Grit(59)

One crucial difference was that, in the new experiment, the rats were only five weeks old—that’s adolescence in the rat life cycle. A second difference was that the effects of this experience were assessed five weeks later, when the rats were fully mature adults. At that point, both groups of rats were subjected to uncontrollable electric shocks and, the next day, observed in a social exploration test.

Here’s what Steve learned. Adolescent rats who experienced stress they could not control grew up to be adult rats who, after being subjected to uncontrollable shocks a second time, behaved timidly. This was not unusual—they learned to be helpless in the same way that any other rat would. In contrast, adolescent rats who experienced stress they could control grew up to be more adventurous and, most astounding, appeared to be inoculated against learned helplessness in adulthood. That’s right—when these “resilient rats” grew up, the usual uncontrollable shock procedures no longer made them helpless.

In other words, what didn’t kill the young rats, when by their own efforts they could control what was happening, made them stronger for life.



* * *



When I learned about Steve Maier’s new experimental work, I just had to talk to him in person. I got on a plane to Colorado.

Steve walked me around his laboratory and showed me the special cages equipped with little wheels that, when turned, cut off the current to the electric shock. Afterward, the graduate student who ran the experiment on adolescent rats that I just described gave a talk on the brain circuits and neurotransmitters involved. Finally, when Steve and I sat down together, I asked him to explain, from this experiment and everything else he’d done in his long and distinguished career, the neurobiology of hope.

Steve thought for a moment. “Here’s the deal in a few sentences. You’ve got lots of places in the brain that respond to aversive experiences. Like the amygdala. In fact, there are a whole bunch of limbic areas that respond to stress.”

I nodded.

“Now what happens is that these limbic structures are regulated by higher-order brain areas, like the prefrontal cortex. And so, if you have an appraisal, a thought, a belief—whatever you want to call it—that says, ‘Wait a minute, I can do something about this!’ or ‘This really isn’t so bad!’ or whatever, then these inhibitory structures in the cortex are activated. They send a message: ‘Cool it down there! Don’t get so activated. There’s something we can do.’?”

I got it. But I still didn’t understand, fully, why Steve had gone to the trouble of experimenting with adolescent rats.

“The long-term story needs some more explanation,” he continued. “We think there is plasticity in that circuitry. If you experience adversity—something pretty potent—that you overcome on your own during your youth, you develop a different way of dealing with adversity later on. It’s important that the adversity be pretty potent. Because these brain areas really have to wire together in some fashion, and that doesn’t happen with just minor inconveniences.”

So you can’t just talk someone into believing they can master challenges?

“That’s right. Just telling somebody they can overcome adversity isn’t enough. For the rewiring to happen, you have to activate the control circuitry at the same time as those low-level areas. That happens when you experience mastery at the same time as adversity.”

And what about a life history of challenge without control?

“I worry a lot about kids in poverty,” Steve said. “They’re getting a lot of helplessness experiences. They’re not getting enough mastery experiences. They’re not learning: ‘I can do this. I can succeed in that.’ My speculation is that those earlier experiences can have really enduring effects. You need to learn that there’s a contingency between your actions and what happens to you: ‘If I do something, then something will happen.’?”



* * *



The scientific research is very clear that experiencing trauma without control can be debilitating. But I also worry about people who cruise through life, friction-free, for a long, long time before encountering their first real failure. They have so little practice falling and getting up again. They have so many reasons to stick with a fixed mindset.

I see a lot of invisibly vulnerable high-achievers stumble in young adulthood and struggle to get up again. I call them the “fragile perfects.” Sometimes I meet fragile perfects in my office after a midterm or a final. Very quickly, it becomes clear that these bright and wonderful people know how to succeed but not how to fail.

Last year, I kept in touch with a freshman at Penn named Kayvon Asemani. Kayvon has the sort of résumé that might make you worry he’s a fragile perfect: valedictorian of his high school class, student body president, star athlete . . . the list goes on.

But I assure you that Kayvon is the very embodiment of growth mindset and optimism. We met when he was a senior at the Milton Hershey School, a tuition-free boarding school originally established by chocolatier Milton Hershey for orphan boys and, to this day, a haven for children from severely disadvantaged backgrounds. Kayvon and his siblings ended up at Hershey just before Kayvon entered the fifth grade—one year after his father nearly strangled his mother to death, leaving her in a permanent coma.

At Hershey, Kayvon thrived. He discovered a passion for music, playing the trombone in two school bands. And he discovered leadership, giving speeches to state politicians, creating a student-run school news website, chairing committees that raised tens of thousands of dollars for charity, and in his senior year, serving as student body president.