Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

So kids had to show us that across time they were doing the work of growing themselves.

What transcendent thinking does that I think is protective for kids and deeply grows them is kids are actively, dynamically, agentically moving themselves from being here and now in the world, paying attention to those around them, reacting appropriately, getting things done, engaging with tasks.

and also noticing emotionally when what really matters here is something bigger, when they can withdraw from that kind of go, go, go, do, do, do, what does it look like, into a place where we think about what does this mean?

And as kids are actively dynamically shifting themselves between those ways of making meaning, they're building the neural muscle, so to speak, for mental health and for good relationships.

Others who are engaging in clinical research with teens are showing that these same networks, when they're hyperactive and not flexibly trading off with one another, are involved in what appears to be the neural correlates of these mental illnesses like depression

and anxiety.

When kids get stuck attending to the outer world and to appearances and worrying about what's around them, we call that anxiety.

When they get stuck, tipped the other way, where they're in their own head and they're thinking about just stories and ruminating, that's associated with depression.

What transcendent thinking does is kids are agentically moving themselves between these two states in appropriate ways according to the situation and what it calls for.

And that is like a neural muscle that we think produces mental well-being.

Yeah, that's right.

We set out to study teachers working in urban inner-city Los Angeles whose administrators identified them as their quote-unquote superstars, right?

The teachers who kids really love, really go to.

The teachers who the administrators say are just the ones really dedicated to the kids who do really great work.

And so we approached 40 of these amazing people and asked them if they would be willing to let us study them, basically to have us videotape them in their classroom and whether they would come to the lab and actually let us image their brains in real time while they did their work.

They graded their students' homeworks and gave feedback to their students and made judgments about classroom activities that they saw and told us what they thought about them.

What we found was quite extraordinary.

So we gave them a kid's assignment.

We said, this is Shankar's work.

Grade his assignment.