Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

Your brain is reacting to the dangerous things around it by becoming hypervigilant and anxious about it.

And these were the same regions in the brain that become thinner among soldiers deployed as ground troops.

It's also been shown to be involved in post-traumatic stress disorder among people with clinical symptomology.

And we were seeing that these very same brain systems were getting thinner in our kids the more violence they knew about in their community.

But what we also found is that

The more kids talked in a transcendent way about what could be done about the violence, about why it happens, the more they said things like, well, everybody's got a story or a history.

You have to look beyond what happened here in this situation and think about, well, how did that person get here?

Right.

And that's where we can do something about making our neighborhood better.

When kids said things like that, that kind of thinking physically was associated with thickening in the brain in these same pivotal regions for attention and pain and motivation and learning.

And what we found is that thinking in these transcendent ways about the violence actually counteracted the negative effect of violence on the brain development.

So we did a longitudinal study.

That means we followed the same group of teenagers for five years and we kept bringing them back to the lab and then talking to them about who they were and having them tell us about themselves over time.

And what we found that was really striking was that their transcendent thinking, the tendency that they brought to the first original interview where they were 14, 15, 16, 17 years old,

To think about these stories that we were sharing with them in a transcendent way, to move beyond just this is a story about Malala to a story about what's right or good in the world for everyone, that tendency in turn predicted change.

the future of the growth of their brain.

And that growth in turn predicted identity development in late adolescence at age 19 or so, right?

How much kids said, yeah, I really think about the adult I want to become and what I stand for and what my values are and what I believe in and what my purpose is.

And in turn, identity development at age 19 predicted young adult life satisfaction in their early 20s.

Kids' well-being and life flourishing and satisfaction in their early 20s was predicted by their tendency to engage in more of this transcendent thinking in the original interview five years before.