Essentials: Science of Mindsets for Health & Performance | Dr. Alia Crum

This Huberman Lab Essentials episode replays Andrew Huberman's conversation with Stanford psychologist Alia Crum. Huberman introduces himself as a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. His first question is basic: what is a mindset, and what does it do?

We define mindsets as core beliefs or assumptions that we have about a domain or category of things that orient us to a particular set of expectations, explanations, and goals.

Crum uses stress to make the definition concrete. A person may see stress as enhancing and good for them, or as debilitating and bad for them. In her account, that core belief shapes three things: what people expect will happen when they are stressed, how they explain what unfolds, and what they feel motivated to do. A mindset works as a distilled assumption that orients both thinking and action.

Huberman notes that mindsets simplify life by narrowing what we need to consider, then mentions Carol Dweck’s growth mindset and asks for other examples and early origins. Crum first explains Dweck’s implicit theories and her lab’s broader domains. Later she traces her own belief in mindsets to childhood gymnastics and a father who taught martial arts and meditation, offering a personal example rather than a general developmental account.

Crum clarifies what she sees as a common misreading of Dweck. People often focus on growth and motivation, but the research began with what Dweck called implicit theories: core beliefs about whether intelligence or ability is fixed for life or can grow and change. Crum does not claim either belief is simply correct.

And the reality is, as it always is, complex, and it's a bit of both, and it's all these things.

She argues that people need such simplifying systems to make sense of a complex reality, and that these systems still have consequences. She summarizes Dweck's motivational finding this way: people who believe intelligence is malleable are motivated to work harder to grow it, while someone with a fixed view may ask why they should work harder at math if they don't think they're good at it.

Crum describes her lab's aim as widening both the range of mindsets studied and the range of effects measured. She lists the domains her group has examined:

Stress: enhancing versus debilitating. Healthy food: indulgent and delicious versus disgusting and depriving. Exercise: whether people feel they are getting enough to gain the health benefits they want. Illness: whether cancer is an unmitigated catastrophe or manageable. Symptoms and side effects: a sign that a treatment is harmful versus a sign that it is working.

She says people, "at least in our culture, in, in the West," generally see stress as debilitating and healthy foods as disgusting and depriving. She adds that mindsets have an impact "whether or not they're true or false, right or wrong." Her central claim goes further than motivation:

but as our lab has started to reveal, they also shape physiological mechanisms by changing what our bodies prioritize and prepare to do.

Her wording is hedged: the lab has "started to reveal" these effects, and mindsets "potentially" affect how bodies respond. She also lists the mechanisms she proposes: mindsets synthesize and simplify our thinking, shape what we pay attention to and what we are motivated to do, and may affect how our bodies respond.

Huberman asks Crum to use her milkshake study as an example of mindsets shaping the body. She ran it as a graduate student at Yale University, working with Kelly Brownell and Peter Salovey. Crum credits Salovey with coining the term emotional intelligence. In a brief aside, Huberman notes that Salovey is now the president of Yale, and Crum agrees that he has "done well for himself" and "for the university and society."