A thrilling crush, excruciating embarrassment or fervent dedication to a cause—adolescence can mean all of these things. For me, it involved a burning curiosity about the natural world, which led one time to my grandmother discovering a bag of cow eyeballs in the fridge. My dad had helped me collect them at a slaughterhouse for dissection.
I didn’t mean to upset anyone; I just wanted to figure out how sight works. Like others my age, I was also driven to understand why things are the way they are and how they could or should be different. A while after my eyeball phase, I declared myself a humanist and took to wearing a four-inch peace sign around my neck. My sister and I began writing and performing (admittedly somewhat histrionic) folk songs through which we attempted to express our discontent with various global, local and historical injustices.
As a teen, I was swimming in big ocean waves, so to speak—watching, listening, questioning and grappling to make sense of all the complex cultural and emotional information coming my way. Who are we humans, anyway, and who am I? Now, 35 years later, I am still fascinated by these questions and by the ways in which adolescents struggle to make sense of what they witness and experience.
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Take these responses from teens in urban Los Angeles to my asking them why they think some people in their neighborhood commit violent crimes:
“They have, like, a lot of emotions. They’re really mad, so they just kill somebody. Like, overly aggressive.”
“Everyone has a history. Like, everybody has an action or choice or some sort of history—some sort of thing happened to them that affects how they act in the future.”
The difference between the quotes is subtle but critical in its implications for brain development. The first one describes the proximal reason for a crime and represents the kind of focused thinking people need to keep themselves safe and to respond appropriately to shifting circumstances. But the second reveals awareness of the broader historical, cultural or social context in which individuals do the things they do.
Every adolescent I have worked with, irrespective of IQ score or social or economic background, has the capacity for such mental time travel. By listening closely to teenagers’ reflections and observing their brain activations as they lay in a neuroimaging scanner, my colleagues and I discovered that thinking that ranges flexibly from the here and now, as in the first quote, to the past, the future and everywhere else, as in the second, seems to literally build their brains. During such wide-ranging, emotionally powerful, reflective thinking—which we call transcendent because it soars beyond the moment—key brain networks activated and deactivated in complex, dynamic patterns, which, our data indicated, grew and strengthened their connections.
This emerging capacity to muse in abstract ways enables teenagers to understand themselves, their family, friends and society at large and to imagine what their own place in the world might be. Over time such transcendent thinking constructs resilience to adversity and places young people on a path to future satisfaction with life, work and relationships. Our research helps to explain why adolescents can be among society’s most visionary and idealistic citizens (and, alternatively, some of its most self-absorbed) and shows that to truly empower their growth, parents, schools and communities need to focus less on what kids know and more on how they think.
In the mid-2000s, when I started studying neuroscience, many researchers thought of adolescence in terms of its deficits. Neuroimaging studies were establishing that although the brain’s centers for automatic emotive reactions, such as the amygdala, develop early, the prefrontal cortex, involved in measured and rational thought, is not mature until a person is in more like their mid-20s. Such findings persuaded neuroscientists such as BJ Casey of Columbia University to argue that adolescents are not only less knowledgeable than adults but also less emotionally stable and not fully responsible for their actions. “A skeetering top, nearly gyrating out of control,” is how neuroscientist Robert M. Sapolsky of Stanford University described the teen brain in his 2017 book, Behave. In this view, adolescents’ transformation into mature adults requires not only amassing knowledge and skills but also developing self-control to curb their appetite for risk and to rein in their strong emotions and sensitivities.
That teenagers’ passions are also crucial to their learning was clear to me even as a 23-year-old science teacher in a public junior-senior high school south of Boston. Being interested not only in nature but also in how nature produces culture, I had by then lived with families in France, Russia, Ireland and Kenya, imbibing their languages and daily activities. After returning to the U.S., I had majored in French literature in college while taking every science course I could. I also loved building things, but when a cut in my hand meant giving up my postgraduate job as an apprentice carpenter, I somehow convinced the Massachusetts Board of Education to give me a chance at teaching seventh-grade science.
