Like many others out there, I’ve become a bit of a podcast obsessive. I know that we can’t really multitask, but when I’m able to go for a run and engage in some learning while I’m running, it almost feels like I’m able to get a two-for-one experience.

Last year, Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast introduced me to Dr. Andrew Huberman, whose Huberman Lab podcast introduced me to Dr. Alia Crum. After hearing Dr. Crum describe the different ways she approaches researching the physiological impacts of mindset shifts, I did a deep(er) dive into her work to better understand how she’s able to empirically capture the ways our bodies respond to our brains learning new information.

In the podcast episode, Dr. Crum begins by describing “the milkshake study,” and I concur that this particular study is a good place to start, since the results are both super interesting and quite useful in framing out much of her other work:

In the milkshake study, participants were invited to help test out nutritional milkshakes a hospital was considering giving to patients. In their first visit, subjects were given a milkshake deemed “indulgent,” something that was more of a treat. In the second visit, they were given a “sensible” milkshake, and had I been a participant, I would have likely thought of this as a “diet” milkshake. Participants’ blood was drawn three times: early in the session to establish a baseline, before milkshake consumption, and after consumption.

As you might have anticipated, participants were actually given the same milkshake in both sessions – they were just told that one was “indulgent” and one was “sensible.” The blood draws measured the amount of ghrelin, a stomach hormone that signals hunger, as a physiological marker of the impact of the milkshakes.

Here’s what they found: When participants thought they were drinking a “treat” milkshake, their stomachs produced less ghrelin. In other words, thinking they’d consumed something higher-calorie prompted their bodies to react as though they actually had, and to hold off on feeling hungry. Conversely, when they drank the “sensible” milkshake, ghrelin rates stayed consistent, so if they thought they drank a “diet” shake, they would be hungrier sooner.

Some of Crum’s other research reinforces the connection between mindset and physical impacts: hotel employees who showed measurable physical impacts when they were informed that their daily work activities were exercise (Crum & Langer, 2007); students who produced more anabolic hormones when primed to view stress as helpful (Crum et al, 2017); US adults who had lower mortality rates when they perceived that they exercised more than the average person (Zahrt, Crum, & Freedland, 2017).

Reading all of this research has led me to one completely non-scientific mindset of my own, as well as questions for my teaching to explore further:

Non-scientific takeaway: Adjusting your mindset can give you a 10% boost (though let me emphasize again that I mostly made up that percentage!). So if I’m eating a salad for lunch, and I consciously think of it as a satisfying, body-fueling, satiating salad, it’ll keep me full for about 10% longer than if I thought of it as…just a salad. And if I think of some of my daily activities – walking to the train, climbing the three flights to my apartment, cleaning up after dinner – as active, healthful activities, then maybe I’ll get about 10% more benefit from those activities, just by calling my own attention to them.

Teaching Questions: While there’s been a lot of research on growth mindset and grit in education (and also, importantly, critiques of these frameworks as “cure-alls” for the many factors that contribute to a student arriving underprepared or under-resourced in an academic setting), those studies tend to rely on observational data, or on things like test scores (e.g., if students are primed to think they’ll do well on an exam, do they perform better than a control group that isn’t primed?).

So, how might research methodologies focused on the physiological impacts of mindset shifts be applied to the scholarship of teaching and learning? Evaluating student learning outcomes based on mindset variables is helpful, but are there other ways to know how our bodies – and perhaps our brains, in particular – respond to learning environments when we’re mentally attuned to the learning experience? We know that metacognitive practices, like reflection, can impact learning (one of many examples: Ford et al, 1998), but we don’t know the physiological mechanisms that lead to these impacts.

I recognize that it’s rather unsatisfying to end a piece with these types of open questions, but that’s where I am: attuning my mind to the “treat” nature of gentle lentils and wondering how I could facilitate similar impacts for my students by drawing their attention to the learning process more intentionally.