Building Meaning and Building Teens' Brains - A Conversation with Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

Kids who leverage their intelligence to become curious, to build deeper meaning, to try to understand why, to try to take alternate perspectives and interrelate those perspectives, to try to appreciate the broader dynamics of a situation. When kids do that, we can predict how their brain is going to grow over time.

Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Future Learning Design Podcast with me, Tim Logan, brought to you in partnership with Intrepid Ed News. This week's episode is such a special one that I'm so happy to be able to share with you a conversation I had with Dr. Mary Helen Imordino-Yang, who studies the psychological and neurobiological basis of social emotion, self-awareness, and culture, and their implications for learning, development, and schools. She's a professor of education at the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education. A professor of psychology at the Brain and Creativity Institute, a member of the neuroscience graduate program faculty at the University of Southern California, and director of the USC Center for Effective Neuroscience, Development, Learning, and Education. Between 2016 and 2018, Mary Helen was the president of the International Mind, Brain, and Education Society, and she also serves as a distinguished scientist on the Aspen Institute's National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's Committee on the science and practice of learning. She also serves as scientific advisor to several Los Angeles schools and districts. Mary Helen's 2015 book, Emotions, Learning, and the Brain, is available from W.W. Norton Publishers, with all proceeds going to education-related causes. And in May 2020, Mary Helen wrote a must-read article in ASCD with Doug Knecht from Bank Street College of Education, which I've link to in the show notes. Hi, Mary Helen.

Hi, how are you?

Good, how are you?

Good.

Thank you so much for doing this. It's a huge pleasure to be able to talk to you. I was put onto your work 6 months ago and it just blew my mind. And there is— there— and it's such— I think it's such important work that I see more and more people finding out about and getting incredibly excited about. So I'm just Really happy that you could join me on the podcast. So thank you so much. So firstly, maybe if we could start, you run the Center for Effective Neuroscience Development in Learning and Education. Did I get that right?

Yes, you did. Yeah.

CANDLE. It's a cool acronym. It's a very cool acronym.

Exactly.

I didn't think of it. I was dancing around it and then my good friend and colleague Doug Connect actually thought of it.

Brilliant. Nice one. So maybe if we could start, because I've heard you speak about how quickly neuroscience has been moving as a field. Um, and then the development of affective neuroscience. And maybe if we could start there just briefly, if you could just say what, what that is and how that's kind of as a distinct branch of neuroscience, and then we'll get into some of the substance of your work, if that's okay.

Yeah, sure. So yeah, the field of affective neuroscience and kind of the related field of social neuroscience, those fields have really come into their own over, I'd say, the last 2 decades. Affective neuroscience is a little bit older and was really launched with the work mainly of Antonio Anjana Damasio, who I trained with as a postdoc. You know, they noticed cogently, you know, in decades of work as neurologists, that when people suffered brain damage that impacted their affect, their ability to sort of induce and appropriately feel emotions, especially in the social space, that this could happen and would profoundly disturb people's cognition, their ability to use their intellect appropriately in the world in a sensible way, in a moral way, in a way that was advantageous in the long term. And this was a really, really important insight that you could maintain, like, high IQ scores, right? And yet be completely unable to leverage your intellectual capacities in the world because your emotion was not functioning well. So Antonio wrote a very famous classic book now that came out, I think, in 1995 or something in its first iteration that he called Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, in which he basically argued that thinking and feeling are actually deeply intertwined with one another and that cognition is not sort of messed up by or impacted by emotion, that cognition and emotion are actually deeply intertwined with one another. And that they, emotion is kind of the way I described it in the first paper that I wrote with Antonio, where I was trying to sort of figure out what this would mean for education in that 2007 paper called "We Feel Therefore We Learn," something like that. That emotion is like the glass shelves underneath the stemware, right? It's really the support for cognition. And it's the thing that drives cognition. And so I, you know, my work since then has really been trying to unpack how it is that our thinking develops and the ways that we develop our thinking in complex social and cultural settings and the dynamic interplay, the interdependence of emotional and cognitive aspects of thinking. In the learning process and in the developmental process.

Yeah. No, amazing. Thank you. And that was one of the things that I've found so interesting was as an educator for me, with a pretty basic understanding of the human brain, let's say, I, you know, it was always that idea that there were kind of separate areas of the brain that were doing separate things. So you had this kind of calm rational part, the cortex or whatever, and the prefrontal cortex as the, as the executive function. And then the, you know, the amygdala hijack, you know, from Daniel Goldman and all of that kind of separate. And I, one of the things I just, again, as it blew my mind, was this idea as you talk about these neural networks and how we repurpose them for different things, right? And how everything is just so interconnected and therefore emotion being a big part of that. I don't want to badly summarize your work.

