How Our Brains Learn  ## Metadata - Author: [[Hidden Brain]] - Full Title: How Our Brains Learn - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/02ca4375-fbe1-4e4f-a4bf-88a9072734a4 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **From Soft Dropout To Scientific Passion** - Mary Helen stopped attending school and thrived after moving to a private school with hands-on science projects. - She dissected cow eyeballs and designed self-directed projects that reignited her love of learning. Transcript: Mary Helen Immordino-Yang I really did. I couldn't understand kind of what the point was or what it meant to do things there. And school really didn't feel like it was about learning for me. It felt like it was about doing stuff. And I can hardly describe the sense of just release Friday afternoon and the dread on Sunday night through my late elementary, especially, and early middle school, sixth grade year. I finally ended up, for a lot of complex reasons for things that were happening at school, I finally ended up just kind of stopping going to school. I sort of was like a soft dropout about, you know, I just stopped getting up in the morning. And I think my parents just kind of stood back and realized I was doing all kinds of interesting things. And my parents were both from the inner city, one from Detroit, one from Yonkers, New York. Right. And they decided they were going to raise their kids on a farm and try to grow what we ate and, you know, and have animals and all kinds of things. And so I was really deeply involved with running that farm, taking care of the animals. I was playing the piano. I was, you know, running around in the woods, training dogs and, you know, all kinds of things that was keeping me very, very busy. Shankar Vendantam I understand that at one point your grandmother once discovered something unusual in her refrigerator that you had left there. Tell me that story, Mary Helen. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang Oh, God, I was a little older. And that actually represents a turning point in my education, I think. My parents had the resources to be able to find a different kind of education system for me. So they moved me the following year into a private school that had, as it turns out, much more rigorous and interesting academics, in addition to all kinds of, you know, theater and art And singing and all these other things that I was very interested in. And so I started there in seventh grade and I just really fell in love with science class. You know, thank you, Mrs. Susan Lundgren, if you're still out there for really like teaching us so much interesting stuff. And we were doing all these laboratory experiments where we were, you know, dissecting all kinds of things from flowers and worms to fish. And that really pulled me in. So for my seventh grade science project, I decided to try to, you know, figure out how sight works, how we see in the eyeball, what the eyeball is structured like. And so, you know, I read all about it. And my dad went with me and he basically got a bunch of cow eyeballs harvested out of some cows who had been slaughtered. And we brought home this bag of eyeballs for me to dissect. And I put it in the refrigerator and my poor grandmother came to visit and, you know, was like, what's this in the refrigerator? And realized it was a bag full of eyeballs. But I did go on to take those eyeballs apart and really, you know, try to figure out what are these different parts? How do they relate to the model I have here and what is this role they're playing in vision? And, you know, I really just loved to be sort of self-directed and designing my own project and kind of digging in on it, but also being accountable to share what I had learned in a more Rigorous academic way at school. ([Time 0:04:31](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3b8824f4-63db-4854-927b-eb6676e7c12f)) - **Students See Science As Their Story** - Mary Helen taught immigrant students who asked why early hominids were depicted with dark skin and connected evolution to their lives. - The question sparked curiosity and real-world exploration like a student collecting snails from the beach. Transcript: Mary Helen Immordino-Yang What fascinated me was that the kids started to ask me questions about why, when we talked about early humans and hominids, why they were always depicted with dark skin, like they looked Like black people. And I remember in particular one girl, you know, bravely raising her hand. And it just struck me that all the other kids were kind of pushing her on, like yeah, yeah, ask the question. Asking me, why is that the case? Why do these early hominids always, why are they depicted with dark skin? And of course, they were on the equator where without dark skin, you would fry, right? You would have skin cancer, you'd be sunburned. And I think it was a turning point moment because the kids suddenly realized that the concept of evolution and of adaptation to your environment was applying to them as well in that context. They were seeing themselves adapt to a new environment. They were looking around at each other and seeing how they were different from one another. And they realized that the reasons we are the way we are is something to do with where we come from and how we've adapted ourselves to fit into the world and to flourish in the spaces in which Our ancestors came from. And that became the entree into conversations about race, about identity, but also about individual variability, about the ways in which development and experience shape who you Are. Shankar Vendantam I understand that after this experience in the classroom, these students also became more engaged with the science. They actually wanted to learn more because now they're not just learning about abstract concepts. They're learning about things that they feel they have a direct connection to. