Placing the blame: Different areas of your brain respond to failures differently

If at first you don’t succeed, and you think you can control the outcome next time, you’re more likely to persist, suggests a new study.

Using brain scans, researchers found different brain areas activated in response to a setback if the failure was perceived as something under the person’s control versus a random or uncontrollable cause, and blaming oneself led to greater persistence.

When we feel that failures are our fault, we tend to want to try again, says study.