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Stanford Study: A Positive Attitude Literally Makes Your Brain Work Better
Inspirational posters featuring soaring eagles and sunlit mountain summits are easy to mock. But it turns out rousing slogans and uplifting images might not actually be pure cheese after all.
When Stanford researchers recently peered into the brains of students to see how attitude affects achievement, they found something startling. Your outlook on learning, it turns out, matters just as much as your IQ.
This is your child’s brain on positivity.
Scientists and educators have long noted that kids who have a positive attitude towards math do better in the subject, but is that just because acing tests naturally makes you enjoy something, or does the arrow of causation point the other way? Does starting off with the expectation that you’ll enjoy and be good at math help you master numbers?
To start to tease this out a research team out of Stanford recently analyzed the math skills and attitudes of 240 kids aged seven to ten, as well as running 47 of them through an fMRI machine while asking them to do some basic arithmetic. What did they find?
As expected, kids who did well in math liked math more, both according to self reports and their parents, and kids who hated the subject did poorly. But…
