Owning Your Brain Health

Just by reading this, you’ve already taken the first step in improving your mind.

As quoted in a recent Scientific American article, a group of researchers recently found:

“people who have a growth mindset about intelligence (believe that intelligence is malleable) showed greater improvement on the visuospatial reasoning tests than those who have a fixed mindset about intelligence (believe intelligence can’t change).”

The researchers, led by Post-doctoral Fellow Susanne Jaeggi at the University of Maryland, were studying the primary methodological concerns of research in: “fluid intelligence:

the deliberate but flexible control of attention to solve novel “on the spot” problems that cannot be performed by relying exclusively on previously learned habits, schemas, and scripts.

In other words, Thomas the Tank Engine was right. “I think I can” is an important part of healthy brain growth. So I wasn’t being glib, above, when I said you’ve taken your first step. Seeking out information on brain health, doing research, visiting this web site, belies a belief in the ability to improve. And it turns out that such a belief is an essential component to improvement.

Curiosity didn’t kill the cat; it made the cat smarter.