I am positive that stroke medical professionals will never solve stroke, 100% recovery. And because they never will I will have blog posts to write about for the next 30 years of my life, and that will keep me intellectually engaged and not prone to dementia. So should I hope they never solve anything because it is all about me, me, me? By then I should hit around 100,000 posts and 50 million views. New Stanford Study: A Positive Attitude Literally Makes Your Brain Work Better
Inspirational
posters featuring soaring eagles and sunlit mountain summits are easy
to mock. But it turns out rousing slogans and uplifting images might not
actually be pure cheese after all.
When Stanford researchers recently
peered into the brains of students to see
how attitude affects achievement, they found something startling. Your
outlook on learning, it turns out, matters just as much as your IQ.
This is your child's brain on positivity.
Scientists
and educators have long noted that kids who have a positive attitude
towards math do better in the subject, but is that just because acing
tests naturally makes you enjoy something, or does the arrow of
causation point the other way? Does starting off with the expectation
that you'll enjoy and be good at math help you master numbers?
To
start to tease this out a research team out of Stanford recently
analyzed the math skills and attitudes of 240 kids aged seven to ten, as
well as running 47 of them through an fMRI machine while asking them to
do some basic arithmetic. What did they find?
As
expected, kids who did well in math liked math more, both according to
self reports and their parents, and kids who hated the subject did
poorly. But the brain scans also turned up something much more
fascinating. The images revealed that the hippocampus, a brain area
linked with memory and learning, was significantly more active in kids
with a positive attitude towards math.
It appears it's not just that children like subjects they're good at. It's also that liking a subject
helps students' brain actually work better.
The
researchers caution that their study can't pin down exactly how much
achievement is down to prior math success and how much is because of the
way positivity pumps up learning in the brain. "We think the
relationship between positive attitude and math achievement is mutual,
bi-directional,"
said Lang Chen,
the study's lead author. "It's like bootstrapping: A good attitude
opens the door to high achievement, which means you then have a better
attitude, getting you into a good circle of learning."
But
whatever the exact weight of various factors turns out to be, it's
already clear that attitude has a bigger impact on performance than the
scientists expected.
"Attitude
is really important," said Chen, "Based on our data, the unique
contribution of positive attitude to math achievement is as large as the
contribution from IQ."
You can improve your kid's brain after all.
Many
parents of kids who struggle in school have wished that they could
somehow tinker with their kid's brain to fix whatever was holding them
back and making them feel so miserable. This research suggests a way
they can do just that.
It
may remain largely impossible to change your kid's natural intellectual
gifts, but it is entirely doable to help them foster more positive
attitudes towards a given subject and their own potential (
here are some specific ideas).
This research shows that this kind of attitude adjustment will
literally change the way their brain works for their better, giving them
a boost at school. Maybe it's time to stop laughing and break out those
eagle posters then.
Published on: Feb 15, 2018
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.
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