No, no, I mean, I think you're right. And it's not just educators who have, you know, it's not your fault that you have these misconceptions about how the brain is organized because a whole, you know, a whole era of cognitive science to a degree continues with that notion that the brain is kind of modular and that, you know, there are these interacting, you know, cogs in the machine, so to speak, that are kind of driving and interrupting each other. And I think this conception of the brain and the mind in science really is incorrect and is kind of a cultural artifact of the way in which the science has been conducted. You know, the, the beauty of the scientific method is that we try to disentangle different processes and mechanisms and features and understand them as isolated units, which is an incredibly useful exercise. But it also, like all methods for thinking about things, it also limits what you're able to see and understand. And I think that the history of cognitive science and learning sciences now today really still carry on this tradition, and I think to much detriment, is that they, they really try to isolate different capacities, which of course capacities can be studied in isolation, but that doesn't mean that the rest of those capacities aren't there to shore it up. I mean, it's like if you're studying, you know, somebody breaks their, their left ankle and then you start studying their right leg to try to figure out what right legs do. Right? In isolation, you're like, well, that's not the normal way that a leg would fully function.

Right?

Normally there'd be another leg there, sort of dynamically balancing back and forth and all this stuff. You know, so you're seeing a very warped view, a very narrow, context-specific view of some capacity or mechanism. And the problem with that, of course, is that these, these mechanisms that are scientifically sort of isolatable methodologically, we can pull them out and shape our analyses such that we study them specifically, but then that is then translated into the public as these things are separate from each other in the human. And this is a problem I've talked a lot about. I'm using another analogy from another friend, David Daniel, right, who talks about this as being like a Frankenstein, right? So I've been calling this solving the Frankenstein problem. How do teachers and scientists for that matter, but for this audience, how do teachers kind of stitch back together all the scientific information about different mechanisms or capacities?

Yeah, exactly.

Not at all distinct from each other in the human. They're completely intertwined and interdependent. They're leveraging the same neural systems. And so, you know, the way that you experience emotion and relationships is centrally invoking and engaging the same brain system that is also managing physiological stress and that senses pain and that manages your attention networks, right? So like, what does this mean for the deep interdependence developmentally of academic skills and processes, social cultural skills and processes, and emotional skills and processes, and physiological regulatory and survival processes? It means that they are absolutely being managed by the same systems. So we really need to understand how developmentally they're interdependent, how they're influencing and dynamically growing each other, and how we can leverage those synergies in the design of educational environments that really support healthy scholarly, personally, you know, personal cultural growth in a coordinated way rather than in a kind of layered or modular way, which is really suboptimal.

Absolutely. And I think I had the great pleasure of talking to Dan Willingham yesterday. So it's been a hell of a week for me. I get Dan Willingham yesterday and you today. I mean, this is like, I'm on a roll. But it was, I mean, brilliant conversation, lovely guy, and totally insightful in many ways. But I think what's interesting is that a lot of the research that makes its way into the classroom, and he's been brilliant at translating a lot of that research. That's what he's really known for. He translates. He's amazing. Absolutely amazing at it and very nuanced and very careful about what he says in terms of recommendations in the complex environment of a classroom, which I totally appreciate. But I think in general, the focus of research applied in the classroom has been primarily cognitive. Absolutely.

I think that's a major problem. And in a way it's kind of not Dan's fault because he is digesting the research that's available and he's doing that incredibly skillfully. But the problem is that the researchers themselves are not understanding the nature of human development, the deeply cultural and social and situated contextualized dynamics that are absolutely the central organizing functions of a human organism in a cultural space, which schools and communities are. And so, you know, I think, and there is now, I should say, a much greater attention to the need for this kind of what I'm calling trans- disciplinarian science, where we really start to think about in the complex space of real human development in the world, what are the dynamic interactions among these mechanisms and how can we really shape our scientific theories and our educational theories and applications such that they appreciate and start to integrate these different mechanisms that have been studied in isolation, but that are actually never isolated from the human context in which they happen.

