Mindsets: Growing Your Brain: A Conversation with Carol Dweck

by Howard Burton

Carol details her long-standing work on mindsets: how these different ways of thinking influence social development, learning, motivation, and success.

64 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 26, 2014

About the author

Howard holds a PhD in theoretical physics and an MA in philosophy. He was the Founding Executive Director of Canada’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI) from 1999-2007. During his time at PI, he also developed an extensive outreach programme for teachers, students and the general public. His experiences at developing the research and outreach mandates of the institute were described in the book First Principles: Building Perimeter Institute, featuring a foreword by Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose.

Reviews

[TK · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good read. It's a nice intro to Carol Dweck's work "Growth Mindset". I like the ideas on the growth mindset (and the "growing your brain" idea), but it's very interesting how a fixed mindset is so powerful and hard to go from it to a growth one.

There's a particular part of the book about how the brain of a growth vs fixed mindset works that fascinated me:

“When students with a growth mindset make an error, the relevant parts of the brain light up orangey-red, which shows heightened activity indicating that they detected the error, they’re processing it deeply, and they’re correcting it.
When you look at the same parts of the brain when students in a fixed mindset make an error, you see almost nothing. Green, cool, cold. They detect the error and they flee from it as quickly as possible.”

Now I'm excited to read Mindset.