Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

You're trying to understand gravity and osmosis and climate, right?

You're trying to understand the bigger things that are behind the forest, but that are not immediately obvious when you just look at it.

Yes, so when the kids moved into the MRI scanner and thought about these same stories again, we were able to look across a young person's activity profile and match up particular time periods where they were telling us they were thinking about a particular story that they had reacted to in the interview in a transcendent way as compared to the stories they had reacted to in a more concrete way.

And so what we found is that there were particular network properties of the brain that systematically came active and deactive in this coordinated pattern that was driven by the kid's expression of strong emotion and that organized the basic networks in the brain that led to transcendent thinking.

So there were three main networks involved at the level that we're analyzing.

Of course, the brain is infinitely complex, but these networks were the focus of our investigation.

And what we found was that networks that are involved in emotion, in feeling the inside of your guts and visceral body that tell you when your heart's pounding or that you have a stomach ache, that tell you when there's a snake in your path and suddenly you should, and look where you're going, right?

Those networks were active, networks that were allowing the person to sort of focus in a goal-directed way on attending to the world and learning about what was in front of them and remembering it and sort of integrating everything that they'd heard.

were active early, but for the first few seconds of watching a story.

But then those networks became profoundly deactivated as the kid let go of their attention into the world.

And instead, networks that are more intrinsically focused, that are mapping your state of consciousness, that are involved in autobiographical memory, that are involved in

transcending the current here and now.

These are the networks you use to daydream and to mind wander.

Those networks became concertedly active as kids were thinking about these big transcendent ideas.

So what we showed was that there was a kind of active

a dynamic trade-off between outward attention and inward reflection being driven by emotion.

And that sort of seesaw tottering back and forth as the young person was moving themselves into these different modes of brain activity, which are corresponding to different kinds of thinking, that was what we found was associated with this transcendent thinking.

We discovered that most directly with the interviews about the violence and crime that kids had witnessed in their communities.

Because what we discovered was that witnessing or even knowing about crime was associated with thinning

in particular regions of the cortex that are involved in kind of outward vigilance, emotion, motivation, learning, right?