Amazing. Can I then just, if we can get into some specifics, you know, from your research, I think that might help people to understand it as well, a little bit more, just thinking in practical terms. Firstly, I'd love to ask you about experience and, you know, this idea that often we ask students to come in and kind of leave their experience at the door and come in and just learn whatever the subject is that they're, they're in at that moment for that 45 minutes and then move on, but their experience is somehow irrelevant to that experience of learning maths or science or whatever. And your really interesting work about community violence and the work there about maybe if you could say something about why is it not possible actually, even if we wanted to, why is it not possible to leave our experience at the classroom door when we invite kids into it?

You know, I mean, I really think that for those who have studied some developmental theory that, you know, Vygotsky, a famous psychologist from like a century ago, really presciently described this phenomenon, though he didn't have the data yet. Yeah. I mean, he, he talked about human learning and growth and development as being, first of all, very deeply driven by the person, but also very fundamentally shaped by the interactions the person is engaging with and the subjective meaning that the person is making of those interactions. And I think that all learning happens this way. And, you know, certain branches of progressive education theory and things like that appreciate this, though they don't have data to back it up, right? We didn't understand it. We're only beginning to start to scratch the surface of understanding now why this is biologically true, you know, but anthropologists, for example, and evolutionary biologists have been describing very interesting phenomena about the ways that our genetic control kind of has been eroding with evolution, right? For example, so that, you know, humans' amazing intellectual potential appears to derive not from the specificity of our genes in, you know, sort of growing brain brains that can do calculus and write poetry, right? And do political science. But instead that our genes have been kind of losing this kind of specific control and determinism over time so that we are outsourcing the organization of our brains and minds into the cultural world. And when we do that, it makes us amazingly plastic, amazingly potentiated, because now humans can have minds that fit in any kind of human society, right? But it also is a major responsibility for education and for community growth and development and for families, because it means that the ways in which a young person— and throughout the lifespan, right? It's particularly pronounced in young people, but it is true throughout the lifespan, all the way into old age— that the ways in which we subjectively experience for ourselves, the ways in which we conjure awareness of the processes of thinking, right, the ways in which we implicitly engage in patterns and dispositions of thinking and of feeling and of socially relating and of making sense and meaning out of the things that we witness and the things that happen and that we notice. These processes are fundamental drivers of our brain development, and they are also deeply tied to our physiological health and growth and development. And there's now abundant evidence from across scientific fields that this is the case. And in learning sciences and cognitive sciences, especially when we're trying to think about what does this mean for educational environments and for children, we really need to start to attend to these much more dynamic, synergistic, interdependent cultural ways of growing because they really do physically shape our brains and directly impact our physical health, our longevity, the ways in which our immune system functions, the ways in which our stress system functions, our digestion system functions, right? We are deeply tied to our subjective experiences of the cultural and social world, which of course, as humans, means that we have the capacity to engage with ideas, to engage with meaning-making around these experiences and not simply to just be in them and to react in a kind of patterned way or habitual way, the ways that, you know, other animals do. We actually can extract broad transcendent understanding that moves beyond the situation we're currently in and thinks about, you know, what it means, whether we think it's good you know, how we understand it in historical context, what it means for possible alternative futures, right? Those kinds of thought processes, what our data are actually showing, which is absolutely like jaw-dropping, like I still can't believe these findings come out the way they do, is that, for example, when we interview teenagers, you know, middle teens, 14, 15, 16 years old, about their understandings of complex scenarios in the world, right? We just showed them, you know, videos, like documentaries that we've put together of real teenagers from around the world to really extraordinary extraordinary situations and ask them how they feel, right? Or also it comes out when we ask them about their own families, about their own communities, about their own hopes and dreams, how they understand complex issues in their own neighborhoods, that the dispositions of mind that these teenagers bring to that process above and beyond IQ. Yeah. Right. So this is not just smarter kids do better. This is kids who leverage their intelligence to become curious, to build deeper meaning, to try to understand why, right? To try to take alternate perspectives and interrelate those perspectives, to try to appreciate the broader dynamics of a situation. When kids do that, we can predict, no matter their family's socioeconomic status, no matter their parents' education level, no matter their IQ, we can predict how their brain is going to grow over the subsequent 2 years. In other words, comparing a youth to themselves 2 years ago.

Yeah.

