Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - It’s Time to Change the Way We Teach (and Learn) | Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

Episode Date: June 29, 2022

This week’s conversation is with Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, a Professor of Education, Psychology, Human Development and Neuroscience at the University of Southern California. Mary Helen studies the psychological and neurobiological development of emotion and self-awareness of adolescents in educational settings. Since earning her doctorate from Harvard in 2005, she has received numerous awards for her research and impact on education and society, including an Honor Coin from the U.S. Army, a Commendation from the County of Los Angeles, and a Cozzarelli Prize from the Proceedings of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.Currently, Mary Helen is conducting several funded, multiyear neurobiological research studies on adolescent students and their teachers. In this conversation we discuss how students really learn, and what we can do to enhance how we teach in an education system. But Mary Helen’s insights extend far beyond the educational setting – those with a deep understanding of the role emotion plays in human development will have a distinct advantage for just about any endeavor one is interested in – whether that be as a modern leader, a parent or coach, athlete or teammate. And that’s why I wanted to roll up my sleeves with Mary Helen._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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and what achievement actually entails. Okay, welcome back or if you're new to this podcast welcome to the finding mastery podcast my name is dr michael gervais and by trade and training i am a sport and high performance psychologist and the whole idea behind these conversations behind this podcast is to learn from people who are exploring the edges and the reaches of the human experience in business and sport and science and life in general. We're going to pull back the curtain to explore their psychology, to understand how it is that they have committed to mastering both their craft and their minds in an effort to express their potential. Finding Mastery is brought to you by LinkedIn Sales Solutions.

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and the majority of my nutrition comes from whole foods. And when I'm traveling or in between meals on a demanding day, certainly I need something quick that will support the way that I feel and think and perform. And that's why I've been leaning on David protein bars. And so has the team here at Finding Mastery. In fact, our GM, Stuart, he loves them so much. I just want to kind of quickly put them on the spot. Stuart, I know you're listening. I think you might be the reason that we're running out of these bars so quickly. They're incredible, Mike.

I love them. One a day. One a day. What do you mean one a day? There's way more than that happening here. Don't tell. Okay. All right, look, they're incredibly simple.

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be understated, not just for strength, but for energy and focus, recovery, for longevity. And I love that David is making that easier. So if you're trying to hit your daily protein goals with something seamless, I'd love for you to go check them out. Get a free variety pack, a $25 value, and 10% off for life when you head to davidprotein.com slash finding mastery. That's David, D-A-V-I-D, protein, P-R-O-T-E-I-N, dot com slash finding mastery. Now, this week's conversation is with Mary Helen Imordino-Yang, a professor of education, psychology, human development, and neuroscience at the University of Southern California. So Mary Helen studies the psychological and neurobiological development of emotion and self-awareness of adolescents in educational settings. So it's very specific of

what she's going after. Since earning her degree from Harvard in 2005, she's received numerous awards for her research and her impact on education and society at large. So currently, Mary Helen is conducting several multi-year neurobiological research studies on adolescent students and their teachers. Now, in this conversation, we discuss how students really learn and what we can do to enhance how we teach in an educational system. But Mary Helen's insights extend far beyond the educational setting. And I know that that's where she is, you know, flown a tall flagpole here. But the deep understanding, those that have a deep understanding of the role of motion and awareness and how they play together in human development will have a distinct advantage for just about any endeavor one is interested in, whether that be as a modern

leader, as a parent or coach, an athlete or teammate, it almost doesn't matter. And so that's why I wanted to have this conversation and roll up my sleeves with Mary Helen. And with that, let's jump right into this week's conversation with Mary Helen Imordino-Yang. Mary Helen, how are you? I'm good. Thanks, Mike. How are you? Oh, you got fire. I love when we start with fire.