The public school I taught in was immensely diverse, with 81 languages spoken among the students. Many were first-generation immigrants and refugees, who landed in my class like deer in headlights. The mostly 13-year-olds were intensely curious about the differences in their appearance and customs.
One time, after a lesson on human evolution in which I’d shown a video depicting how early East African hominids might have lived, a Black girl I will call Marila put up her hand. Marila was a strong student, but she was clearly nervous, and I could see she was being egged on by her classmates to ask her question: “Ms. Immordino, why is it that when we’re studying human evolution, they always show these creatures in Africa with dark skin? Why do they always look like Black people?”
“Because they live on the equator,” I responded. “The sun is very strong there. Your skin would burn and you’d get skin cancer if you didn’t have a lot of melanin to protect you.”
There was a stunned silence. That silence evolved into a fervent class discussion that went on for months. The students were using the science they learned in the classroom to figure out who they were in the world. That got me hooked. Why had they interpreted the lesson in such a personal, emotional way? And why, long after the classroom turbulence had settled, did so many of my students suddenly seem to take a new interest in science?
Reflective, emotionally powerful thinking—which we call transcendent—may literally build brains.
I began to study developmental cognitive neuroscience at night school and eventually enrolled in graduate school at Harvard University in 1997. As early as the 1930s, I learned, naturalist-turned-psychologist Jean Piaget had observed that at about 11 or 12 years of age, children begin to think abstractly about issues such as morality and to ponder complex scenarios. Psychologist Erik Erikson noted two decades later that adolescents reflect on their values and beliefs to figure out who they are and how they fit in with everyone else. These and a succession of other scholars, such as Richard Lerner of Tufts University, William Damon of Stanford and Kurt W. Fischer of Harvard, characterized adolescence as a period of emerging capacities for abstract thinking that, together with heightened social sensitivity and a propensity for strong emotion, enable teenagers to infer overarching principles or hidden personal lessons from specific experiences or events. Adolescents seem almost compelled to look for these connections and their deeper meaning, as I had seen in my Boston classroom.
After graduating in 2005, I had the immense good fortune to begin a postdoctoral fellowship supervised by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, who had just moved to the University of Southern California with his colleague and spouse, Hanna Damasio. Through decades of clinical research the Damasios had proposed something radical for the time: emotions, rather than interfering with clear-headed thinking, drive clear-headed thinking—thinking that is rational, responsive to circumstances and morally aware.
One patient known as EVR demonstrated this insight particularly well. He’d been a smart and successful businessman, happily married and raising a family. After he had surgery for a brain tumor, however, things changed. The operation involved removing parts of the lower surface of his brain’s frontal lobes, just above and behind his eyes. When EVR returned to work, he started making shortsighted business decisions—which resulted in predictable bankruptcy. He began offending those he loved most and seemed callous about their pain, apparently incapable of remorse or embarrassment. EVR divorced his wife, remarried and quickly divorced again.
Through exquisitely thoughtful studies, the Damasios and their colleagues demonstrated that although EVR’s IQ continued to test very high after the surgery, his brain had a deficit that was preventing him from using his intelligence ethically or advantageously. He acted in antisocial ways and made decisions that to any healthy person would seem irrational. And he was strikingly unable to learn from his mistakes. EVR knew the right things and had the necessary memories to guide him, but he was unable to care about the implications of his decisions. The Damasios came to understand that EVR’s emotions were not properly informing his planning and cognition, and his social relationships suffered for it.
On my first day at USC, Antonio came to my office. “I’d like to study social emotions,” I recall him saying as we sipped Italian espresso. “I want to understand how the brain feels emotions like compassion, admiration for virtue, and contempt—emotions that form the basis of human morality, creativity, culture and the arts. Emotions that are the hallmark of acculturation and education. No one has yet done this. Are you interested?”
That day marked the start of a long journey—one that would integrate the insights I had gained from my adolescent pursuits, my travels, my seventh graders, my Harvard professors, the Damasios and other colleagues, and, eventually, my own students and my work with them. It would lead me to a new way of studying adolescent thinking.
