Available October 14, 2025
Find New View EDU on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and many other podcast apps.
“What does it mean to be a self-actualizing, fully integrated, socially contextualized human being in this new world order? And how would we design opportunities…to help a young person develop not just what they know now, but to potentiate in ways that change who they could become?”
Neuroscientist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang returns to New View EDU to share what she and her team at USC CANDLE are doing to answer these, and other, deep questions about the science of teaching and learning. Her new research focuses on a cognitive process she calls “transcendent thinking.” And as Mary Helen explains during this conversation with host and NAIS President Debra P. Wilson, transcendent thinking may be the key to unlocking long-term developmental outcomes for students.
Mary Helen describes how her team worked with teenagers to study their emotional, biological, and cognitive processes in response to a variety of real-life stories about other adolescents from around the world. The surprising findings indicated there was a specific, powerful type of neurological engagement taking place in which some students extrapolated larger and more socially complex themes from the material presented. In other words, when learning about Malala Yousafzai, some teens not only became emotionally invested and inspired by her story but began to contemplate what it meant implicitly about possible injustice in the world, the value of education, and what they might be able to do to champion the right to equitable educational access for others. That type of cognitive process is a demonstration of transcendent thinking—and it mattered to student outcomes in the long term.
The degree to which students demonstrated transcendent thinking, and then continued to flex that cognitive muscle over time, corresponded to growth in the white matter and neural structures of their brains two years later. Furthermore, that ongoing growth in the brain predicted the students’ well-being as young adults; the greater the degree of transcendent thinking, the greater the growth of the white matter, the more the student would report satisfaction with their identity, relationships, and place in the world in young adulthood. Mary Helen describes the findings as a “developmental cascade” that could be predicted irrespective of socioeconomic status, gender, or IQ.
And it wasn’t only students whose cognitive processes were part of CANDLE’s latest research. Mary Helen’s team also worked with teachers to understand the neurobiological processes that underpin excellent pedagogy. They found that effective teachers, when grading student work and providing feedback on performance, are using the same regions of the brain that were engaged in the transcendent thinking process in adolescence. They also discovered that teachers rated most highly by independent observers in areas related to promoting the richest content, depth of knowledge, and equitable access to the educational experience were the same teachers who provided student feedback that strongly related to personal growth and identity formation—or, in other words, feedback that encouraged transcendent thinking as part of stronger academic performance.
Mary Helen’s research demonstrates that teaching and learning is fundamentally about making meaning in an increasingly complex world. Far from being a set of assigned tasks and measuring outcomes, the purpose of school—according to Mary Helen—is to utilize learning as a means for human development. The real question, she says, is, “How have you changed who you’re able to become next for having experienced this learning?” The challenge is for educators to design classrooms that allow students to discover those answers.
Key Questions
Some of the key questions Debra and Mary Helen explore in this episode include:
- What is transcendent thinking, and how does it show up in students? What do educators need to know about fostering transcendent thinking?
- What is the relationship among emotions, learning, and transcendent thinking? What types of emotional engagement do we typically see in classrooms, and how do they differ from the emotional engagement needed to create positive long-term outcomes?
- How can educators balance fostering transcendent thinking in the classroom with the very real and overwhelming demands already placed upon them by the nature of the profession?
- What about the introduction of AI into education? How can AI help or hinder both the work of teachers and the growth of students in terms of transcendent thinking and personal development?
Episode Highlights
- “I mean, for the history of humanity, we have leveraged our new technologies in the service of both good and evil. And technologies like AI are tools, and we don't fully understand this one yet. It's a very emergent kind of a tool. And so I think what we really need to do as educators is safeguard the well-being of our small, delicate, but also incredibly robust, under certain circumstances, humans who are in our care and think about what does it mean to be a self-actualizing, fully integrated, socially contextualized human being in this new world order? And how would we support that and how would we advocate and how would we design opportunities for young people to learn together that by virtue of having engaged in those opportunities, help a young person develop not just what they know now, but to potentiate in ways that change who they could become?” (6:25)
- “So what we have here is this incredible suggestion that when kids dispositionally engage with complex, curious, deep thinking about big ideas, not only are they deeply engaged by that, but they are physically and functionally growing their capacity to think in ways that over time produces a neural substrate that supports well-being. So we're actually growing a robust brain that enables us to be well, to manage in relationships, and to feel good in our own skin and to develop identities that transcend that are about big ideas and purpose and values.” (18:21)
- “What we show is that teaching well is not more work, it's different work. It's work in which you really engage with the thought patterns, what it feels like for these students to be thinking. What are their emotions about here? Are they having emotions about the amazing power of right triangles to help us understand the geometry of the world and how powerful it feels to really engage in that kind of mathematical thinking? Or are they having emotions about, yay, I did it, I'm done. Or, boo, I didn't, and now I'm freaking out because I'm going to flunk, right? Because when the emotions are mainly about those outcomes, what we're finding is that the school is not promotive of development in the same way. It may be promoting quote-unquote learning, maybe, but in the service of what? What are you going to use that learning for?” (33:33)
Resource List
- Learn more about the work of USC CANDLE.
- Watch Mary Helen explain transcendent thinking on The Well.
- Check out Mary Helen’s book on Emotions, Learning, and the Brain.
- Watch this USC Rossier video about Mary Helen’s work.
- Read Mary Helen’s article in Scientific American about the impact of transcendent thinking on well-being.
Full Transcript
- Read the full transcript here.
Related Episodes
- Episode 75: The Future of Smart
- Episode 72: Thriving Through Happiness
- Episode 69: Building Collaborative Learning Cultures
- Episode 59: Schools and the Emotional Lives of Teenagers
- Episode 58: Transforming Teaching and Learning
- Episode 47: Designing Schools for Future-Ready Minds
- Episode 35: The Relationship Between Emotions and Learning
About Our Guest
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang is a professor of education, psychology, and neuroscience at the University of Southern California and founding director of the USC Center for Affective Neuroscience, Development, Learning and Education (CANDLE). She holds the Fahmy and Donna Attallah Chair in Humanistic Psychology at the USC Rossier School of Education. Her work pairs in-depth qualitative interviews with longitudinal brain imaging and psychophysiological recording to reveal coordinated mental, neural, and bodily processes by which adolescents and their teachers build meaning—deliberating on the abstract, systems-level, and ethical implications of complex information, social situations, and identities. Her research underscores the active role youth play in their own brain and psychosocial development through the narratives they construct, and capacities teachers cultivate to support student belonging and deep learning. She conducts her work in partnership with expert educators and diverse youth from the lowSES communities where she works.
She writes and speaks extensively on the implications for redesigning schools around curiosity and civic reasoning to promote intellectual vibrance and thriving. She has received numerous awards for her research and impact on society, including from the AAAS, the PNAS editorial board, the AERA, APS, FABBS, IMBES, the US Army, and others. She served on the National Academies committee writing How People Learn II, as a distinguished scientist on the Aspen Institute’s National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development, and was a Spencer Foundation midcareer fellow. She was elected to the National Academy of Education in 2023 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2025. She received her doctorate in education from Harvard University.