Is that natural for you? Absolutely. I don't know how to be any other way, honestly. It's this or sleep. create a gripping sensation from a brain and a psychological perspective where people are able to really wrestle and be pulled in to a learning mechanism to help them, you know, set them up for later expression of those learnings. So that's one. And the second is the unique methodologies that you've come to understand that are agnostic to the school environment, but carry into just teaching in general. So one is like the school and environmental conditions

there. And the other is for teaching in general. So can I start with a really hard question? Of course, lay it on me. Okay. I won't promise to answer, but I'll do my best. Okay. All right. So I'm going to, I'm going to, I'll set it up. When I was younger, when I was in high school and all of the, you know, the ages before that, like I didn't learn, right? Maybe it was me. Maybe it was the environment. It was certainly the interaction of the two, but it was not what I looking back, what I hope for, for my son.

So here's the question. What is wrong with the way that we are educating our kids? And how did we get here? I'm really glad you didn't say what's wrong with me. It's not you. It's the world, right? It's the way we set up education. So when you say you weren't learning right, you mean at school.

Is that what you mean? Yeah, Yeah. Me neither. Welcome to my exclusive, not so exclusive club of people who just didn't get elementary, middle and high school that well. I mean, you know, we really misunderstand in our modern schooling system, I think the main aim of schooling in the current modern world, which is actually not learning, it's development. Wait, let me explain what I mean by that before somebody runs out and goes like Mary Helen and Martina Yang says school is not about learning. I mean, learning happens, but learning is serving a bigger aim. And that's always the case. Why are you learning these things? How is the experience of learning this, whatever it is, changing what you're capable of thinking like and being like into the future?

How is it changing your development? And that is the key thing. So what we really need to refocus around, I think, in the design of schooling is the development of the people in the system. And then the learning follows that. Right now, we've got the cart in front of the horse, right? The development should be pulling what the rest of the decision making is around what kids are doing in school, what teachers are doing in school, what counts as training for teachers, right, which is also inadequate, and not setting people up to be successful in the role that they're taking on, which is to support the growth and development

of young people as they engage with really difficult new ways of doing things and thinking about things, right? That's what school actually is. And it is simply not designed around that right now. We have made this false narrative in our minds that school is about what you can remember, right? And there's tons of learning science out there too, which is great science, very useful. It's a piece of the toolkit, right? But it's all about recall and retrieval and, right? And on cue, can you remember how many bones are in the U.S.? You know, and then the human body, right? It's like, who cares, right? Unless you've got some reason to know that. How does knowing that change how I understand and think about the world? How does it change my dispositions of mind

is the way I've been thinking about it. How does it change the way in which I engage with learning and interacting and building things and innovating in things and achieving in a purposeful way over time? And when we rethink the aims of schooling to put the development of the people in the system first, then all of a sudden, many things start to make sense that are really feeling very awkward and irrelevant to so many people who are caught up in the system, like yourself and myself when we were kids. Are you placing your gaze on helping teachers be more skilled at teaching, or are you placing your gaze on the system for specifically trying to get at the students? Okay, so that's a complex question, right? So all of us as humans, we are deeply we bring, we have cultural ways of knowing about

things that are based in the ways that we've experienced them with other people in the past. We bring that to everywhere we go. And so the school system, the structure of how schools are set up does not adequately support those very basic human capacities. In fact, it directly punches and undermines them. So that is a major place where innovation is needed, serious innovation is needed. But it's not just about doing something different, giving teachers different tools to deploy, because again, they're not not robots they need to be humans and interacting in a whole range of dynamic complex situations that they're going to encounter with a whole range of dynamic complex people that they're teaching right and so what we really need to do

is both things start by deconstructing the environment of schools the structures of of schools. But in order to do that, we need to have a North Star. We need to know what we're doing. We're not just taking apart the 45-minute bell schedule and replacing it with, I don't know, two-hour block periods. Okay, that sounds good, right? We're taking away the desks and we're putting, you know, beanbag chairs. Terrific innovation, accomplished, check, right? What we really need to do is think about what are we trying to achieve here developmentally? How do we want people to think when they're here? How do we want them to develop feelings within the space of thinking? What does it mean to feel interested if you're curious to