At that time, advances in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which maps blood flow in the brain, were enabling neuroscientists to track which regions activate and deactivate during different states of mind. It was becoming possible to detect emotions’ traces in the brain—not only the signs of basic emotions, like fear of heights or disgust over spoiled food, but also those of “social” emotions, which pertain to oneself, to cultural ideas and artifacts, and to the social world.
An early surprise from the fMRI studies was that even when someone rested idly in the scanner, key regions of their brain were activating in a coordinated way. Some of these areas are among the body’s most metabolically expensive tissues, sucking up more glucose and oxygen than even muscle tissue. Why would such labor- intensive regions be activated during rest? The answer, it turns out, is that free-form, reflective thinking is extraordinarily important.
In 2001 neuroscientist Marcus E. Raichle of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and his colleagues described the default mode network (DMN), a set of regions mainly in the core of the brain that we now know are key to one’s sense of self. The DMN is active when someone is daydreaming, recalling a meaningful incident from the past or trying to comprehend a complex issue. Many studies since have shown that the DMN also helps us to feel compassion, gratitude, admiration or awe and to perform feats of imagination or creativity. When we aren’t focusing on the outside world, we aren’t idle after all—we are conjuring stories, beliefs and imagined futures, traveling through time and possibilities to invent ideas and derive meaning from our experiences.
The DMN quiets down during focused, goal-driven activities such as filling out a tax form or catching a ball. That’s when the executive control network (ECN) comes online to keep you on task and attentive. In the late 2000s William W. Seeley of the University of California, San Francisco, Lucina Uddin of the University of California, Los Angeles, and others identified a third network, the salience network (SN). It links regions that sense internal body states and tells you, for instance, when you have a stomachache. The SN is also involved in the kind of arousal you might experience when you see a snake in your path, notice that a song you like is playing or realize you’ve made an error in the math problem you’re solving.
After some trial and error, I settled on a remarkably simple experimental paradigm. We shared short documentary-style stories with participants, first in a private interview and then again while they lay in the fMRI scanner. By comparing individuals’ psychological responses when discussing their feelings with the neural activity patterns they showed in the scanner, we began linking people’s feelings and ways of thinking about the world to underlying neurobiological mechanisms. Our first paper, published in 2009, reported something quite profound.
When participants told us from within the scanner that they felt deeply moved by the real-life stories we were sharing with them, we saw activation in the brain stem, which operates far below conscious awareness and is necessary for consciousness and physiological mechanisms of survival such as your heart rate. We also saw excitation in the insulae, regions of the SN that sense internal bodily signals, like when your heart is pounding from exercise, love or fear, and in the anterior cingulate cortex, a hub of brain connectivity important for emotion, motivation and learning. And we saw activation in the DMN’s posteromedial cortices—extensive regions in the middle of the back of the head that relate to states of consciousness, such as when someone passes from light to deep anesthesia.
In sum, we demonstrated what the Damasios and others had previously hypothesized: social emotions such as admiration and compassion—which require complex inferences about others’ experiences, intentions, beliefs, values, stories, histories and imagined futures—recruit many of the same brain systems that keep us alive. The SN not only senses bodily signals, it is also important for feelings of all kinds, including feelings of personal agency. It makes whatever you are thinking about seem relevant, pleasing, beautiful, painful, repulsive, interesting or urgent. It gives you a jolt when you notice something you care about. And it contributes to decision-making and cognition—weighing the relevance and urgency of information to prompt shifts between different modes of thinking.
We now know the hormonal surge associated with puberty not only escalates emotions, imbuing ideas and encounters with deep meaning, but also launches a critical period of malleability in brain networks, including the DMN, ECN and SN. Teenagers respond powerfully to social and other cues, which drive key networks to reorganize in response to experiences. This protracted period of brain development enables us to adapt effectively to a staggering diversity of physical and social environments—from the equator to the Arctic and from hunter-gatherer bands to cities of millions. It is essential to being human.
Over years of experiments and theorizing, I went on to probe how complex social emotions work in the brain, eventually launching my own lab in 2014. Through a series of studies in Beijing and Los Angeles, my student Xaio-Fei Yang (no relation) and I documented how culture influences the brain processes by which people experience social emotions, such as admiration and compassion. With Darby Saxbe, then a postdoc, we showed that individuals vary in their brain responses when feeling social emotions and that their ways of talking in an interview could predict these styles of neural processing.
