Success Breeds Success

This is the ancient mantra that confounds the newer one that you learn more from failure than from success.

Recent research, reported by the Harvard Business Review, reveals the truth to the old and the lie to the new.

An excerpt.

“Neuroscientists have long understood that the brain can rewire itself in response to experience—a phenomenon known as neuroplasticity. But until recently, they didn’t know what causes gray matter to become plastic, to begin changing. Breakthrough research by a team at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory has documented one type of environmental feedback that triggers plasticity: success. Equally important and somewhat surprising: Its opposite, failure, has no impact.

“Earl Miller, the lead researcher on the study (published in the journal Neuron last summer), says understanding the link to environmental feedback is crucial to improving how people teach and motivate because it’s a big part of how we learn. But we absorb more from success than from failure, according to the study.

“Miller’s researchers gave monkeys a simple learning task: They presented one of two pictures. If it was Picture A, the monkeys were supposed to look to the left; if Picture B, to the right. When the monkeys looked in the correct direction, they were rewarded with a drop of juice. All the while the team recorded brain function.

“Neurons in the prefrontal cortex and striatum, where the brain tracks success and failure, sharpened their tuning after success,” says Miller. What’s more, those changes lingered for several seconds, making brain activity more efficient the next time the monkey did the task. Thereafter, each success was processed more efficiently. That is, the monkey had learned. “But after failure,” Miller points out, “there was little change in brain activity.” In other words, the brain didn’t store any information about what went wrong and use it the next time. The monkey just tried, tried again.

“Miller says this means that on a neurological level, success is actually a lot more informative than failure. If you get a reward, the brain remembers what it did right. But with failure (unless there is a clear negative consequence, like the shock a child feels when she sticks something in an electrical outlet), the brain isn’t sure what to store, so it doesn’t change at all.”