feel determined right about complex skills and information what does it mean to have a sense of purpose that you build that that connects to your newly emerging skills that you can actually use them for something that you know is is is purposeful in the world over time that grows you and improves the world you're in how do we help people feel that way about the process of thinking in schools and then what would it take to actually design around that as our north star so the first thing is yes we're going to dismantle many of our school structures that are incompatible with human development, frankly. Right. But just dismantling them and replacing them with like who knows what is not going to not going to do it. We actually need to step back and take a really hard, courageous look at the beliefs and the values that this current system is built around and deconstruct those,

do those beliefs and values actually reflect what we want for our young people? I would say no. And if not, what do we want for our young people? And then how would we design for that? You're describing the exact process that we go through working with a world-class athlete or deconstruct, okay, what is it going to take to be your best and relative to other people's best in four years? So there's like a four-year quad or four-year time cycle that we think through. And we start with like, well, what is it do you think is going to be happening? What do you think you can do in four years' time? And then what do it do you think is going to be happening? What do you think you can do in four years time? And then what do you think the world is going to be doing? Because there's always a reference point, which is important in some of these experiences.

And then we say, right. Is that really it? Is that really what you think? Yes. Well, actually, you know, if I'm what? And OK, so there's usually when you double click, there's another thing. And then then we we get the fabric of that idea so clear. You use the word deconstruct, but we get the fabric of that idea so clear.

It's like the planning of it just naturally unfolds. Like, okay, if we're going to do, let's say, some sort of quad flip. I'm just making this up because it's concrete. Yeah, difficult and concrete, right? Right. Okay, well, concrete, right? Right. Okay, well, we got to be able to do the single. We got to be able to eventually ladder onto the double. Okay, so it just starts to make sense of how to plan.

And then what we've done in high performance anything, when humans are involved, we say, what are the necessary capabilities? Okay, so, well, we do need to understand the psychology and the physical and the nutritional and the medical, and then we just optimize for each one of those. So that I'm trying to be concrete, but not get down in a rabbit hole. How do you, cause you, you had this really radical idea, deconstruct beliefs and values, better understand how we want people to think and feel and learn and be in the process of learning. What you just did is a radical idea to deconstruct those. And I'm tempted to say, like as a model, who's doing that well? Or ask you, if you had a white canvas,

how would you start? Because I feel like there's going to be gold in both of those. Yeah. Can answer either of those questions. Let me just step back for one moment and lay a little brain science on the table. Great. Because I think one of the beliefs that we as a society hold, which turns out not to be true, okay, is that our abilities and our capabilities, as you said, and our skills and our cognitions are, they exist in you as a thing, right? Like if I could open up your head, I could look in there and see like, oh, look, you can do a quad flip, you know, or like, no, you can't, but you can do a triple or whatever. Okay. I know nothing about that. Right. They exist in there and you just need to

deploy when the time is right. Right. And then the other piece of that faulty conceptualization or schema around what it means to have ability is that our emotions about it, our social sort of contextualization, the cultural ways that we value that skill, that we enact that skill on the fly in different kinds of situations, that that's separate from the skill itself in your head. That, you know, how you feel and the emotion you're having and what you can do and what you know are somehow two things. And they might impact on each other right um and there is at a certain level right some utility to that conceptualization from a scientific perspective because what you're really doing is breaking down in this case an athlete's performance and saying

well you can do a quad and we know that because you did it in practice but you didn't do it in this competition and the reason is because you were too nervous so your emotion interfered with your quad right but think about a different way think about in the context part of which is emotional context in the meaning you're making of this situation right now, which is for you a competition that's very high stakes, let's just say, in the emotional, cognitive, cultural, developmental meaning of that situation, you don't have the capability to conjure up quad level understanding, you know what I mean? And so the skills themselves are tied to context. There are certainly things you can't do and don't know, but there's nothing that you can do and do know all the time. What you can do and what you know depends on the context.