Working with local teenagers and a succession of brilliant undergraduates made me wonder how the messy brew of hormones and new capacities for social and emotional abstract thinking might come together in the brains of adolescents. That emotional processing varies across individuals and is shaped by culture, as we had shown, suggested that individuals at least partially learn how to have complex emotional experiences—and that we could capture this learning with interviews paired with fMRI imaging. With my student Rebecca Gotlieb, Yang and others, I eventually launched an ambitious project to look at how teens’ ways of making meaning are related to brain mechanisms—and how these thought patterns might drive changes to their brains over time.
Adolescents’ transcendent thinking may help key brain networks come to communicate more efficiently.
In 2012 my team recruited 65 students between ages 14 and 18 from public high schools serving diverse and low-income urban communities in Los Angeles for a long-running study of thinking and brain development. These youths, we reasoned, were particularly likely to be facing complex challenges and may have been uniquely placed to notice the intricacies of their social milieu. We showed them videos of true stories about teenagers from all over the world and interviewed them about their responses. We also gave the adolescents three types of brain scans later that day and again two years later, following up with online questionnaires and phone conversations over the next three years as most of them entered their early 20s.
All the adolescents talked at least a bit about the bigger picture—the lessons they took from a story, especially if it felt poignant. For example, I showed Isela, a participating teen, a video of Malala Yousafzai filmed when she was a 12-year-old in Pakistan determined to continue studying despite the Taliban having forbidden it. I asked Isela how it made her feel. She responded:
“Um, this story makes me feel upset—how she wants to be a doctor and continue on with her education, but it makes her sad … knowing her journey would be very difficult.”
I nodded, and after pausing for a few moments, Isela went on:
“And it’s crazy how it’s that powerful…. I mean… it makes me think about my own journey in education and how I want to go to college and hopefully be a scientist someday. And even more, I guess what really hits me is how not everyone is able to get this chance, to go forward with their life and get an education or do what they want to do with their life. I mean, it’s not right.”
Again, Isela stopped to think. Her gaze wandered from the image of Malala on the computer screen in front of her to the tree outside the window by my desk. Then she turned back to me and continued:
“Ah, I guess when I think more, yeah, it makes me feel upset that, um, others live in certain parts of the world where they don’t want people to learn and they are trying to, like, hold them back. But then, uh, her story, like, inspires me to work harder so that, uh, I can prevent those things from happening maybe. Everyone everywhere should have the chance … I mean, all human beings should be able to live free and choose their life future.”
After reacting empathically to the concrete details of Malala’s situation, Isela went beyond these details to consider the personal and ethical implications of the story. All the teens could think transcendently, we found, but some, like Isela, did so far more than others. After the interview, we asked each student to rest in an fMRI scanner for about 10 minutes so we could evaluate the cross talk among their brain networks. We also conducted so-called diffusion tensor imaging, which allowed us to measure changes to the brain’s white matter fiber tracts, the routes by which distant regions of the brain communicate. Finally, we obtained high-definition images of their brain tissues to assess the volume of different regions.
As an analogy, if we were to think of the brain as a country, the fMRI scans measure how lively each city is and how much travel or communication there is between cities; the diffusion tensor imaging evaluates the quality of the roads; and the high-definition structural images assess the quality of each city’s infrastructure. Putting these measures together, we got a consistent picture of brain change over time—and found that this change was predicted by teens’ tendency toward transcendent thinking in the original interview.
The stories we shared with the teens were compelling. To what extent were the adolescents motivated to figure out the deeper meaning of what they had learned? The more they grappled with the bigger questions, we found, the greater the increase in coordination between the ECN and the DMN over the two years between the fMRI scans. This finding suggested that adolescents’ propensity for transcendent thinking might have helped these key networks to communicate more efficiently over time.
In people with mood disorders, the mind may be less able to flexibly shift between different modes of thinking.
