistake, of course, they immediately regret it. There is no excuse for misidentifying a letter.

While performing the flanker task, subjects wore an EEG cap, a monitoring device filled with greased electrodes that records electrical activity in the brain. (Unlike fMRI, EEG gives researchers excellent temporal resolution, allowing them to precisely measure a sequence of neural events. Unfortunately, this comes at the expense of spatial resolution, making it difficult to know where in the brain the signals are coming from.)

It turned out that those subjects with a growth mindset were significantly better at learning from their mistakes. As a result, they showed a spike in accuracy immediately following an error. Most interesting, though, was the EEG data, which demonstrated that those with a growth mindset generated a much larger Pe signal, indicating increased attention to their mistakes. (While those with an extremely fixed mindset generated a Pe amplitude around five, those with a growth mindset were closer to fifteen.) What’s more, this increased Pe signal was nicely correlated with improvement after error, implying that the extra awareness was paying dividends in performance. Because the subjects were thinking about what they got wrong, they learned how to get it right.

In her own research, Dweck has shown that these mindsets have important practical implications.
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