Every parent’s wish is for their child to grow up and live a fulfilling, happy life. During teenage years, this desire often leads to a laser-like focus on grades, test scores, and chances of college admission. After all, happiness is difficult to achieve without the economic security provided by a steady paycheck. But what if it wasn’t the grades but the thinking that a teenager did—in and out of school—that enabled him to grow into a happy adulthood?
What kind of thinking supports young people’s brain development?
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, a professor at the University of Southern California, is part of a group of researchers studying how adolescents’ thinking predicts brain development. Some of their findings are not what you would expect.
They conducted a five-year study involving 65 participants ages 14 to 18; These were all young people of different races living in the urban area.
In one-on-one interviews, the researchers showed the teens what Immordino-Yang described as “really compelling little mini-documentary stories about teens from around the world.” Youth were then asked the following question: “How does this person’s story make you feel?”
“They could say anything they wanted,” Immordino-Yang told HuffPost.
Given the engaging material, it’s no surprise that the young people in the study made connections between the stories and their own lives, as well as big-picture social and moral issues. Researchers call this “transcendental thinking.”
“The purpose of transcendental thinking is to capture the tendency to move beyond the current context, create a larger story, and grapple with psychological meaning or implications that transcend the here and now,” Immordino-Yang said.
While we tend to associate this type of thoughtfulness with academically high-achieving kids, the researchers observed varying degrees of transcendental thinking in their interviews with all the teens in the study.
“All the kids spontaneously tried to think about these big issues and ask us about them, or relate it to their own stories, their lives, or larger ideas, values, or beliefs that they have,” Immordino-Yang said. “some kids did this a lot more than others.”
What’s more, the amount of transcendental thinking the teens expressed was not related to their IQ or markers of socioeconomic status, such as their income, ethnicity, or their parents’ education level. (For comparison, SAT scores are highly correlated with all of the above.)
The researchers then used functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to examine the relationship between transcendental thinking, brain activity, and brain development over time. They looked at images of teenagers’ brains both at rest and while thinking about stories, and measured the degree of connectivity between two main neural networks that become active when people engage in this type of thinking.
They then sent the teens back to the lab two years later for another round of brain scans. They found that children who exhibited more transcendental thinking showed greater brain development over time. This was again independent of IQ and socioeconomic status. The more transcendental thoughts a young person had to begin with, the more brain growth was measured.
In follow-up surveys over the next three years as the teens transitioned into adulthood, researchers found that the degree of brain development they showed had a major impact on their lives overall.
What is the connection between transcendental thinking and a happy life?
In follow-up surveys, young adults were asked questions about their identity development and life satisfaction, such as how much they liked themselves and how they felt about their relationships with others. What the researchers found was that young people whose brains showed greater growth—not just more transcendental thinking but also more development in their brains over time—scored higher on these measures of well-being.
“What we found is that the degree of brain growth — but not the original thought in the interview, that you actually have to do the work of growing your brain — is also related to the growth of who you are,” Immordino-Yang said. “And after a year and a half or two years, this identity development predicted how satisfied children were with their lives and how much they liked themselves.”
In the study, researchers propose a “developmental cascade” effect in which transcendental thinking leads to brain growth, which in turn leads to life satisfaction.
Immordino-Yang emphasized that every step in this process is very important.
“You can’t go directly from the thinking in the interview to the young adult outcomes,” he said. “You have to go through the work of growing yourself.”
What are the implications for the way we raise and educate young people?
Immordino-Yang believes these findings are good news for teens, parents and teachers. They promote a growth mindset in which intelligence is not a fixed trait but can be fostered in its development over time. A young person’s brain changes as they grow, and we can help shape this neurological development by giving young people ample opportunity to think in a “transcendental” way.
Rather than focusing on end goals of test scores or grades, educators can maximize the types of experiences that support brain development by focusing on children’s learning processes.
“I think we need to look closely at not only what young people know and what to do and how, but also how they learn it,” Immordino-Yang said.
He added that young people’s curiosity and their willingness to rethink problems and consider different perspectives “seems to be a really important force in the development of young people in terms of their well-being, productivity and successful transition into society.” young adulthood.”
Unfortunately, our current education system often rewards unquestioning obedience rather than encouraging children to challenge authority and ask probing questions.
“Our standard structures and traditional ways of engaging adolescents in education in middle and high school tend not to support these mental tendencies and, in many cases, actually punish them,” Immordino-Yang said. Instead, encourage children to think deeply and critically and ask “Why?” She believes we should encourage people to ask.
Lisa Miller, who was not affiliated with the study, is a professor at Columbia University Teachers College and author of “The Spiritual Child: The New Science of Parenting for Health and Lifelong Development.” The potential of transcendental thinking complements his own work on the importance of young people finding deeper meaning in their lives.
“There’s more than one way to know,” Miller told HuffPost. School education “tends to place great emphasis on logic and empiricism,” he said, but “this alone is not enough. Narrow, strategic and tactical thinking alone is not enough. A fresh, innovative, bottom-up creative way of thinking is needed.”
To improve their happiness and prevent what Miller calls the “diseases of despair” that have become epidemic in Generation Z, children need to tap into something bigger than themselves. Whether they call it intuition, spiritual awareness, or a mystical connection, research shows that spirituality can be a useful preventative against depression, addiction, and suicidal thoughts.
Miller said it’s also effective: “If a parent talks about their own higher power, if the parent talks about their own struggle or pain or struggle and then achieves progress that is greater than the sum of the parts.”
Just as the researchers in the study used true stories to stimulate transcendental thinking, parents can tell their own stories to their children to model different ways of making meaning.
Immordino-Yang said the research provides “scientific evidence that these alternative educational pathways can actually improve the brain in ways that benefit healthy young adulthood.”