Okay. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. This is rich. This is really rich because you are pulling apart two things that are intimately linked, which is the ability to do a skill repeatedly, the emotions that are connected to accessing that skill. And both of those are encapsulated in the context of the way that you're perceiving the upcoming experience. right? And so I'm going to ask you a question quickly to stay on this because this is, I'll go back to the Olympics one more time. And it's just an easy concrete model right now is that heading into the quad, I would typically ask the team or individuals to say, what's it going to be? When we arrive, the next Olympic game, summer games is in Paris. When we arrive in Paris is, is the Olympic game for you, the biggest show on earth, the largest,

craziest, the most media driven, the most hype, the most important show on earth, or is this another competition? The rules haven't changed. The size of the court hasn't changed. The ball weight hasn't changed. Fill in the blanks. And then to make a fundamental commitment to either one of those aims, to me, it doesn't matter. To make a fundamental commitment, choose one and train accordingly so that your context is familiar when you show up. And how would you enhance that or dismantle it and say,

what are you doing? No, you must be doing some right, Mike. Cause you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. A lot of work is going well. Yeah. Right.

No, I'd say you're doing it exactly right. And what you're talking about is exactly an example of what I'm saying, that two things are really important there. Skills are enacted within context right so it's it's not just being able to do a quad there's no such thing yeah you need to be able to have all the movements that go into a quad but you need to be able to pull them together in a in a particular place in time that feels a particular way to you and that's the second half so context matters you're talking about that and you're helping them explicitly imagine and decide upon a story

you're telling yourself that you're embedding that skill into. Skills don't exist free form. They exist in stories of context, which are, and this is the second half, deeply subjective on the part of the person. So the context is not what's happening by what other people are describing of what happened in the news story. It's how you feel and notice in that context yourself. So you can learn, in fact, skills for managing yourself into a particular storyline, a way of interpreting and making meaning, which shapes the way you feel emotionally and the kinds of skills that become relevant in that conjured context story in your own mind. And that's my, as a cognitive

scientist, way of saying you're doing the right thing that's what you're doing is helping somebody set up not just because being able to do a quad in the olympics is not just about being able to do a quad it's being able to do a quad in the olympics so you gotta have a meaning for that it's got to pull together into a feeling space that is conducive and supportive feeling to you. And that is sort of commensurate or aligned with the aim of, of doing a quad and not somehow undermining it or somehow in conflict with it or somehow unresolved, right? Because any of those three alternative scenarios will undermine your skillfulness at doing a quad, at getting it done in that time and place. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentus.

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And if you're ready to feel the difference for yourself, Felix Gray is offering all Finding Mastery listeners 20% off. Just head to felixgray.com and use the code findingmastery20 at checkout. Again, that's felixgray. You spell it F-E-L-I-X-G-R-A-Y.com and use the code findingmastery20 at felixgray.com for 20% off. From a cognitive science perspective, when somebody does imagery and they're putting themselves in that context, they've created the narrative, they've used their imagination to see and feel to their highest level of ability what they hope it would feel like or what it might feel like, and then they see and feel themselves perform well in those

environments. What's happening across the brain? What have you come to find is happening across the brain? What have you come to find is happening across the brain during imagery? And you might say, listen, I haven't, I haven't dug there. So I don't know. Well, I mean, I don't know exactly what's happening, right. In that exact situation, but we can piece together evidence from many people's studies, including from ours. And I can give you a sort of satisfactory answer. Great. Great. Right. So, so one way to think about this, you need to kind of,

the brain is immensely complex and we have to have some kind of schema for understanding. So I'm going to right now say a useful schema, I think, is to reduce that complexity to something we call networks, which is basically they're fractals. Okay. So you can have teeny can, you can have teeny little networks and you can have gigantic huge ones where the brain is only in three big networks or something. Right. So we can look at it at any level of, of granularity. But for this big question, you're talking about integrating a whole context with a vision for something with a memory for being there with the emotions of experiencing it with a

