How Emotions & Social Factors Impact Learning | Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  Emotions are the foundation of thinking and learning, not an add-on

  Immordino-Yang, who studies emotion, learning and adolescent development, argues that emotions drive all thinking, decision-making, relationship-building and well-being. That doesn't license acting on every feeling. It creates a responsibility to develop habits of questioning and reframing emotional narratives when they aren't serving us or the world.

• 02

  Complex social emotions recruit the same body-regulating systems as basic ones

  In her MRI studies, people heard true stories meant to evoke compassion or admiration. Emotions about physical pain and inspiring stories of virtue both engaged the brainstem, hypothalamus and anterior insula, the cortex that senses visceral states like heartbeat and digestion. Even our most abstract feelings are built on the physiology we share with much simpler animals.

• 03

  For story-based emotions, valence matters less than whether you must build a narrative

  Her surprise finding: once emotions are about stories, whether they're positive or negative is no longer the defining feature. What matters is whether you directly witness something (someone breaks an ankle stepping off a curb) or must construct a story in your mind (a man dining alone whose spouse of 75 years recently died). That narrative leap is uniquely human and develops slowly.

• 04

  The default mode network activates during effortful meaning-making

  Her team was among the first to show the default mode network actively engaging, not just switching off, during a demanding task: deciding how you feel about a story that requires cultural, contextual and personal knowledge. Stories that inspire admiration for someone's character or state of mind, such as Malala standing up to the Taliban, engaged it more than admiration for physical or cognitive skill.

• 05

  Responses can be predicted story by story

  In a two-hour interview before scanning, participants reacted to about 50 stories. The stories that individually inspired someone predicted which ones would activate these networks for that person in the scanner. Immordino-Yang calls this 'transcending' a situation: going from 'that's unfair to her' to what it means about the world and about oneself.

• 06

  Adolescence is the developmental window for complex meaning-making

  Young children can't fully appreciate others' mental states. Teenagers become driven to construct big meanings: their shoes become a statement about sustainability or counterculture. Yet that is exactly when school, she argues, doubles down on transactional testing, such as asking whether the servant in Great Expectations is Molly or Maria.

• 07

  Dehumanization works by rewriting the story

  Asked how people who love their families can take part in genocide, she explains that the narrative imposed on another's pain shifts from 'another human suffering' to 'a rat, a pig, a bug'. That brings a different set of values into play. Huberman connects this to classic obedience studies suggesting most people could harm others under the right conditions.

• 08

  You can't think expansively when you feel unsafe

  Default-mode activity, the basis of self-awareness and of building narratives, is fundamentally incompatible with vigilance about your immediate physical or social surroundings. Feeling physically, emotionally, culturally or socially unsafe makes it neurobiologically hard to imagine alternative perspectives, future outcomes or ethical implications. She notes creativity is also tied to these networks.

• 09

  Mirror neurons as a special cell type haven't been found

  She says that, as far as she knows, the predicted dedicated mirror cell type was never found. She prefers Antonio Damasio's late-1980s model of convergence-divergence zones, in which networks bring processing together and send it back out, linking perceiving others' actions with our own goal-directed action.