Right? We can predict how they're going to have grown their brain after 2 years depending on the degree to which they're inclined to engage with these deeper, curious, and dispositional ways of thinking about the bigger meaning. And when they do that, the degree to which they grow their brain over time above and beyond IQ. So it's like the extra growth that you're not just— that isn't easy for you based on, quote unquote, the amount of intelligence capacity you have. If you're really dispositionally engaging with hard thinking, whatever that is to you, that then grows your brain. And then that brain growth, not the state of your brain, not what kind of brain you have, but how much you've grown over that 2-year interval between the scans, that predicts how happy you are as a young adult. How much you like yourself, how much you like your close relationships, how much you feel like the opportunities you have at school or at work, whatever you're doing as a young adult, are just what you always dreamed of for yourself. How much young people tell us that they have sort of a strong sense of who they are and what they believe in and what they stand for and purpose as compared to endorsing statements like, I don't really know what I think. I just kind of follow what everybody else thinks is right. And I don't really have any opinions. I don't I don't really know, you know why I'm here, right? Which we know is really not good for democracies. It's also not good for your own mental health and wellbeing to be this way. So it really is striking that the ways young people are sort of disposed to engage curiously with making broader meaning about the world grows them over time, both psychologically and neurologically. And then when you go back and look at, well, how do our traditional school, opportunities support young people engaging dispositionally with such meaning-making, you see, you know, starkly that it's not just that most, most schooling does not really adequately support this, it directly punishes it. We do not want our young people to think outside the box, to try different dispositional ways of understanding things, to engage in deep, emotionally poignant debate with each other and with evidence around really fundamentally hairy problems. We just want them to give us the right answer to get the work done by the date we told them to do it. And like, that's it, right?

Finish the task.

Yeah. We really undermine any other kind of achievement. And yet it's those dispositional ways of knowing, not what you know, but how you think, that appears to grow your brain over time.

Huge. Yeah, I mean, it's such a powerful, like, just that as a headline. I mean, but I know there's so much depth and nuance to it, but it's just an amazing thing. And that's what people are getting so excited about. I definitely, I see that in the people I speak to. But if I could just go back just a small step, because I thought that there's the experience piece, but then there's this, which you moved on to, this meaning-making, which is just, I think it's so interesting. But that idea about the concrete meaning, you know, because those are important, right? Very important.

We need all of this. Yeah, it's not a—

we're not saying it's not important, but we're also what we're also saying, as you, you were just articulating, that disposition around abstract or transcendent meaning-making is the thing that we don't generally as much kind of value in schools and encourage. So maybe could you say just a little bit about what's the interaction between the concrete and the abstract meaning-making?

