Projects, Purpose, and the Teenage Mind

When a young Mary Helen Immordino-Yang retired from teaching seventh grade science, she wasn’t fleeing teenagers.

Watching her seventh graders wrestle with challenging material, in fact, had made her curious: At that critical age, she wondered, what is the spark that ignites deeper learning? What causes an often-defiant teenager—or indeed, a whole class of them—to bring their considerable passions to bear on academic explorations of history, language, or mathematics?

Teasing out the answers has been the work of a long, second career.

Now a professor and neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, Immordino-Yang has spent a good part of the last decade back in the presence of teenagers—this time using brain imaging technology, EKGs, and pulse oximeters in hot pursuit of the neural mechanisms that motivate teens to marshal concrete facts (like the functions of the branches of government) in search of deeper implications and personal meaning (like their own role as citizens in a democracy). In a seminal 2024 study, published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, her team described the adolescent propensity to gravitate towards meaty social and political issues, seek patterns of significance below the surface of everyday events, and translate local concerns into bigger, more universal questions.

That can lead to “fraught“ conversations with teens, she admitted in our interview, but it’s precisely this kind of emotionally rich, reflective mode of thought—which her team dubbed transcendent thinking because it "goes beyond the here and now"—that predicts the future growth of major networks of the teenage brain.

Her research poses important questions about the way middle and high schools are organized. Teenagers are biologically designed to grapple with complex questions, and “innovative school designs and teaching practices,” she wrote in Scientific American, “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.”

Steve Merrill: Like me, you were a very young teacher of teens or tweens. Tell me about that.

Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: Well, I had just come from undergrad where I majored in French Literature, and I had taken some of every science because I was fascinated by science in the natural world—biology and physics, astronomy, human evolution and anthropology. I was tasked with making a new curriculum for the district, and I was perfectly positioned to try and weave that together. It was fantastically fun.

Merrill: In Scientific American, you tell the story of a young Black girl who raises her hand in your class and asks a tough question about evolution—about the mystery of why our ancient ancestors were dark-skinned. I wondered if you could just recount that for me: How did that question change your classroom dynamics? What lessons did you draw from it?

Immordino-Yang: One of my professors discovered that I was teaching in a public school, and he went into the university’s museum and identified artifacts that were catalogued but not important enough to be on display. He put together a whole kit of real Acheulean handaxes and Neanderthal obsidian blades and pieces of fossilized antelope bone that were found right next to our hominid ancestor Lucy, and so I thought—oh, we have to build a curriculum around this. I wove that into our studies of biology, culture, sociology, and evolution.

There was a huge amount of first-generation immigration in my district at that time. Kids were coming from Rwanda because of the recent genocide there; they were coming from the Middle East, Myanmar and Southeast Asia; from Cuba and Haiti; from Eastern Europe and Kosovo. What I hadn’t foreseen was the degree to which that curriculum would resonate for kids who were from all over the world.

I think that was a really seminal moment for me in my career, not just as a teacher but as an education researcher: thinking about the ways that people build knowledge in these deeply personal, narrativized ways.

Merrill: Do you think that questions with that kind of personal, “narrativized” relevance to students’ lives is what makes learning stick? It sounds like the girl’s question stayed with the the students for a while—they carried the discussion on for weeks inside your classroom?

Immordino-Yang: Yeah, we dove deep into that curriculum; the students did all kinds of things with those artifacts. We drew them, we held them, and figured out—“Wow, the creature that made this Acheulean handaxe was clearly right-handed!” You hold that rock in your right hand and you could really chop something with it, but in your left hand it’s facing the wrong way.

There were things you could start to figure out using evidence and by exploring artifacts in an embodied way to discover ancient stories that are relevant to who you are right now. I think that’s what really grabbed the kids.

Merrill: But some critics of purpose-based or inquiry-based learning may say, well, kids will just focus on a very narrow range of things that they’re passionate about.

Immordino-Yang: I think what you’re really talking about is a fundamental misunderstanding about what school is for. We can think of school as a place that focuses solely on producing learning and learning outcomes, but I think that’s not true.

The main purpose of school is to produce human development. It’s to grow thinkers, civic agents, people who understand themselves in a way that really positions them to think in evidence-based and systematic ways about complex problems—students who are curious and are dispositionally engaged with meaning-making.

Do “learning outcomes” matter? Absolutely, because if your kid can’t decode, for example, then there’s no hope of learning from the reading process. But when we think of the “learning outcomes” as the aim and stop there, we have missed what’s really the ultimate and most important aim of school—which is to use the learning to build the person.

Merrill: For a decade, some of your research has focused on what you call “transcendent thinking” in teenagers. You coined the term, so help us out—what is transcendent thinking?

Immordino-Yang: It’s thinking that goes beyond what’s immediately available in the here and now—concrete, factual information—and tries to build a deeper narrative about the broader lessons. So it’s really leaping from “these are the things that are happening in this problem” to thinking about future implications and the why, how, what if, and who says.

Things like purpose and identity development, deep conceptual understanding, disciplinary knowledge and expertise—are all domains in which transcendent thinking is key. To really understand something, you need to understand the implications of the math, not just how to do it. And to really understand a cultural holiday, for example, you need to understand the identity-based stories that shape the values and beliefs that the community lives by. These things are “transcendent” because they are not immediately visible; they’re inferences we construct from enacted, lived patterns of understanding.

Merrill: Over a five-year period, your team conducted research with 65 teens from high-diversity public schools in Los Angeles, getting to know them, asking hard questions... You even used fMRI scanners to take snapshots of their brain activity after they responded to emotionally-rich scenarios in documentary videos—like the injustices and violence faced by Malala Yousafzai in Pakistan. What did you find out about transcendent thinking?