As Isela and other teens went about their lives, they would have brought this propensity with them, making the time and effort to think about what they were seeing, feeling and learning and thereby exercising the connections between the networks. Further, more transcendent thinking also meant greater enhancement of the robustness of the fiber tracts connecting the networks of the brain in the two years between the first and the second brain scans.
Also important, in many key regions of the brain, particularly in network hubs in the SN and frontal lobes, we found that more transcendent thinking in the original interview counteracted age-related thinning of the cerebral cortex over time. In a classic 1999 study, Jay Giedd of the University of California, San Diego, and his colleagues discovered this pattern of thinning by comparing brain development in individuals age four to 20. This thinning is thought to reflect increased efficiency of the brain as unused circuits are pruned. Research is now showing the story is more complicated because when the thinning is slowed, it is associated with less stress and higher intelligence. It is interesting that in about half of our teens, transcendent thinking even predicted increases in cortical volume—it apparently caused their brain to grow even more than normal pruning shrank it.
The more teens grappled with the bigger picture and tried to learn larger lessons from the stories, the more they developed their brain over the next two years. Transcendent thinking appears to enhance communication between the DMN and the ECN, to slow the loss of gray matter and to even physically build the brain. This multifaceted brain growth, in turn, predicted greater identity development, measured as the degree to which a teen reported thinking about who they are and what they stand for, as per the original work by Erikson. (In contrast, teens who say they “just hang with the crowd” and “rarely try things on their own” are not likely to have a strong sense of self.) Most significant, these findings had no correlation with the teens’ IQs, which we measured, or with their family’s financial means or parents’ education levels. Nor did they differ by gender or ethnic group.
As young adults, about five years after their first interview and brain scan, youths who had evinced more transcendent thinking and brain growth also reported greater life satisfaction—for example, by saying they liked the person they had become. We had discovered something quite fundamental: a teen’s proclivity to expend effort on deep thinking and meaning making may itself be a source of brain development that supports well-being.
Our findings are also synergistic with recent research in adolescent mental health, which ongoing clinical research is associating with the same networks whose development we found to be supported by transcendent thinking. One study led by Caterina Stamoulis of Harvard University recently reported that adolescents with less robustly connected brain circuits were more vulnerable to the emotional effects of pandemic stressors, for example. Another study using the same large-scale, long-term data, led by Patricia Kuhl of the University of Washington, showed that the stress of the pandemic was associated with increased and earlier thinning of the cortex among teens. The relations between these findings and ours are complex and nuanced, but on the whole they suggest that transcendent thinking promotes patterns of structural growth in the cortex and network connectivity that are associated with resilience.
What may be happening in people with mood disorders is that the mind is less able to flexibly shift between different modes of thinking. (This idea has been the core of child psychiatrist Dan Siegel’s theory of “integration” of the mind for mental health for more than a quarter of a century, and it echoes Vinod Menon’s “triple network” model of brain function in psychiatry, involving the SN, DMN and ECN.) The mind might be so focused on dealing with tasks or threats that it gets stuck in executive-control mode, worrying or working compulsively, which occurs with anxiety, or in default mode, characterized by brooding and being unable to act in a goal-driven way, which marks depression. In contrast, young people who can tap into different brain networks in an organized way, according to what should be salient at that time, may be better able to manage their attention, imagine themselves in others’ situations, and have overall better relationships and quality of life.
When our teen participants were at the lab, we also asked them to report any violent acts they had witnessed or heard about in their community and then interviewed them about their understanding of the causes of and possible solutions to such social problems. Consistent with brain studies of soldiers deployed to war and individuals suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, exposure to violence in our teens was associated with thinning of a key brain region in the SN, the anterior middle cingulate cortex (ACC), which is involved in pain processing, motivation and learning. Hearteningly, however, we also found that teens who reflected more on the broader historical, cultural or social context of the crimes they had witnessed, rather than simply blaming the implicated individuals’ bad behavior in that moment—in other words, teens who thought more transcendently about this civic issue—showed a protective effect. The more transcendent thinking these teens engaged in, the less thinning we found in the ACC.
