I took an electricity class at the local community college last year.  The teacher spent about 20 minutes of the first lecture doing exactly this.  He presented a basic model of the brain where mental effort creates new connections in the brain and actually physically changes the form of the brain.  The summary was that even if we thought we didn't have the mental ability for the course at the start, long-term effort would turn us into people with that mental ability.<p>I wondered if he was familiar with some of this research.  And also whether it made a difference in class performance.