Within about 100 milliseconds of making a mistake, brains show a burst of electrical activity.
Before a person consciously registers "I got that wrong," their error-monitoring systems have already flagged the mismatch between what they predicted and what actually happened.
The beautiful thing is that those mismatches are precisely how the brain updates and learns.
BUT… what happens next depends on our interpretation.
In EEG studies, people who interpret mistakes as ‘information’ (instead of a negative judgment or threat to their identity) show a certain pattern of brain activity associated with paying attention to the error.
Their brains stay OPEN to the data coming in from the mistake. Their accuracy and performance on future attempts improve and they show a gain in knowledge..
People who interpret the mistake as a negative judgment about themselves showed a different pattern:.
Their brain did not engage in the information as deeply.
Their future attempts did not improve, no gain in knowledge.
Same mistake. Different firing pattern. Different learning.
This is why I teach mistakes as ‘information for iterations’.
A mistake means your brain has entered what I call new neural territory... a zone where your existing predictions no longer match the environment.
That mismatch is uncomfortable. But it also happens to be the exact condition your brain uses to update its models, build new circuitry, and gain knowledge it couldn't access any other way.
If you think about it from a brain’s perspective…
The vulnerability of ‘getting it wrong' is one of the most underused sources of intelligence we have.
Imagine how different our classrooms, teams, and families could be with more of us who truly understand this?
A question to sit with this week: when was the last time you treated an error as data instead of a negative judgment about yourself... and what did it make possible?
Wishing you brain activity that stays open even when things don't go as predicted,
Stefanie
P.S. If you want to teach this to your clients with the science to back it up, The Neuroscience of Growth Mindset opens the mechanism up module by module.
Every error, rejection and failure is a doorway... the brain's invitation to become something it hasn't been yet.
Inside the course, you'll learn:
- The firing patterns behind "I can't," and how interpretation reshapes them in real time
- How to guide clients from self-judgment to iteration using the brain's own predictive machinery
- The language that helps a nervous system stay open to live data instead of shutting down around failure
The more of us who understand this, the more brains stay open to what's possible.
→ Join The Neuroscience of Growth Mindset here
References and further reading
den Ouden, H. E. M., Kok, P., & de Lange, F. P. (2012). How prediction errors shape perception, attention, and motivation. Frontiers in Psychology, 3, Article 548. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00548
Metcalfe, J. (2017). Learning from errors. Annual Review of Psychology, 68, 465–489. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-010416-044022
Moser, J. S., Schroder, H. S., Heeter, C., Moran, T. P., & Lee, Y.-H. (2011). Mind your errors: Evidence for a neural mechanism linking growth mind-set to adaptive posterror adjustments. Psychological Science, 22(12), 1484–1489. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797611419520
Schultz, W. (2016). Dopamine reward prediction error signalling: A two-component response. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 17(3), 183–195. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn.2015.26
Yeager, D. S., & Dweck, C. S. (2020). What can be learned from growth mindset controversies? American Psychologist, 75(9), 1269–1284. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000794
