Weekly Roundup: Failure is Overrated, Brain Balance in Children, Mixed Emotions in the Brain, and Facial Expressions & Social Intelligence
This week I have a fascinating mix of articles. But this weekend is also special because paid subscribers have received the first instalment of my latest book The Handbook: Your Brain in Business, my esteemed Founding Members are a few weeks ahead. For all you free subscribers (and a big thank you to everyone for subscribing), some sections will also be free to access.
And from this pleasing emotion, for me, at least, we will look at a bunch of research from failure, to balanced brains in children and maturity, to mixed emotions, and how facial expression can help you be more influential.
Let’s start off on the topic of failure and specifically - do we really learn from it?
Do We Learn From Failure?
This was a question that I reported on here:
In that research the researchers found that heart surgeons learned most when mistakes were in a sweet spot, not too often, and not too little. Likely because if it is too little we seem to think it was bad luck or chance, and too often and we fail to see clear patterns.
Another group of researchers around Lauren Eskreis-Winkler have now published a paper summarising 11 experiments with over 1’800 participants on the topic of failure. And what they found is that:
"People expect success to follow failure much more often than it actually does"
These experiments directly measured this and it seems to be a general principle that people in general assume people will improve more than they do after failure - this was consistently overestimated in roles ranging from nurses to lawyers.
Basically, we tend to assume that people pay attention to their mistake and then learn form them - this is often not the case. One of the obvious reasons is that failure is demotivating and ego-threatening - and because of this we may externalise failure i.e. ascribe it to circumstance, others, or chance.
This believe that failure will be self-correcting however has many societal or policy implications notes Eskreis -Winkler: "People who believe that problems will self-correct after failure are less motivated to help those in need. Why would we invest time or money to help struggling populations if we erroneously believe that they will right themselves?"
The researchers also conducted two experiments looking at this and noticed that expectations can be recalibrated - for example participants were more supportive of taxpayer funding for rehabilitation programs for former inmates and drug treatment programs on learning of the low success rates of these.
This didn’t approach self-awareness and learning from mistakes which is an obvious next step - this is something top of my radar currently working with learning agility assessments and helping to integrate this across one particular organisation.
From learning from failure to high-performing brains in children - and in this study a fascinating aspect of how brains need to be balanced.
Balanced Brains for Maturity and Ability
You may or may not know that you have two key types of neurons and transmitters in the brain. Ones that excite or activate, and ones that inhibit or deactivate. Often we only talk about the excitatory side of the brain - this is the sexy stuff of neurons activating and triggering electrical impulses and the various neurotransmitters and modulators that contribute to this.
But the brain, and these signals, also needs to shut down, be inhibited. GABA is the main transmitter responsible for this. There has however, been little research into the whole brain and how these activation and inhibition patterns play out and what they mean - it is also very difficult to measure.
This is important because many mental disorders and conditions can be considered as falling on one or the other side of this spectrum e.g. anxiety disorders associated with over activation, and simple low motivation or lethargy with high inhibition.
Enter Shaoshi Zhang and colleagues of the National University of Singapore and Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine. They ran a series of experiments using a placebo crossover experiment with an anti-anxiety drug to see if they could identify the patterns of this in brain scans (using AI and biophysical modelling). After successfully completing this they then turned to brain scanning of over 1000 children, adolescents, and young adults between the ages of 7 and 23. They also matched this to cognitive abilities.
What did they find?
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