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang Yeah, they became very deeply interested, some of them, in really the ways that science could help them explore the world. I remember one girl who went for the first time, we were kind of near the beach, but she had never been to the coast before, and her parents took her on a weekend excursion to the beach. And she came back eagerly on Monday morning with a coffee can with snails in it and was telling me, like, look, they're alive! Like, these things were at the beach. ([Time 0:09:47](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d9370f1f-99ed-4997-baa0-2443affa4d0a)) - **Stories Evoke Measurable Engagement** - Using real-life mini-documentaries reliably evokes deep emotional engagement in lab participants. - Mary Helen linked subjective reports of feeling to brain and body activity measured in the scanner. Transcript: Mary Helen Immordino-Yang What ended up working just remarkably well was to bring together stories of real people's lives from around the world, people in a variety of complex situations, and compose these Stories into little mini documentaries that I would share with the participants in our experiments in a private two-hour long interview where I would show them a small two-minute To five-minute documentary and tell them the story of someone's situation and then just ask them, how does this person's story make you feel? And from that, people began to really start to actively engage with and show us, exteriorize their own meaning-making process, the way in which they made sense of what they'd heard And learned and then went from there to begin to tell stories about what it meant to them and how they felt about it. And we moved people to the MRI scanner after that and scanned their brain activity. We also recorded the activity in their bodies, their heart rate, their breathing, right, called psychophysiological recording at the same time. And we had them watch the stories again in the scanner and push buttons in real time to tell us how emotionally engaged they were with that story at that moment. ([Time 0:16:57](https://share.snipd.com/snip/469bc817-5094-4515-bc54-7e81442200c3)) - **From Empathy To Moral Reasoning** - Teenager Isela watched Malala's story, felt sadness, then related it to her own education and invented a moral belief: "It's not right." - She moved from personal sympathy to broad moral reasoning about education for all. Transcript: Shankar Vendantam What did she say, Mary Helen? Mary Helen Immordino-Yang What Isela said, I think, was quite extraordinary. And turned out to reveal a kind of pattern of thinking that many adolescents engaged in different ways and that we discovered was very important to both their brain growth and their Social growth. What Acela said was first along the lines of, well, this story makes me feel very upset. It's going to be so difficult for her. She wants to be a doctor, but it's very difficult because she's not allowed to go to school. And that's frightening and it makes me sad. But then she paused. And that pause is very important neurologically, because we think what's happening is she's shifting herself into another mode of engagement where she's leveraging systems of the Brain that are involved in consciousness, in autobiographical memory, in storytelling, in beliefs and values. And what she said next was astounding. She said, it's crazy how it's that powerful. She says something like, it makes me think about my own journey in education and how I want to go to college and hopefully be a scientist someday. Right. So she was likening her own experience to that girl's experience to see the similarity. But then she moves even beyond that and says, I guess what really hits me, like what the emotion is about now, is how not everyone's able to get this chance to go forward with their life And get an education and do what they want to do with their life. And she says, it's not right. She moves from analyzing this one girl sad situation, which is very difficult and makes her sad, to this much more powerful story about what it means for what's right in the world, what Happens, what shouldn't happen, what could happen, and who she and that girl both are in the space of the broader world and what that means for what's right. She has invented morality out of a story that was a specific example. Shankar Vendantam What makes this powerful is, of course, she is relating the story she is hearing to her own life. So she's not just seeing it as this other girl's story over there, but she's saying, this is my story too. