Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

speaker

612 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2025 last heard Aug 2025

Mary Helen Immordino-Yang’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Hidden Brain · How Our Brains Learn · 18 Aug 2025 podcast

And then, you know, here's Mary Helen's work.

Grade her assignment.

And then, after a bunch of their own kids, we gave them a bunch of kids' assignments that we told them were not their own kids' work.

And we told them we had taken those off the internet.

And actually what we had done, though, is written those assignments to be matched in quality

And what we found was that, first, the teachers graded the two assignments the same way.

So, you know, you gave Mary Helen a B over here and you gave the fake answer that we pulled off the Internet from a kid that thinks like Mary Helen also a B, right?

So they knew what they were doing.

But what we found was that the brain activity when they graded their own students versus students they didn't know was massively more.

All over the brain, we see increases in activity in regions involved in motivation, attention, memory, emotion, autobiographical thinking, ideas, beliefs, consciousness, right?

These teachers are doing more mental, social, affective work when they're seeing their own kids' assignments than when they're seeing the assignments that are the same but by kids they don't know.

What that tells us is that excellent teachers are doing work that is deeply social and emotional and effortful, even beyond what's required to just accomplish the teaching task, which is grading the assignment.

So what was accounting for the difference in the brain activity in the two conditions?

We asked these same teachers to provide open-ended feedback to their students.

And so we said, here's your student Mary Helen.

What would you say to Mary Helen if you had a meeting with her about how she's doing?

Here's your student Shankar.

What would you say to Shankar if you had a meeting with him about who he's doing?

And what we were looking for was to what degree do teachers understand

actually appreciate and support actively in their feedback to their students the whole development of that young person's capacities of mind.

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