It’s also important to realize that even if people have a fixed mindset, they’re not always in that mindset. In fact, in many of our studies, we put people into a growth mindset. We tell them that an ability can be learned and that the task will give them a chance to do that. Or we have them read a scientific article that teaches them the growth mindset. The article describes people who did not have natural ability, but who developed exceptional skills. These experiences make our research participants into growth-minded thinkers, at least for the moment - and they act like growth-minded thinkers, too.

Biologist Rupert Sheldrake, in taking the ideas of physics into the biological and physiological realms, offers a strong case for considering seemingly random chance events as dependable energy manifestations.

The new physics indicates that tremendous energy resources lie within each of us and that we are united with energy patterns in the universe. Sheldrake proposes that there are morphogenic fields, or “invisible organizing structures that mold or shape things like crystals, plants, and animals, and [that] also have an organizing effect on behavior.” He posits that these fields contain influences from all of history and evolution. As such, they begin to explain the “lucky coincidences” that sometimes solve our problems.

With our super-plastic neocortices and well-organized senses, Homo sapiens are the gluttons of the informavore world. We are uniquely skilled at acquiring, processing, and ordering information, and uniquely versatile when it comes to letting that information shape who we are. And when we are deprived of sensory information, like a prisoner in solitary confinement, we conjure sometimes fantastical information-rich worlds from the darkness to feed our inner informavore.

I do not think my experience is unique. Many scientists, no less than poets or artists, have a living relation to the past, not just an abstract sense of history and tradition but a feeling of companions and predecessors, ancestors with whom they enjoy a sort of implicit dialogue. Science sometimes sees itself as impersonal, as “pure thought,” independent of its historical and human origins. It is often taught as if this were the case. But science is a human enterprise through and through, an organic, evolving, human growth, with sudden spurts and arrests, and strange deviations, too. It grows out of its past but never outgrows it, any more than we outgrow our childhoods.

The neural embodiment of self, it seems, is extremely robust. Every perception, every action, every thought, every utterance seems to bear the mark of the individual’s experience, of his value system, of all that is peculiar to him. In Gerald Edelman’s theory of neuronal group selection (as in Esther Thelen’s work on the development of cognition and action in children), we find a rich account of how neuronal connectivity may be determined by, literally shaped by, the individual’s experience, thoughts, and actions no less than by all that is hardwired and biologically given. If individual experience and experiential selection so determine the developing brain, we should not perhaps be surprised that individuality, self, is preserved for so long even in the face of diffuse neuronal damage.