Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

I'd suggested, you know, and I was teaching them to use the microscopes that I found in the closet.

I was teaching them to use some of the other scientific instrumentation that we had floating around.

And and then they were designing activities for themselves.

you know, that rift off of the things I was introducing them to in the class.

Yeah, so Antonio, when I first met him and Hannah, his collaborator and wife, were deeply interested in trying to understand how the human brain creates engagement and emotion around ideas, around social relationships and values and beliefs.

And it was remarkably difficult to genuinely elicit those kinds of complex feelings in a laboratory setting.

What ended up working just remarkably well was to bring together stories of real people's lives from around the world, people in a variety of complex situations, and compose these stories into little mini documentaries.

that I would share with the participants in our experiments in a private two hour long interview where I would show them a small two minute to five minute documentary and tell them the story of someone's situation and then just ask them, how does this person's story make you feel?

And from that, people began to really start to actively engage with and show us, exteriorize their own meaning-making process, the way in which they made sense of what they'd heard and learned and then went from there to begin to tell stories about what it meant to them and how they felt about it.

And we moved people to the MRI scanner after that and scanned their brain activity.

We also recorded the activity in their bodies, their heart rate, their breathing, called psychophysiological recording at the same time.

And we had them watch the stories again in the scanner and push buttons in real time to tell us how emotionally engaged they were with that story at that moment.

And what we were able to do was design a method in which we could relate patterns of brain activity and body activity to expressions of emotional engagement that they are subjectively telling us they're having in real time and look at how those patterns were related to the ways in which they made meaning of the story and narratized their own experience of thinking about the story in the interview.

What Isela said, I think, was quite extraordinary and turned out to reveal a kind of pattern of thinking that many adolescents engaged in different ways and that we discovered was very important to both their brain growth and their social growth.

What Acela said was first along the lines of, well, this story makes me feel very upset.

It's going to be so difficult for her.

She wants to be a doctor, but it's very difficult because she's not allowed to go to school.

And that's frightening.

And it makes me sad.

But then she paused and that pause is very important neurologically because we think what's happening is she's shifting herself into another mode of engagement where she's leveraging systems of the brain that are involved in consciousness, in autobiographical memory, in storytelling and beliefs and values.