I’ve finally gotten around to reading a book that I’m pretty sure my sister gave me for either my birthday or Christmas. Either way, it’s taken me somewhere between 8 and 11 months to get to this book, which is pretty much par for the course. At any given time, I usually have 3-4 books going, and sometimes it can take me years to get through a book because I get distracted or just lose interest in that particular genre. Until I finally finished it about five years ago, I had been reading On the Road since the 90′s. We’ll see how this one pans out, but at the moment I’m on pace to finish it well before the world ends in December. Thank goodness for that.
The book I’m reading is How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer, who, unfortunately for him, is probably now best-known for being fired by The New Yorker for fabricating facts in his recent book on Bob Dylan. The book is all about how the brain makes decisions. I’m not very far into it, but last night I read a passage that was–ironically, given Lehrer’s recent fate–about the importance of failure in learning. The passage detailed a study conducted by Carol Dweck, a psychologist at Stanford, in 12 New York City Schools with more than 400 fifth-graders. The results of the study highlighted the roles that failure and how we administer praise to students play in the learning process and our neural development.