Yeah, yeah. So let me just give you a sense of what those mean. So like, for example, it was operationalized in this experiment in the what we show the documentary films. Like we think this is happening in academic subjects. We think it's happening in mathematical understanding and scientific understanding, and we are actively studying that. But like, just so you can get an intuitive sense. So a teenager might, when I show them the video of this girl in Pakistan in 2012 who gets shot in the head by this group called the Taliban. Do you know who they are? Right. Let me explain what was going on. And she continues to go to school anyway and is outspoken about it. And they actually single her out and shoot her and attempt to kill her as a way to try to intimidate other girls from going to school and other families from sending their girls. You know, here's a video of her being interviewed about, you know, what she thinks and believes. And then, you know, we just ask the kids on videotape, right? So we know we have what they say. You know, how does this person's story make you feel? Stop, right? They can say whatever they want. And so there are kind of two big categories of responses, and kids give both. That is what's very key, okay? And you ought to give both, right? They are both very useful categories of responses, but they have different affordances neurologically, mentally, psychosocially, and in terms of academic achievement. Kids can say things, and should, like, "Oh my gosh, that is just horrible. I'm horrified. Poor her. I feel terrible for her. I wish I could help her. Like, I hope she makes it, right, and keeps going. She shouldn't stop." Okay. Which is a very context-dependent response. It's empathic. It's engaged with that person's story specifically. And what we find is that that's what we're calling a more concrete context-dependent kind of response. And what we find is that when kids do that a lot, the more they do that, the more they are activating executive control networks in the brain when they are engaging in the stories across the whole 2-hour experiment. Right. So they're, they're more sort of regulated in the here and now they're watching what's going on and they're reacting. To that. And that is associated with having more and better friendships, appreciating diversity among your group of friends, things like that. You know, very, very useful things. The child could also, that teenager could also then say, but you know, I never thought about this before, but you know, I go to school every day with my friends and I didn't know that some people don't get to do that. Like, you know, I'm grumpy about it sometimes, but I didn't realize that not everybody can, you know, what? That's not right. Everybody should be able to go to school. Education should be a human right. I wonder if I should be leveraging my opportunities better. I should be trying harder so that maybe I could do something about this for other kids around the world who don't have the privileges I do, right? That kind of like education is a human right and self-examination, and then wondering what you could do about it in the future and trying to understand the big systems level situation that is not about this girl It's about what this girl has taught you about what's possible or true in the world. Kids show us that, and we're calling that quote unquote abstract meaning making, transcendent. You're transcending the context to think about the bigger systems level implications in a deep way. When kids tell us that, that is involved with different networks in the brain, more episodic memory networks, networks in the brain that are involved in daydreaming and sort of thinking outside the here and now, but that are also deeply involved in personal memories of experiences, storytelling, so to speak, about who you are and why things are, as compared to just semantic or factual memory, right, about, you know, what happened, which you also need that, but it's not enough, right? Or procedural memory about, you know, what's going on or how you would do something, right? Which is, you also need, but again, it's not enough, right? So when kids transcend just semantic, factual memory and procedural memory for how to do things and what to know, which is what, by the way, learning science is all focused on, those two kinds of memory, right? That's what all the stuff on quote-unquote memory is about in learning science, right? And it's important, but then for what, right? You also need to build these dispositional, you know, sort of capacities for engaging with leveraging those procedural and semantic memories in the service of broader knowledge building, of sense-making, of ethical deliberation, of transcendent sort of wondering and curiosity about, you know, what does this all mean? And when kids do that, it's that that specifically grows their brain over time. It's the tendency to move into that transcendent mode of thinking. And what's so striking about these findings is that not only is this kind of transcendent thinking serving that young person well in terms of helping them be resilient and build purpose and a goal, right, at the time, it also is the thing that is systematically pushing them to examine and re-examine their own situated self in the world, their own role in the systems that exist, their own potential, which is another way of saying identity, life purpose, right, and values. So we're really showing, I think, neurologically and psychosocially how it is that our dispositions toward building and deconstructing and reconstructing and questioning and engaging with these broader levels of meaning-making are fundamental capacities that young people leverage, right, in order to grow themselves. And this is really something that our education system underutilizes and in fact oftentimes actively punishes.

Yeah, and as you said, I mean, major implications not only for teenagers and their own learning and growth and development, but also socially for equity and democracy.

It's all tied together. You start to understand why these things would be so interdependent with each other, why self and identity and values and character are so importantly tied to real scholarly and intellectual identity and achievement, not to semantic and procedural memory regurgitation on a test necessarily, right? It's gonna help you there too. You can do fine on that stuff, just chugging along in a kind of very sort of transactional way. You give me this assignment, I give you back the answer. Right? And you can succeed. In fact, that is the most effective way to succeed in much of our modern education system. And that deeply undermines a young person's, you know, sort of proclivities and dispositions to think more broadly about why.

And one thing that I wanted to pick up on was super interesting talking to Dan about story. And he, because he talks about story in relation to memory. And as you were saying about factual and and procedural memory, it tends to be focused around that, but there is a recognition there. There's kind of a meeting point somewhere that narrative structure and story is important. But I think what I hear from you is that you're just going into a whole nother world of implications.

Yes, I think it's just, there's an interest in it right now. There's an awareness that maybe this matters and it's coming a lot from the push for equity and diversity and inclusion. It's coming a lot from the recognition that certain cultural ways of thinking and being are fundamentally privileged in our traditional education system. And as people from other kinds of cultural and social backgrounds are starting to have a voice in this space, they're really pushing back on that notion. And out of this tension arises this new appreciation that, wait a minute, maybe stories and identities really matter. But we, we have not as a field yet really understood fully why that is the case. Yeah. In the learning and the development process. And I think our work is just beginning to shine a flashlight into the foggy dark on that question.

Yeah, but it's a major question, isn't it? And then, you know, it is, it's just, it's fascinating. And the other thing that, as I said to you, I work a lot with international schools and particularly with the International Baccalaureate, the IB, and I love hearing what you're talking about because particularly with the Middle Years Programme there, which is a concept-based curriculum and it's, you know, putting everything into global context, a lot of interdisciplinarity, it's absolutely about asking students to bring in that abstract meaning-making and that transcendent meaning. So, you know, it is there, but I hear absolutely what you're saying, that a lot of the systems around the world are still, and I'd heard you say it this way, which I also really like, it's kind of a push system versus a pull.