Ultimately we believe that transcendent thinking may be to the adolescent mind and brain what exercise is to the body: most people can exercise, but only those who do will reap the benefits. We believe that teens who showed more transcendent thinking in our interviews were going about their daily lives with more curiosity and thoughtfulness and using their strong emotions to propel this thinking rather than engaging in superficial and reactive thinking. Our study underscores the role teens play in their own brain development when they make deeper meaning of the social world.
What does this mean for society? Our schools tend to be preoccupied with what students know and can do, and parents are focused on helping their kids succeed in this outcome-oriented system. It is true that teens need rich, relevant content to learn about and that students’ hard work in school will be important for their future opportunities. But our studies add to a growing body of research suggesting that our ultimate focus should be on how teens think and feel. What good is it to know algebra, for example, if you have no inclination to use it when making financial decisions? What use is knowing about the U.S. Civil War if you have no capacity to think deeply about the ethics and motivations of that conflict and how that history shaped our modern societal landscape, values and institutions? Why learn science if you cannot use that approach to discern fake from evidence-based recommendations during the next pandemic?
These findings make me realize how my upbringing shaped me. My parents were city people, but they decided they would raise their kids in the middle of the woods in Connecticut. A clearing formed when a hurricane ripped out trees became a pasture for the animals we raised and ate, and the fallen trees became boards with which we built a barn and fences. I ran around in the woods with my siblings, friends and dogs; rode horses and taught neighborhood kids how to ride; helped a sheep give birth and dissected the placenta; and never saw a house key until I reached college. I sometimes found it difficult to navigate between the structure of school and the freedom to explore I had at home. But as an adult looking back, I can see how the opportunities I had to follow my interests prepared me to engage in both focused and open-ended thinking and to pursue my curiosities relentlessly.
In 2019, to focus on these issues, I founded USC’s Center for Affective Neuroscience, Development and Education (CANDLE). Our team is particularly interested in adolescents’ curiosity and willingness to consider multiple perspectives, big ideas and broad implications, as well as in the ways teachers and schools can support these processes. Teenagers are eager to sink their teeth into complex, interesting content that invites them to explore big, emotionally powerful ideas. Innovative school designs and teaching practices can engage students in choosing and pursuing open-ended, project-based coursework, leveraging their interests to broaden exposure to new knowledge, concepts, skills and questions. Such schools support their students by encouraging them to make sense of all they are discovering through writing, problem-solving, dialogue and reflection.
In New York State’s performance-based assessment schools, for example, classes culminate in students presenting the things they have learned to panels of teachers, evaluators, and other students. This approach, rather than focusing on testing, is designed to enable students to recognize the importance—the salience—of academic content. It then helps these newly motivated students shift between a tight focus on skills and information and the effortful but often inspiring reflections that connect the work to big ideas.
Here’s how a student at one of these schools, who had never before passed a math class, described his project to solve Zeno’s paradox, in which a person walks progressively toward a door in front of them, halving the distance with each forward movement but never quite reaching the destination:
“I want to be the first person in my family to graduate from college … [but] I never even imagined I could reach that level of math. My school has helped me learn mathematically, learn how to think outside the box, in different strategies …. I have spent two months working on a problem called ‘walking to the door’ … It led me to think about limits and the idea of asymptotes. I had to study fractions to be able to think about the problem I had. Through doing the problem, I got fascinated by finite and infinite. I was able to connect it to my life.”
Think about it—he connected Zeno’s paradox to his life. Given support for specific skills as he needed it, this student felt empowered to explore a challenging math problem that ended up feeling personally compelling, maybe because as he shifted between focusing on the math (recruiting his ECN) and musing on the big ideas (invoking the DMN), he fired up his SN—that brain network that makes something “feel like me.”
In transcendent thinking, teens rally their knowledge and skills and their strong capacity for emotion to imbue their worlds with meaning. For a while they let go of appearances and tasks and settle into a mental space where they are safe to explore ideas and, in the process, build purpose and meaning. In that space, they invent possible worlds and selves, grapple with alternatives and perspectives, and conjure the understandings, ethics and narratives that will carry them, and us, forward.
