Learned Helplessness at Fifty: Insights from Neuroscience

Learned helplessness is a psychological condition where a person or animal learns to behave helplessly in a particular situation, even when the opportunity to avoid or escape it is available. It occurs after an individual has experienced repeated aversive stimuli (e.g., pain, failure) that they cannot control. As a result, they come to believe that

Responsibility is the negation of learned helplessness.

“Wrong, the rat will become depressed and engage in extreme inaction otherwise known as learned helplessness. Alyona and Louie will I’m sure attest that we can already see this happening with our rat friend here. A similar experiment was done with dogs and it worked.”

Why are we as helpless, or more so, than our ancestors were in facing the chaos that interferes with happiness? There are at least two good explanations for this failure. In the first place, the kind of knowledge—or wisdom—one needs for emancipating consciousness is not cumulative. It cannot be condensed into a formula; it cannot be memorized and t

And when he watched what was actually going on in the brain, he discovered that the original theory had it all backward: We don’t learn helplessness. The brain assumes helplessness when exposed to adverse conditions. If we want to feel that we have any control over our own outcomes, we have to learn that we have power.

Negative events generally have more impact than positive ones. For example, it’s easy to acquire feelings of learned helplessness from a few failures, but hard to undo those feelings, even with many successes (Seligman 2006).