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang She's saying it's my story too, but she even goes beyond that. She goes all the way toward the end and says, it's not right. It makes me feel upset that other people who live in certain parts of the world where they don't want people to learn are trying to hold them back. She starts to understand that both she and this girl are part of an even bigger world. So she goes from that girl to her own story to something even bigger than the two of them. And she ends by saying, everyone everywhere should have the chance. I mean, all human beings should be able to live free and choose their life future. ([Time 0:19:28](https://share.snipd.com/snip/70e0e743-ed3d-4565-85d4-fa32a0877c2e)) - **The Power Of Transcendent Thinking** - Transcendent thinking shifts reasoning from a specific example to broader values, institutions, and possible futures. - It helps students see "bigger than the immediate" and form beliefs about what should be. Transcript: Mary Helen Immordino-Yang Issela engaged in this thing we're calling transcendent thinking because her thinking moved from the current context and transcended that context to think also about what these Examples mean for bigger ideas, for what's right or good, for how institutions work, for the intentions behind the institutions and the settings and the situations that she learned About, for the values, the morals, the beliefs, for the possible futures, for the historical interpretations, for the identities that they invoke. Kids did this in many different ways. But the heart of transcendent thinking is that kids became deeply engaged with thinking about something bigger than what was directly in front of them. ([Time 0:23:05](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bd5db8c5-75c8-4f93-9520-b99dc044ffbe)) - **Students Advise Fixing Neighborhood Crime** - Teens in Los Angeles described neighborhood crime then proposed solutions ranging from punishment to addressing life histories. - Some recommended understanding people's histories to design better community interventions. Transcript: Mary Helen Immordino-Yang So we asked kids who were not involved in any kind of criminal activity, who were not under any disciplinary action at school, who were passing all of their classes, who were from stable Home situations. So kids who were, you know, doing fine, as my grandmother would have said, right? We asked those kids about the things that they'd witnessed and seen in their neighborhoods. And they told us about a range of scary, dangerous criminal activity of various sorts. But we didn't stop there. We then went through with them and said, okay, so you said you saw a drug deal or you said you saw somebody get arrested or you said you saw somebody vandalize something or somebody get In a fight. Why do you think that happens? And how do you think the different actors in that scenario felt? And how do you think the cop felt? How do you think the little kid watching felt? Right. And then we asked them a really pivotal question. We said, imagine you were in charge and the people in your neighborhood who run things would do whatever you asked them to do as the new policy to try to make your neighborhood a better, Safer place. What would you advise them to do? And there again, we saw an amazing range of answers where some kids stayed sort of in the immediate moment saying, well, these people are bad people. They do bad things. They lose control of their emotion. They get angry and they just do something before they think. And they deserve to be rounded up or punished in some way. And that's how you're going to control things, right? Or there's nothing that can be done to control it, said one kid. This is just how these people are. Stay away from them. Other kids went beyond this to say, well, I think you have to think about the bigger picture. I think you have to think about the person's history, one kid told me. He said something like, everyone has a history, everyone has a story. And that changes who they are because of the way they've lived in their life. So if we really wanted to do something to make the neighborhood better, we should think about why these people feel the way they do, that they get themselves into these situations. And he went on to tell me about his own family and how he had been loved and safe, but maybe these people hadn't been. ([Time 0:24:08](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5f90405d-69fb-4808-a3da-c17cfd3526a0)) - **Emotion Drives An Attentional Seesaw** - Transcendent thinking engages a trade-off: outward attention networks deactivate while inward autobiographical networks activate. - Emotion drives this seesaw, enabling reflection and big-picture meaning-making. Transcript: Mary Helen Immordino-Yang And so what we found is that there were particular network properties of the brain that systematically came active and deactive in this coordinated pattern that was driven by the kid's Expression of strong emotion and that organized the basic networks in the brain that led to transcendent thinking. Shankar Vendantam What were these networks in the brain, Mary Helen? Describe some of these to me. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang So there were three main networks involved at the level that we're analyzing. Of course, the brain is infinitely complex, but these networks were the focus of our investigation. And what we found was that networks that are involved in emotion, in feeling the inside of your guts and visceral body that tell you when your heart's pounding or that you have a stomach Ache, that tell you when there's a snake in your path and suddenly you should and look where you're going. Allowing the person to sort of focus in a goal-directed way on attending to the world and learning about what was in front of them and remembering it and sort of integrating everything That they'd heard were active early, but for the first few seconds of watching a story. But then those networks became profoundly deactivated as the kid let go of their attention into the world. And instead, networks that are more intrinsically focused, that are mapping your state of consciousness, that are involved in autobiographical memory, that are involved in transcending The current here and now. These are the networks you use to daydream and to mind wander. Those networks became concertedly active as kids were thinking about these big transcendent ideas. ([Time 0:27:42](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ca394c1d-3c69-40e8-8025-3c98ec095fb7)) - **Reflection Protects The Developing Brain** - Teen transcendent thinking predicted brain thickening in regions harmed by community violence and improved resilience. - Reflecting on causes and solutions counteracted violence-related cortical thinning. Transcript: Shankar Vendantam You found that transcendent thinking was associated with more resilience in the face of adverse events. How did you discover this? Mary Helen Immordino-Yang We discovered that most directly with the interviews about the violence and crime that kids had witnessed in their communities. About crime was associated with thinning in particular regions of the cortex that are involved in kind of outward vigilance, emotion, motivation, learning, right? Your brain is reacting to the dangerous things around it by becoming hypervigilant and anxious about it. And these were the same regions in the brain that become thinner among soldiers deployed to as ground troops. It's also been shown to be involved in post-traumatic stress disorder among people with clinical symptomology. And we were seeing that these very same brain systems were getting thinner in our kids, the more violence they knew about in their community. But what we also found is that the more kids talked in a transcendent way about what could be done about the violence, about why it happens, the more they said things like, well, everybody's Got a story or a history. You have to look beyond what happened here in this situation and think about, well, how did that person get here? Right. And that's where we can do something about making our neighborhood better. When kids said things like that, that kind of thinking physically was associated with thickening in the brain in these same pivotal regions for attention and pain and motivation and Learning. And what we found is that thinking in these transcendent ways about the violence actually counteracted the negative effect of violence on the brain development. ([Time 0:30:12](https://share.snipd.com/snip/aac1a4a6-b28f-4cdb-b1a6-81f111fbf0d1)) - **Early Reflection Predicts Later Well-Being** - Teens' early tendency for transcendent thought predicted later identity development and life satisfaction years later. - Engaging with big ideas fosters growth that shows up as well-being in young adulthood. Transcript: Mary Helen Immordino-Yang That means we followed the same group of teenagers for five years and we kept bringing them back to the lab and then talking to them about who they were and having them tell us about themselves Over time. And what we found that was really striking was that their transcendent thinking, the tendency that they brought to the first original interview where they were 14, 15, 16, 17 years Old, right? To think about these stories that we were sharing with them in a transcendent way, to move beyond just this is a story about Malala to a story about what's right or good in the world for Everyone, right? That tendency in turn predicted the future of the growth of their brain. And that growth in turn predicted identity development in late adolescence at age 19 or so, right? How much kids said, yeah, I really think about the adult I want to become and what I stand for and what my values are and what I believe in and what my purpose is. And in turn, identity development at age 19 predicted young adult life satisfaction in their early 20s. Kids' well-being and life flourishing and satisfaction in their early 20s was predicted by their tendency to engage in more of this transcendent thinking in the original interview Five years before. ([Time 0:32:13](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b22f3d2a-44a2-4c80-bb78-96ebfe842c33)) - **Teachers' Brains Engage For Real Students** - Expert teachers show massively higher brain activity when grading their own students versus unknown students. - Their feedback focuses on students' development, not just the task, revealing deep social-emotional work. Transcript: Mary Helen Immordino-Yang That's right. We set out