Immordino-Yang: We talked to those kids about all manner of things: What they had witnessed in their communities and how they understood it; who they thought they would be at age 26; what they thought could be done to make the world a better place. And in the 2024 paper, we interviewed the kids for two hours about documentaries that featured teenagers in compelling situations from all over the world.

In those two hours, every kid showed us that they were thinking about the bigger implications in the videos. It was not correlated with the kid’s IQ or socioeconomic status or gender. Some kids did that far more than others, and the degree to which a kid engaged spontaneously in that kind of transcendent thinking was—trial by trial—associated with particular patterns of brain network activity. When we moved those students into the fMRI scanner, we could tell when they had taken this “transcendent” approach.

And what we demonstrated—which is really incredible—is that the degree of transcendent thinking that the kids engaged in during the interview predicted the future growth of the major networks of their brain, both the functioning of those networks and the structural enrichment of those networks over time: the thickness of the cortex, the robustness of the white matter fiber tracks, the networking, the wiring of the brain, if you will.

Merrill: So the questions you asked and the documentaries you showed these students over the years—there’s this really emotionally rich subject matter at the heart of it all. The materials pose big questions about crime, justice, how to create a better world. Is it important to ask hard, transcendent questions to teenagers?

Immordino-Yang: I would argue, and I think many people would agree with me, that many of our most traditional, unexamined educational practices at the secondary level don’t just not encourage transcendent thinking, but they actually punish it.

Schools need to provide the opportunities and the invitations and the modeling of this kind of thinking. How do you develop dispositions to query multiple perspectives, to sit with uncertainty?

But I also think that we don’t train teachers—or support teachers—to work inside classrooms that have these fraught conversations happening about math or history—even when we know that thinking about these issues in an emotionally engaged, sometimes fraught or socially heated way is exactly what teenagers need safe structured opportunities to do.

Merrill: OK— so ”fraught” and “emotionally engaged” conversations. But are emotions conducive to clear thinking? You know—passion, doubt, anger—historically, these have been considered distractions to productive, rational thinking. Are they…

Immordino-Yang: Those are thinking. How do you have doubt without thought? How do you have anger without noticing something in the world and thinking about what it means? As scientists, we have a long history of separating the aspects of the mind into these smaller mechanistic pieces that we can tease apart. That’s completely valid scientifically as a way to understand things, but there’s no such thing as a thought without emotion or an emotion without thought.

I sometimes say to teachers “whatever you’re having emotion about is what you’re thinking about.”

We should be asking: Are the students’ emotions about the content, the actual ideas, the reason why the ball rolls down the ramp, which—oh my gosh it’s amazing!—is the same reason my feet stick to the ground and the moon makes the tides. There’s a hidden, transcendent concept behind it all which is deeply empowering to me as a thinker. Or are the emotions about the outcomes, the procedures, the institutional structures, the test results? Are students learning about how school works and how to succeed and please people, or are they primarily thinking about the ideas?

Good schooling shifts the emotions of both the teacher and the students to emotions that are about the ideas rather than the outcomes and the results.

Merrill: And you write elsewhere that the thinking brain recruits many of the same brain circuits that keep us alive. To me, it sounds like you’re saying there is this deep emotional—even instinctive—underpinning to our “rational“ thinking.

Immordino-Yang: In our first study with adults, transcendent thinking was strongly associated with regions of the brain—and even the brain stem—that operate far below the level of conscious control. These are systems that remind your heart to beat and keep you breathing while you’re asleep.

So the way the cortex up at the top of the brain gets its fodder for complex thinking is by sort of repurposing systems that are involved in bodily somatosensation and survival—the feeling inside your guts and viscera. And the very same regions in the brain that allow you to be deeply, passionately interested in mathematical equations are the ones that if you poke them, the person vomits. These are literally somatosensory regions.

We don’t have separate brains for thinking about big ideas, on the one hand, and keeping ourselves alive on the other. I think this is why humans are the only species on the planet that are able to die for ideas. We can literally starve ourselves to make a moral or historical point. There’s no other organism on the planet that will do that. Other species will fight over resources or mates or hierarchies, but that’s not the same as fighting over ideas, or values, or historical identities.

For humans, I would argue, the legacy of our intelligence is that we have evolutionarily co-opted systems that keep us alive in the service of ideas—that is both the beauty and the danger of our intellect.

Merrill: To tap into those big emotions that might make kids passionate about a math problem or an essay—some researchers say that asking kids to connect the things they’re learning to future careers, for example, moves the needle on the question of purpose. What do you think of that approach?

Immordino-Yang: You know, we often ask kids to do the work of making things relevant, but I don’t think that leads students all the way to the big R relevance of concepts like infinity or democracy. Those things are, by their nature, transcendent ideas.

I’m thinking of this 18 year old who chose to focus on Zeno’s paradox—if you are walking to a door and you get halfway, then halfway again—how do you know if you’ll ever reach the doorway? That student talked about how he needed to learn fractions because he got fascinated by the idea of asymptotes and the notion of infinity; he’s suddenly moving back and forth between the concrete, procedural aspects of the math that he needs to know in order to figure out these bigger, conceptual ideas.

And as you’re tilting between these different neural modalities in the brain—between the concrete and the transcendent—the pivot, if you will, is the anterior cingulate, the deep regions of the brain that are core to who you are and are involved in bodily arousal. So I think what relevance actually is, is “it feels like me when I’m thinking about this content.“

Merrill: Wow. That's fascinating.

Immordino-Yang: Students need to experience the power of deeper
understanding as they are engaged with solving problems in the instrumental sense. And when that happens, neurologically, the residual effect is a heightened awareness of the sense of me, which I think actually translates into engagement, agency, and relevance and motivation.

This interview has been edited for brevity, clarity, and flow.