As compared to a pull system, right? Exactly. Yeah. That I just have to credit all my brilliant colleagues who think of these metaphors. That I heard from Joseph South.

Good. And I've actually heard other people say the same thing, and because I do some work with Agile and it's that idea of a pull system. But that is definitely, as you say, that kind of transactional, I'm here, I'm going to deliver you some content and you're going to translate, we're going to transact.

You're going to hold your end of the bargain, right? So then all of the learning science is about how do I help you to most effectively memorize this?

Exactly.

I've already curated for you, that I've already explained to you, that I've already decided matters for you, and now your job is to recall it on cue.

Yeah.

And where does the autonomy piece fit into that? Because, you know, in the pull system there's much more emphasis on the student and then bringing themselves to it, but also that ability to regulate and, you know, navigate the process themselves. And there's definitely a lot of discussion about how much structure and guidance an educator should give a student, you know, that kind of idea of guided inquiry, or, you know, at the other extreme, kind of real explicit instruction where they don't have any autonomy. And then the other end full kind of discovery learning where they're just kind of figuring out themselves, pushing buttons on a computer to see what happens, right? Yeah, yeah.

I mean, you know, it— and this really speaks to the need for us to really think hard as educators about our goals, and not just our goals overall in the grand scheme of the education system, which I think we really need to rethink what— you know, although the IB is working in this direction, right? But You know, what does it actually mean to be an educated person? Right? What's the range of ways that can manifest in cultural contexts and developmental contexts and with individual differences? Right? So, so that's one thing, but this doesn't, this isn't code speak for anything goes, right? There are more and less systematic, more and less thoughtful, more and less nuanced ways of engaging with complex information and problems. And the job of education is to systematically orchestrate contexts in which youth are actively engaging in this kind of constructive inquiry in such a way that they're very likely to, first of all, experience it as construction themselves, right? That doesn't mean you don't give them the stuff they need, but it means you set it up so that it feels to them like they're inventing it. Right? Because that is what makes the human mind really feel like this is relevant. Okay? Empowered. And that's the essence of autonomy, really. Right?

Yeah.

And then you also need to really deeply understand the aim of whatever it is that you're exposing your kids to. Right? If you want— if the aim is to help them think like scientists, but also to know something about photosynthesis and trees or something, right? Then you need to think about at what points, and this is a dynamic judgment call, that the students are also being empowered to engage with the information seeking so that the teacher can respond and provide information when it's needed, right? You're setting them up to need it. And then it's a kind of dynamic tightrope walk. You're really watching to figure out how can I support these students or this student in a productive inquiry that sort of satisfies between them discovering and finding and me, you know, making the evidence available or exposing them to the tools that would help them discover it for themselves. So it's really kind of, you know, it's a judgment call. It's an art form. It's something that takes an amazing amount of skill, amazing amount of thoughtfulness on the part of the adults in the system. And it's something that really, really requires that teachers are truly experts in human development, not just in their content area, you know, math, physics, whatever, but in how young people develop themselves as thinkers and as citizens. And those capacities for development, those process-oriented approaches to building out dispositions of mind and heart in intellectual contexts. That's what good education focuses on.

Yeah, that's amazing. And I think that focus on dispositional outcomes is so important because one of the things I, again, I spoke to Dan about was that getting to the deep structure of things in terms of being able to make meaning on that kind of broader, deeper level, you know, the root to that seemed to be from his mind, from a cognitive science perspective, is through just lots of practice of knowledge, you know, the concrete, right? In order to go, you got so kind of good at the concrete stuff that in the end you then see the deep structure of a discipline, et cetera. And then you become experienced and then towards expert so that you can then make abstractions. You can see kind of the more abstract patterns, but by focusing on dispositions, it seems to shift the conversation a bit away from the concrete. I don't know. Is that a fair summary?

I think so. Yeah, I do think so. I mean, I think there are, Honestly, I think there are rare occasions with very specific features where people are very clear on why they're there and what it is they need to acquire skill at before they can get out of here. You know, I, I now understand why we're doing these surgeries. I understand, you know, how to engage with patients. I understand this. Now just teach me how do I do an appendectomy appropriate, like over and over and over. I need to learn how to tie this knot, right? But you, you come to it with this really deep need for the information. Yeah. As compared to, let me just make you practice tying knots 10,000 times until, and then we'll worry about how you do surgeries and why you do surgeries and what they actually do for health. Right. You know, I'm making a silly example.