to study teachers working in urban inner city Los Angeles whose administrators identified them as their quote unquote superstars, right? The teachers who kids really love, really go to, the teachers who the administrators say are just the ones really dedicated to the kids who do really great work. And so we approached 40 of these amazing people and asked them if they would be willing to let us study them, basically to have us videotape them in their classroom and whether they would Come to the lab and actually let us image their brains in real time while they did their work. They graded their students' homeworks and gave feedback to their students and made judgments about classroom activities that they saw and told us what they thought about them. What we found was quite extraordinary. So we gave them a kid's assignment. We said, this is Shankar's work. Grade his assignment. And then, you know, here's Mary Helen's work. Grade her assignment. And then after a bunch of their own kids, we gave them a bunch of kids assignments that we told them were not their own kids work. And we told them we had taken those off the Internet. And actually what we had done, though, is written those assignments to be matched in quality. And what we found was that first the teachers graded the two assignments the same way. You know, you gave Mary Helen a B over here, and you gave the fake answer that we pulled off the internet from a kid that thinks like Mary Helen, also a B, right? So they knew what they were doing. But what we found was that the brain activity, when they graded their own students versus students they didn't know, was massively more. All over the brain, we see increases in activity in regions involved in motivation, attention, memory, emotion, autobiographical thinking, ideas, beliefs, consciousness, right? These teachers are doing more mental, social, affective work when they're seeing their own kids' assignments than when they're seeing the assignments that are the same, but by kids They don't know. What that tells us is that excellent teachers are doing work that is deeply social and emotional and effortful, even beyond what's required to just accomplish the teaching task, which Is grading the assignment. ([Time 0:39:12](https://share.snipd.com/snip/02c507b8-2351-4c10-bbc7-380142b3e5ed)) - **Emotion And Thought Are One System** - Cognition and emotion are not separate; thinking is inherently emotional and vice versa. - Learning sticks when emotion highlights why an idea matters to the learner's goals and identity. Transcript: Mary Helen Immordino-Yang I think our traditional Western philosophies too often separate cognition and emotion. We think that there are cognitive skills and there are emotional skills, right? And that maybe those two things impact on each other, right? But actually, that's the wrong way to think about it. There are two different dimensions of the same thing. Thinking is inherently cognitive and emotional always at the same time. And we can look at thinking from a cognitive lens and analyze the cognitive dimensions of what's going on, and it's important to do that. We can look at thinking from an effective lens and analyze the emotional engagement that's going on. But actually, both of those things are simultaneously happening in an integrated way always when people are alive, when they're moving through the world, adapting and engaging with The things around them. Shankar Vendantam Great teachers understand, perhaps instinctively, that in order to get students to learn, they have to care about what they are learning. Emotion has to sit in the driver's seat, if you will. This is not merely an argument about how school ought to work. Mary Helen says this is simply how the human brain is designed to work. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang Yeah, in terms of biology doesn't waste energy, right? We don't think about things that don't matter. Because that would be a waste of time and energy. So if you think about it this way, whatever you're having emotion about is what you're thinking about. And whatever you're thinking about, you might be able to learn about. ([Time 0:43:11](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c8992116-eaff-4e4c-84bd-bd6af29f60bb)) - **Infinity Made Math Irresistible** - A struggling math student engaged with Zeno's paradox and learned fractions because the big idea sparked his curiosity. - He alternated between fascination with the idea and learning calculations, making math personally relevant. Transcript: Mary Helen Immordino-Yang So this is an example of a really fantastic math curriculum that's built by a school in New York City that's an alternative high school for kids who haven't passed their classes in traditional Schools for whatever reason. Some of them are new immigrants to the country. Some of them have just failed in the past and not connected with school. Some of them are in trouble. And so these teachers have designed a math curriculum that turns things on its head. Right. But they actually have it right. Rather than starting with the building blocks of how to calculate things and working up, they start with big, powerful, intriguing ideas. They get kids involved with those. They choose big problems to work on. And