large number of people are told directly that they are not a “math person” or an “English person” or an “artist” by teachers or parents. In an attempt to be helpful, adults tell young learners that a particular subject is “just not for them.” This happens to some when they are children. For others, it happens later in life when they are taking college courses or interviewing for their first job. Some people are given negative messages about their potential directly; others assume it from culturally embedded ideas—that some people can achieve and some cannot.
When we learn the new science in this book and the six keys of learning I will present, our brains function differently, and we change as people. The six keys not only change people’s beliefs about their reality, they change their reality. This is because as we begin to realize our potential, we unlock parts of ourselves that had been held back and start to live without limiting beliefs; we become able to meet the small and large challenges we are faced with in life and turn them into achievements. The implications of the new science are important for everyone. For teachers, leaders, and learners, the changed possibilities created by this new information are far reaching.
I am a Stanford professor of education who has spent the last few years collaborating with brain scientists, adding their knowledge of neuroscience to my knowledge of education and learning. I regularly share the new knowledge that is in this book, and invite people to think differently about problems, and it changes the way they think about themselves. I have spent the last several years focusing on mathematics, the subject with the most damaging ideas held by teachers, students, and parents. The idea that math ability (and a host of other capabilities) is fixed is a large part of the reason that math anxiety is widespread in the US and the world. Many children grow up thinking that either you can do math or you can’t. When they struggle, they assume they can’t. From that point on, any struggle is a further reminder of their perceived inadequacies. This affects millions of people. One study found that 48 percent of all young adults in a work-apprentice program had math anxiety;1 other studies have found that approximately 50 percent of students taking introductory math courses in college suffer from math anxiety.2 It is difficult to know how many people walk around in society harboring damaging ideas about their math ability, but I estimate it to be at least half of the population.
Researchers now know that when people with math anxiety encounter numbers, a fear center in the brain is activated—the same fear center that lights up when people see snakes or spiders.3 As the fear center of the brain becomes activated, activity in the problem-solving centers of the brain is diminished. It is no wonder that so many people underachieve in mathematics—as soon as people become anxious about it, their brains are compromised. Anxiety in any subject area has a negative impact on the functioning of the brain. It is critical that we change the messages that are given to learners about their ability and rid education and homes of anxiety-inducing teaching practices.
We are not born with fixed abilities, and those who achieve at the highest levels do not do so because of their genetics.4 The myth that our brains are fixed and that we simply don’t have the aptitude for certain topics is not only scientifically inaccurate; it is omnipresent and negatively impacts education and many other events in our everyday lives. When we let go of the idea that our brains are fixed, stop believing that our genetics determine our lives’ pathways, and learn that our brains are incredibly adaptable, it is liberating. The knowledge that every time we learn something our brains change and reorganize comes from perhaps the most important research of this decade—research on brain plasticity, also known as neuroplasticity.5 I will be sharing the most compelling evidence on this topic in the next chapter.
When I make the point with adults—often teachers and educators—that we should reject ideas of fixed thinking and instead see all learners as capable, these adults invariably tell me about themselves as learners. Almost all of them can recall their own experience and realize the ways in which they themselves were limited and held back. We have all been fully immersed in the damaging myth that some are smart—they have a gift or special intelligence—and some are not, and these ideas have shaped our lives.
We now know that ideas about limits to potential or intelligence are incorrect. Unfortunately, they are persistent and widespread in many cultures across the world. The good news is that when we challenge these beliefs, incredible results follow. In this book, we will upend these ingrained and dangerous self-limiting beliefs and reveal the opportunities that open up when we adopt a limitless approach. The limitless approach starts with knowledge from neuroscience and expands into a different approach to ideas and to life.
The original discovery of neuroplasticity is decades old, and the groundbreaking studies that have shown brain growth and change—among children and adults—are well established.6 The science, however, has for the most part not made its way into classrooms, boardrooms, or homes. It has also not been translated into the much-needed ideas for learning that this book will share. Fortunately, a few pioneers who have learned about brain change have taken it upon themselves to spread the news. Anders Ericsson, a Swedish-born psychologist, is one of those people. He first became aware of the brain’s incredible ability to grow and change not from the neuroscience that was emerging at the time, but from an experiment he tried with a young athlete, a runner named Steve.7
Ericsson set out to study the limits of people’s ability to memorize a random string of digits. A study published in 1929 found that people could improve their ability to memorize. The early researchers managed to train one person to memorize thirteen random digits and another person, fifteen. Ericsson was curious to know how people improved, so he recruited Steve, whom he describes as an average Carnegie Mellon undergraduate. On the first day that Steve began working with the researchers to memorize digits, his performance was exactly average: he could remember seven numbers consistently, sometimes eight. On the following four days, Steve improved to just under nine numbers.
Then something remarkable happened. Steve and the researchers thought he had reached his limit, but he managed to push through the “ceiling” and memorize ten numbers, two more than had seemed possible. Ericsson describes this as the beginning of what became the two most surprising years of his career. Steve continued to steadily improve until he had successfully memorized and could recall a string of eighty-two random digits. Needless to say, this feat was remarkable, and it was no magic trick. This was an “average” college student unlocking his learning potential to accomplish a rare and impressive feat.
A few years later, Ericsson and his team tried the same experiment with a different participant. Renee started off much like Steve, improving her memory beyond the level of an untrained person, and she learned to memorize close to twenty digits. Then, however, she stopped improving, and after another fifty hours of training without improvement, she dropped out of the study. This set Ericsson and his team on a new quest—to work out why Steve had managed to memorize so many more digits than Renee.
This is where Ericsson began to learn more about what he called “deliberate practice.” He realized that Steve’s love for running had made him highly competitive and motivated. Whenever he hit what seemed like a limit, he developed new strategies to become successful. For example, he hit a barrier at twenty-four digits, so he developed a new strategy of grouping numbers into four four-digit strings. At regular intervals, Steve developed new strategies.
This approach illustrates a key takeaway—when you hit a barrier, it is advantageous to develop a new approach and come at the problem from a new perspective. Despite how logical this sounds, far too many of us fail to make adjustments in our thinking when we run into those barriers. We often decide, instead, that we cannot overcome them. Ericsson has studied human performance in many fields and concludes: “It is surprisingly rare to get clear evidence in any field that a person has reached some immutable limit on performance. Instead, I’ve found that people more often just give up and stop trying to improve.”8
For the skeptics reading this—and deciding that Steve’s incredible memory feat meant that he was in some way exceptional or gifted—there’s more. Ericsson repeated the experiment with another runner named Dario. Dario memorized even more than Steve—more than one hundred numbers. Those who study remarkable feats performed by seemingly ordinary people find that