Yeah.

I really think we have it backwards. And I think the reason we have it backwards, though I adore Dan, don't get me wrong. I think the reason we have it backwards is because that is how the science has approached it. Right? We have this, you know, famous notion that people who are extremely good at something practice for 10,000 hours and all that stuff, which makes you think that in order to be good at something, right, in order to understand why you're doing it or to have an appreciation of it, you first have to have done 10,000 hours. But that's not necessarily the case. People are actively engaging all the time with the bigger picture and what we think neurologically actually is going on. But this is a hypothesis. I mean, this is something we're actively testing is that By orchestrating environments in which young people are inclined or likely to engage with concrete skills and information, and then also to decide by themselves to notice and pull back and reflect on why and how, and then to reengage themselves and engage with the, with the dig in and go task, and then step back again. By building environments where kids are managing themselves in that dig in, step back and reflect, dig in and go, step back and reflect kind of thing. What we think is happening is that the neural system, literally the neural network that is involved in that toggling of attention into an outward sort of task-oriented focus and then into an inward sort of transcendent meaning-making, like let me connect this to other things I've seen in the world, other things relevant to what else do I know here, how else could this work kind of, you know, thing. When you are toggling between those brain states, the pivot, so to speak, in terms of the networking is literally the piece of cortex, right, that is also feeling and regulating the physiological state of stress and arousal in your body. And so what we think is that by moving yourself back and forth, not somebody else telling you now it's time to reflect, now it's— now we're taking 5 minutes, now it's time to work, now dig in.. But by moving yourself back and forth and sort of engaging that system actively, we think it kind of produces this tickling up of that physiological system that feels the internal body itself. And the psychological residual of that is that you come to experience this work as personally relevant.

Wow. Amazing. This is, this is cool stuff. Thank you so much.

That's a very different way of thinking about relevance. You know, that doesn't mean relevance is, you know, we typically think of relevance as having direct instrumental applicability in your daily life, but that's not actually what we experience as relevant. It's about the experience. And what do we think conjures that experience psychologically and neurobiologically? We think it's moving yourself from dig in to reflect to dig in to reflect.

Amazing.

Right. And so you can find things relevant that they feel relevant when they're like, You know, fractions, because you're trying to understand infinity, right? In the case of this Haitian immigrant, right? It was in that little paper we wrote for Ed Leadership. He's like, it became, it became relevant to my life. And we're like, wait, wait, hold on. Fractions is relevant to your life as a new immigrant at age 18, who's never been in a math class before? Well, how's that? Right? And, and we saw that over and over again in those kids' interviews, that relevance comes out of their active engagement. With trying to make sense out of the little things they notice and the things that they're doing.

Amazing. Yeah. Brilliant. And that paper just to— that you just referenced, I mean, I would recommend anybody, everybody reads that because it's just a brilliant synopsis of everything we've been talking about and I love it. But also just to finish with, we've got Doug is the co-author on that, right? And he's part of the New York Performance Assessment Consortium, right?

Yeah. So he was, he taught and he helped found one of those schools. Yeah. He's been really involved, but right now he's, he's at the Bank Street College of Education and is basically running all of their—

It was just, just to kind of finish on something, let's say optimistic and practical in the sense that there are some things going on.

Yeah, deeply. Yes. There is a lot of really promising work. The question is how do we actually start to study that work so that we can really lift up what it is about it that is so instrumental in youth's growth? And then also the question is, you know, how do we help schools that are kind of buckling down on the traditional didactic sort of approach appreciate why that is in the short term producing the quote-unquote learning outcomes that you have decided matter, but in the long term may be directly undermining your proclivities toward learning, their achievement, and their scholarly and intellectual identity and their well-being.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, the whole— it's the whole thing, right? Exactly. Oh, thank you, Mary Helen. That is— I mean, it's amazing, and I'm just so happy to have— to be able to speak to you and then then can hopefully spread the word a bit more widely that more people can access your research.

So yeah, yeah, so follow us. You can follow us on social media, the CANDLE stuff. I don't really do social media, but I have people do it for me.

That's good.

So you can, you can, you can access.

No, I'll link to it all in the show notes. But thank you again, huge privilege to speak to you.

Thank you.

All the best.

Thank you, Mariela.

Bye.

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