then those problems become the space in which they learn mathematical calculation because they're so driven to understand their problem. So this one young man is describing how he had never before taken a math class and passed. And in this math class, he was given a big problem called Zeno's paradox. It's this problem that he calls walking to the door. You get halfway, halfway, halfway to the door. Do you ever make it to the door? Why or why not? And he says, I got so fascinated by this problem. I had to learn fractions to solve the problem I had. And I got fascinated by ideas like asymptotes and finite and infinite. And he talks about how he's moving back and forth between being fascinated by this big idea and having to learn the calculations and the mathematical concepts to be able to satisfy his Curiosity about that big idea. And as he is, we think, tilting his brains back and forth from paying attention, learning about fractions, because I care about big ideas like infinity, what an amazing idea. An asymptote that you get closer and closer to something, but you never reach it. Right. As he's doing that, he's tickling up, we think, the same regions of his brain that are the ones that are the kind of pivot of the attentional seesaw, which are the feeling of your guts and Viscera and your own self. And what we think is happening is that by engaging in these agentic ways of moving yourself between doing the skill and thinking about the big idea and then doing the calculations again Because you care about the big idea, what happens is that the after effect is you activate up these regions of the brain that are the seat of our subjective feeling of our own internal Self. They're the feeling of being me. And the kid says, and many of the kids in this kind of curriculum say, it got relevant to my life. It mattered to my life. ([Time 0:46:39](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c0283131-a63e-4535-b1f3-b1bb1ce75092)) - **Teach Purpose Before Practice** - Always show students why a skill matters before asking them to grind through it. - Give them a clear reason and they'll develop discipline to do the hard work. Transcript: Mary Helen Immordino-Yang Right. But they follow a big idea. There is no nut and bolt and grunt work that doesn't have some reason for knowing it. When kids are asking, why do I need to do this? Why do I need to know this? That represents a failing of the design of the curriculum. It should be very clear to everybody in that room why you need to know this before you start learning it. They need to know it. They need to feel the need. And then, yes, you have to work hard. You have to have self-discipline. You have to have control. You have to have stick-to And all those things are things you develop within yourself. ([Time 1:08:15](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c1b3e2c1-ce73-488f-90bc-f3bca8c278a6)) - **Make The Learner The Center** - Recenter education on students' subjective experience to make outcomes actionable and meaningful. - Treat the learner's inner experience as the system's center and design backward from it. Transcript: Mary Helen Immordino-Yang And what we're arguing is that we need to recenter education like a Copernican shift. We're changing the perspective on the metrics and the processes that we have. So, you know, right now for so long, what we've done is we're basically standing on the earth, making the earth the center and watching the kids and the learning outcomes go by. And when they go in the wrong direction or they slow down or things happen, we don't really know what to do about it, right? We can't make sense of that. But when we reframe so that we realize that, oh, another way to understand this, which is equally correct, but more useful, is that the experience of the person doing the thinking and Learning, their subjective experience is the center of the solar system, and the rest of us in our learning outcomes are spinning around and watching that. All of a sudden, the paradoxes, when we look up into the sky, many of them fall away because it now makes sense from this new perspective why they're moving in a direction that didn't conform To our previous expectations, right? And so when we refocus the educational enterprise on the subjective experience of thinking, what does it feel like to me to think here? How does thinking here change the way in which I engage with the process of learning? When we focus on that as the core of the enterprise, that's actionable. That helps us to make sense of why the learning outcomes are as they are and how we might change them if we're not happy with them. In our education systems, we focus way too much on the learning outcome as the metric of the functioning of the system. And the problem with that is it doesn't tell you what you need to know. When kids don't meet the achievement marks you want, we don't know what to do about that. What we need to do in tandem is go back and really analyze how are kids thinking with the material? What does it mean to think here? What does it feel like to think here? What is my process when I'm tackling a problem? And as we start to uncover that, that's actionable. ([Time 1:16:38](https://share.snipd.com/snip/821a2ae3-d270-4545-9e69-0a4a52c7ebc4))