Okay - when I was studying back 2007, neuroscience was everywhere! I would describe that era 2007 - 2013/4 as “peak neuroscience”.

God damn, everything was neuroscience hype. Elasticity, plasticity - basically if you slapped neuro- in front of a word you were rolled gold. Neuroscience could do EVERYTHING! If you blasted your kids with Mozart they would be geniuses, if you did Luminosity or other “brain-training” you would prevent mental-decline, at the same time suddenly everything was being explained by way of an MRI.

Criminality? Drug addiction? Academic achievement? You get an MRI, you get an MRI! you get an MRI!

In hindsight, this neuroessentialism, the idea that we could boil a person and their way of existing in the world down to a scan of their head, was really the logical endpoint of the radical empiricalisation of society - we had measured everything and science (or purported science like economics) could explain it all through rationality and empirical evaluation. It followed then, that the final frontier: personhood/personality etc., would be scanned, studied and corrected with the power of neuroscience.

Of course, often, but not always, it was the neuroscientists pulling the handbrake on the frenzy, and trying to stop the stream of Gladwellian pop-science flooding airport bookshops and boardrooms. But as soon as someone says that “neuroscience can help you get abs” - your chances are shot.

How we manage something depends on what we measure.

The neuroessentialist fever that we were all gripped by back then had some seriously dark side-effects. For example, if we could reduce a person’s experience with drug addiction down to a brain scan - then all that is needed is pharmacological interventions to correct things. Suddenly, economic/social/cultural support - stuff that can’t be addressed through a CAT-scan - is sidelined. Great for the pharmaceutical companies!

All this is to say, the actual applications and results of neuroscience and its correlates like neuroplasticity have been, at best, overhyped and at worst been deployed quite worryingly.

In a learning context, when we deploy the language of neuroplasticity what are we actually saying? What are we telling ourselves? What are we saying about ourselves?

The idea that like: “hey if you do a lot of a thing, you will get more proficient at a thing”, is not a new thing. What’s new I guess is the granular detail we can get about what is happening in our brain as we are getting more proficient. But the takeaway is not new at all - “practise makes perfect” yadda yadda.

Growth mindset kind of sits within the same framework. Like, it is good that we have moved on from thinking that tries to classify people into “IQ” ranges and give them a niche in society, which is just insane that that ever was a thing. So yeah, growth mindset: the finding that individuals who believe that the can get better/more proficient in any task with good strategies, feedback and effort tend to then focus on getting better/learning versus thinking they cannot change - good, pleasant, uncontroversial. I don’t consciously do it, but I tend to operate on that assumption.

But, perhaps, I do that because I’ve been the beneficiary of a society/upbringing that creates the conditions and instills/has instilled by default a certain strata of people with growth mindset (or whatever it was called before Dweck - self-esteem?). So it is easy for me to just swim with the current - the system enables it by design.

But what about those for whom the system either wasn't designed by, or has actually, by design, harmed/degraded/discriminated against etc. etc. well this is where the limits of Dweckian/MRI driven essentialism comes up. Believing that “hey I can get better at things if I keep trying and using new strategies and seeking feedback” etc. is one thing - having a context in which you can do that safely, without discrimination, fear, harassment is another thing. If you are living in a space of precariousness economically, socially, culturally it is harder to reap the fruit of 'having a growth mindset' regardless of if you 'have one'.

A lot, A LOT, of things can explain why people don’t seek feedback, risk failing, ask questions despite risking seeming ‘silly’ - and it can’t all be explained by ‘fixed mindset’, it can also be explained by the lived experience, the reality of conscious and unconscious bias, history.

All this is to say - let’s push against the essentialism that seperates what we can do with our time, brains, bodies out from what the settings of the system actually let you do through both overt and subvert power-dynamics and structures.

Let’s remember that flourishing and achieving human potential is the product not only of individuals trying really hard, but also that of society trying really hard.

I don’t think I answered the specific questions :)