Mistakes. We all make them. And, by and large, we all dread them. I get that. I hate making mistakes. They make me feel foolish and incompetent. They undermine my confidence and make it harder to reach my goals. They feel like setbacks, if not out and out failures. And sometimes those mistakes are costly or painful or both, to me and to others. Mistakes are therefore something to be avoided. That’s the common narrative we tell ourselves about mistakes, and there is something deeply and obviously true about that story. But there’s another story as well. And that is that mistakes, if we pay attention to them, have a great deal to teach us....

I’ve been working through Jonah Lehrer’s How We Decide, a really fine book that explores the neuroscience behind how we make decisions. In one of the early chapters, Lehrer describes the role dopamine neurons play in decision-making. Essentially, they are those elements of the brain that register experience and create emotions. Interestingly, these neurons actually learn from experience. That is, they take note of successes and failures and improve their predictive performance (creating an emotion before something actually occurs – pleasure at the sight of an ice cream cone, anxiety when noticing that the back door to the house is...