In my other life as an internet company angel investor, we often spread the old adage that it’s great to find an entrepreneur who has experienced one major failure. That person is supposedly the one who has learned the most from the experience and can apply those lessons to future endeavors.
It turns out that we might learn a lot more from success than failure.
Training monkeys on a two-choice visual task, researchers found that the animals’ brains kept track of recent successes and failures. A correct answer had impressive effects: it improved neural processing and sent the monkeys’ performance soaring in the next trial. But if a monkey made a mistake in one trial, even after mastering the task, it performed around chance level in the next trial—in other words, it was thrown off by mistakes instead of learning from them.
Success, eh? Now you tell me.
