On April 13, 2022, the Next Level Lab hosted a presentation by Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Professor of Education, Psychology, and Neuroscience at the University of Southern California, and Director of the USC Center for Affective Neuroscience, Development, Learning and Education (CANDLE). This talk summarized the findings from a five-year transdisciplinary study on educating for dispositions of mind, research which has powerful implications for redesigning adolescent educational experiences to promote youth thriving.
Dr. Immordino-Yang’s interdisciplinary work brings together techniques from human development and education, ethnography, neuroimaging, and psychophysiological research. Her presentation to the Next Level Lab focused on an aspect of her research that seeks to understand the ways that thoughts are built out of biological patterns of activity, and the ways in which those patterns and thoughts are shaped by cultural and educational experiences, individual variability, and development over time.
Through a series of studies over the past decade with participants across the lifespan, Dr. Immordino-Yang and her colleagues have investigated which areas of the brain coordinate, or “talk” to each other, when people are experiencing strong emotional engagement with information or ideas. This research indicates that the same areas of the brain that are involved in abstract thinking and identity development are simultaneously responsible for the basic functions of mapping and regulating the state of one’s own body consciousness. In short, as Dr. Immordino-Yang explained, “emotional engagement activates the same brain systems that keep you alive.” This research suggests that when we are presented with complex information, recruiting the regions of the brain that are involved in body awareness and regulation is part of what enables us to develop a subjective sense that this information is relevant and meaningful to us and to the world.
In one recent longitudinal study, Dr. Immordino-Yang showed teenagers a series of videos depicting true personal stories about other young people and asked them to react verbally to each narrative. The participants’ responses included a mix of concrete, emotion-based reactions (e.g., “This story makes me upset”) and more abstract, “big picture” reflections (e.g., “What really hits me is how not everyone is able to get an education”). Next, each participant underwent fMRI scanning while watching the videos a second time. When the adolescents watched videos that they found emotionally resonant and meaningful, the neuroimaging showed coordination between the networks in the brain described above. Interestingly, when Dr. Immordino-Yang and her team followed up with the same participants two years later, they found that the adolescents who had demonstrated more abstract thinking in the initial study showed more growth in the connections between these regions. A subsequent follow-up showed that this increased brain coordination was also predictive of better academic and personal outcomes in early adulthood. The findings from this research suggest that adolescents’ brain development is supported by the practice of constructing narratives that highlight the connections between their own life and the broader world around them.
Finally, Dr. Immordino-Yang discussed a number of other facets of her work, including a program that matched adolescents with senior citizens from the same neighborhoods in low-SES communities in Los Angeles. The pairs participate in an eight-week program that involves telling each other stories about their lives. After participating in the program, adolescents reported feeling wiser, more hopeful, and more grateful, and that they had a greater sense of purpose. Moreover, without being prompted, the adolescents demonstrated more transcendent dispositions of mind as they progressed through the program – their reflections showed movement from a concrete, pragmatic understanding of life goals to more abstract understanding that focuses on the broader picture of how they want to engage in the world. Most notably, the more adolescents demonstrated these abstract conceptualizations, the more likely they were to report an increased sense of purpose in life at the end of the program. As with the neuroimaging research described above, this study indicates that there is significant value in the process of reflecting on big ideas about how an individual relates to the world.
For educators who work with learners in adolescence and early adulthood, this research highlights the power in creating space for reflection and meaning-making. It is critical to help students navigate between concrete and abstract ideas, offering opportunities to engage with the content directly and also to step back and reflect on its purpose and value. As Dr. Immordino-Yang’s research shows, not only is this a worthwhile pedagogical practice, it is a powerful long-term investment in young people’s brain development.
If you would like to learn more, we encourage you to read this summary of some of Dr. Immordino-Yang’s recent work or visit the CANDLE website at https://candle.usc.edu/.
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by Megan Powell Cuzzolino, Ed.D. (Next Level Lab Senior Project Manager)