Failure is the way to go?

It turns out that failure is the way we learn best--presuming we don't get too much of it at any one time. And the article helps explain why.

THE ATTRIBUTIONS WE MAKE

Of course, through disappointment and failure we learn how to cope. Welearn what we can cope with. Success is great, but it often misleads us.We tend to internalize success, erroneously ascribing it to our ownstellar innate characteristics--while overlooking the often-powerful handof luck or special opportunity. On the other hand, we tend to attribute failure to general conditions Out There or to adverse circumstances. Weoften do this so we can look ourselves in the mirror in the morning.

PRESSURES FOR SUCCESS

Our culture these days is especially focused on success. The economy is doing quite well and so success stories abound. Our taste for having things and displaying status is riding high. People are focused on the pathways to success. Of course, there are signals that focusing on success is not always psychically sustainable: The pressure to achieve has an uncanny way of promoting perfectionism, and disorders ofperfectionism are rampant. Eating disorders are only the most visible.Think about anxiety disorders related to obsessiveness, the ubiquity ofstress, and burnout especially among young athletes who push theirbodies beyond their limits.

A DIFFERENT DIRECTION

The new article, which appeared in the May issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, turns my head in a completely different direction. What I like about it is that it shows precisely how we learn more from our mistakes than we do from getting things right. Bydefinition, mistakes violate our own expectations. The surprise indiscovering we are wrong is particularly conducive to learning--it galvanizes our attention, amplifies it, and speeds up our ability to detect the possibility of error the next time around.

PRIORITY PROCESSING

The need to learn from mistakes is so crucial--in our ancient past on the savannah it likely saved lives and is the reason why our ancestors survived and we can strut our stuff today-- it is allocated priority processing in the brain. Psychologist Andy Wills and colleagues at the University of Exeter in England report that when we come up against things for which we earlier made incorrect predictions, the brain sendsout a signal of recognition. It does this amazingly quickly--in just one-tenth of a second--almost immediately after seeing the object that first foiled us, in an effort to prevent us from repeating the error.This happens automatically, long before there is time for conscious consideration.

ANOTHER CHANCE

Learning, then, hinges on the surprise of getting things wrong. Failure,after all, is just information, a signal to try something else, anotherchance to learn. But failure is information--and not a fixed and frozen outcome or catastrophe--only if people are allowed to see themselves as problem-solvers, secular scientists learning by trial and error, and notas totems of talent or perfection who need to look smart and always produce the right answer.

PROMOTING FAILURE

We need to fail more often and we need to get more comfortable with the concept of failure--not always see it as a negative, and especially not as a negative reflection on our innermost self. If we never fail, it means we're not testing our limits; we don't know who, or what, we are.

Experimentation is the true mother of success. Many inventions--Velcro is one--grew from accidents that were at first looked on as failures.Experimentation demands tolerance for mistakes, and without either one of them innovation is as good as dead. In the absence of innovation, our economy has little ability to sustain itself in the global marketplace. Our future depends as much on failure as it does on success.