LearnStorm Growth Mindset: Dr. Michael Merzenich on growing your brain

But we've actually trained athletes, you could say, on the sort of academic side of training you would not necessarily imagine. And guess what? It improves our performance on the field.

What's happening for a couple of reasons. One reason is that you're training a person to be more alert, more on the ball; they're more engaged. You're, I mean, you're heavily exercising the machinery of the brain that's controlling its capacity to learn.

You know, there's an interesting thing about athletic training. It focuses massively on the body and that's sort of, uh, in the level of professional athletics, that's sort of to the peak. I mean, how could you improve a great athlete on a professional level physically? But they're all improvable cognitively. They're all improvable in here; they still have a ways to go.

By training in here, how about smarter? How about quicker in their decision making? How about seeing more and responding to it more accurately? Logic, reasoning, and the brain machinery itself that's controlling learning are all improving.

Now, I'm going to use my brain for some other purpose, maybe some very different purpose. Maybe I'm going to throw or catch a baseball. It matters. I now have a different machine than I had before. I spent all of that time in the class, on the economy, Khan Academy class; you have a different and better brain and it will matter to you.

It will count on the positive side from the point of view of your neurological capacities. Of course, you have this resource; every one of us has this resource. How effectively are you using it?

And I wish every young person, I wish every adult could understand that they're probably underutilizing this resource, right, and undervaluing it. The best way to throw away this asset is just to accept the fact that you have some dark fate.

Right? That means you have no real potential because that's who you are. What a silly and scientifically incorrect attitude that is.