Here’s what they found. In the brains of the students who received negative feedback the sympathetic nervous system lit up. This is the “fight or flight” system, the system that mutes the other parts of the brain and thus allows us to focus only on the information most necessary to survive. When this part of the nervous system is triggered, your heart rate goes up, endorphins flood your body, your cortisol levels rise, and you tense for action. This is your brain on negative feedback: it responds as if to a threat, and it narrows its activity. The strong negative emotions produced by criticism “inhibits access to existing neural circuits and invokes cognitive, emotional, and perceptual impairment,” psychology and business professor Richard Boyatzis said in summarizing the researchers findings.

Negative feedback doesn’t enable learning. It systematically inhibits it and is, neurologically speaking, how to create impairment.

In the students who received attention focused on their dreams and how they might go about achieving them, however, the sympathetic nervous system was not activated. Instead it was the parasympathetic nervous system that lit up. This is sometimes referred to as the “rest and digest” system. To quote the researchers again: “[T]he Parasympathetic Nervous System . . . stimulates adult neurogenesis (i.e., growth of new neurons) . . . , a sense of well being, better immune system functioning, and cognitive, emotional, and perceptual openness.”

In other words, positive, future-focused attention gives your brain access to more regions of itself and thus sets you up for greater learning. We’re often told that the key to learning is to get out of our comfort zones, but this finding gives the lie to that particular chestnut—take us out of our comfort zones and our brains stop paying attention to anything other than surviving the experience. It’s clear that we learn most in our comfort zone, because that’s our strengths zone, where our neural pathways are most concentrated. It’s where we’re most open to possibility, and it’s where we are most creative and insightful.

The neurobiology of fear is to some extent understood. A threat in some form is perceived, and in very broad terms two systems are activated: one rapid and more or less unconscious and mediated at lower levels of the central nervous system, the other slower and conscious and mediated at higher levels.

Rather than informing an appropriate course of action, the more immediate, visceral, intensely powerful, emotional - possibly blunter - response can overwhelm the slower, more elaborately calibrated, evaluative system. We become paralysed by fear. We lose a sense of control and panic ensues. Our thoughts are distorted and we become disorganised by fear. In this frenzied state of mind we cannot respond to reason.

First, fear inhibits learning. Research shows that fear consumes physiologic resources, diverting them from parts of the brain that manage working memory and process new information. In a word, learning. And that includes learning from failure. It is hard for people to do their best work when they’re afraid. It’s especially hard to learn from failure because doing so is a cognitively demanding task. Second, fear impedes talking about our failures. Today’s never-ending chore of self-presentation has exacerbated this ancient human tendency. The pressure to look successful has never been greater than in this age of social media. Studies find today’s teens, in particular, are obsessed with putting forward a sanitized version of their lives, endlessly checking for “likes” and suffering emotionally from comparisons and slights, real or perceived. Our emotional reaction to a perceived rejection is the same as to an actual one, because it’s how we interpret a situation that shapes our emotional response. And it’s not just the kids who worry. Whether in professional accomplishment, attractiveness, or social inclusion, keeping up appearances can feel as necessary as breathing to full-grown adults. The real failure, I’ve found, is believing that others will like us more if we are failure-free. In reality, we appreciate and like people who are genuine and interested in us, not those who present a flawless exterior.

We are saddled with what psychologists call prepared fears. These include fears of dangerous animals, loud noises, and sudden movements. To this list of prepared fears add that of being expelled by the tribe. University of Virginia professor James “Jim” Detert and I consider being rejected by a group as a survival-based prepared fear. The risk of coming up short in the eyes of an authority such as one’s boss triggers a prepared fear in the brain related to being expelled from the tribe, a reality that might long ago have resulted in death from exposure or starvation. But today when we’re afraid to speak up about failure, our colleagues lose valuable opportunities to learn vicariously. Also, we miss out on opportunities to avoid preventable failures. Meanwhile, distracted by irrational prepared fears, we miss signals of longer-term peril that require slower thinking but constitute true threats to survival, such as the impact of climate change on food supplies and sea levels. Fast, automatic low road processing feeds the confirmation bias, encourages complacency, and hides failure’s useful lessons. Slow high road processing happens when we stop to question the automatic to wonder what is happening and what it might mean. Most important, it happens when we stop to ask ourselves, How might I have contributed to the failure?