The incredible powers of transcendental thinking, explained by a neuroscientist

One of the fundamental misconceptions undergirding our education system is the idea that the purpose

of school is to support learning outcomes. And learning outcomes are operationalized mainly

around two things, both to do with memory. One is memory for semantic information, for facts

and the other is memory for procedures. But in the human brain, there's a third kind of memory

that is absolutely fundamental to our growth and development and well-being, and that is autobiographical memory

Autobiographical memory is the story we tell ourselves, the stories of who we are and what we stand for

and how we want the world to be. The sort of transcendent thinking that young people do

forms the kind of hat stand that all of the other learning gets layered on top of

In essence, organizing the way in which we call up our memories, the way in which we

enact our skills, the way in which we notice what needs to happen in different situations

those are the things that really make us human, and those are the things that we need to reorganize

our educational experiences around. I'm Mary Helen Imordino Yang. I'm a professor of education, psychology, and neuroscience at the

University of Southern California, and I'm the director of CANDLE, which is the Center for Affect

of Neuroscience, Development, Learning, and Education. We've known for a long time that

infants very quickly grow their brains in the first three years of life We now coming to appreciate that there a second major period of brain development that happens just before puberty and lasts all the way into the mid

There's lots of work in neurodevelopment showing that, for example, the kinds of resources and environments that kids have

socioeconomic status, for example, are affecting the ways in which their brains are developing at the group level

young people across adolescence are needing healthy opportunities to contribute, to be part

of communities, to develop a sense of purpose, those very fundamental psychological capacities

turn out to be driving the development of their brains. So as we began to pull apart and understand

the neural correlates of what we're now calling transcendent thinking, which is the proclivity to

think beyond the here and now and to make broader meaning out of the things that we witness

To also consider the historical or future possible implications, the ethical implications

to become curious about what alternative ways something could have happened, to think about

the ways that our perspectives are related to our systems of beliefs and assumptions

So I was really drawn to try to understand how do young people develop these capacities

What do they look like in the brains of young people? And what might be some of the affordances of these capacities for thinking

So we designed an experiment, a five-year longitudinal study, in which I invited 65 young people between the ages of 14 and 18

from low socioeconomic status high crime neighborhoods a range of ethnic backgrounds all kids who were passing their classes in school they all came from sort of stable family situations

Independently, I sat with each kid for two hours and showed them a set of 40 documentaries

that told the stories of real teenagers from all around the world

And then asked the kids, how does this person's story make you feel

Then we moved the kids into the MRI scanner where they watched again a short clip of the story

and they just sit and think about what the story means to them

and push buttons to tell us how strongly emotionally engaged they are

with thinking about that story. And then we had the kids come back two years later

and we scanned their brains again. And then we followed those young people into late adolescence

and then again as they were transitioning to young adulthood. And what we were able to show, which is quite extraordinary

is that the way in which they were inclined to engage in transcendent thinking about the meaning of the story

predicted the physical change in the growth of the white matter fiber tracts of their brain over the subsequent two years

That brain growth that we observed predicted identity development in late adolescence

which in turn predicted young adult life satisfaction, that they like the person whom they've become

that they enjoy and feel satisfied with the quality of their close relationships

that their opportunities at school or at work are what they always had hoped for themselves

that those are really what they want to be doing with their life. These findings were not explained by IQ

They were not explained by ethnic group or gender or by socioeconomic status

They were explained by the kind of disposition to think deeply about complex issues in a transcendent way So you have to do the exercise of actually using that thinking to grow your brain

and then that growth in the brain over time predicted identity development

and then that identity development predicted these young adult outcomes. So when we think about the current state of secondary education

and we think about what adolescents need, it's fairly obvious that there is a fundamental mismatch

We want kids to start with the small building blocks, to learn the little pieces and start to put those together

but that is not how the human mind grows. The human mind grows and develops by engaging with deep, powerful ideas

and then working backward to inform the meaning that you're making. What our and many people's psychosocial and educational research is showing is that supporting young people to respectfully and in a developmentally appropriate way engage with the complexities of the social and moral lives that they and others are living and that we are co-creating together in our society is what is deeply, deeply motivating and purpose generating

in all people, but especially in young people. So when our educational system thinks of the learning process

as enabling a young person to think about the kind of world that they live in

but also the kind of world they want to create, that is good education