whole bunch of skills that involve arms and legs and all kinds of stuff. So that's going to be a whole brain kind of big deal networks, okay? Big picture dynamic networks. So think about it this way. There's kind of, you can sort of think of the brain at a very high, you know, broad strokes level as having three big cortical networks that are most relevant to what you're talking about. Of course, there's other ones that are doing vision and that are making your heartbeat and stuff. Okay. We're just going to those. Yeah. Okay. But we're going to, we're going to set those aside for a minute. But the big ones at the level of the cortex that I think need to be coordinated here, you can kind of think about them as, as, as like forming like kind of a seesaw, okay? So you got

one network that's activated when we go down here. We got one network that's activated when you go over here, okay? And then you got a network over here that's telling you which way to flip the seesaw, all right? And so what are these? So first of all, the pivot, okay, that's saying like, wow, better do something, go this way or go that way, right, is literally the like, oh, network, pound, feeling your digestion, your guts, you know, noticing that, you know, something is frightening or something that is relaxing, right? All of this emotional sort of physiological regulatory arousal related, all of that kind of stuff, okay? And then you've got kind of these two networks, which are more or less, you could think of them as kind of trading off with one another, but in, in activating or deactivating one, you're also facilitating the activation or deactivation of the other. So

they're not act, you're not independent of each other. Right. And so one of them, you can call something like the executive control network or the frontal parietal network. There's like different names and it can have different smaller parts depending on how you name it. It doesn't matter here. What matters is it's a network that kind of is like, well, pay attention into the world right now, move your arms and legs,ain, you know, focus on the immediate physical contextual features of what's happening. Super important for sports, right, or for anything for that matter, for interacting with people appropriately, all that. And then, right, that's this, let's say. And then over here, you've got something that is loosely called versions of the so-called default mode network which you know is involved in it's you know from an embodied perspective this one is arousal right this one is more like

reading the state of your level of consciousness is kind of how you can think of it like how awake how aware how like what does it feel like inside of me to be me? And it's also a kind of, if you might think of it as sort of a context independent sort of narrative, right? So it's thinking about the things you can't see directly, the story that's in the background, the intentions that are underlying somebody's actions or psychological state, the moral or ethical implications, the episodic memories that go into something, right? Envisioning yourself in a particular scenario and playing it through or the time it actually happened and reliving those memories, all of those kinds of thinking, imagining the future, right? Possible

futures and impossible futures, right? Making sense out of the historical past and integrating those all together into some kind of meaningful feeling of me here and now that comes with a kind of story about why and how it's all coming together. That network is sort of, if you will, balancing with the like, dig in and do, right? You can't imagine the deep historical significance of your quad in the Olympics at the same time as you're actually doing it. You know, you either dig in and like make the arms and legs go and you're paying attention to where the line is, you got the land on or whatever. Okay, I know nothing about this. Or you're paying attention to where the line is you got the land on or whatever okay i know nothing about this or you're thinking about gosh i'm going to be the first you know whoever person to do this under these circumstances that's a big historical

achievement because right but you can't be thinking about the big picture story of inferred meaning and the actual actions at the same time and so so what do you need? You need to be able to actively appropriately manage the way in which you move yourself. You notice you activate or deactivate your physiology, so to speak, and move yourself into the brain slash mind slash emotional cognitive skill state that's conducive to the situation being, you know, adaptively managed. So if you're over here, when you're supposed to be doing a quad, you're out of competition. And the here is the default mode network in this case. Right? Yeah. If you're over here, you're thinking it and you're doing it. Okay. You're in the right place, but if you're doing this, that's, that's going to undermine

it too. So you, you really got to like marshal yourself into the appropriate space and these spaces are balanced. So when you're practicing beforehand, you're planning it out. What you're doing is saying, yo, notice, think about it, feel it, get yourself worked up, try that out and make a story out of it in your default, so to speak. So that when you get there, you know how to recognize it and you can move yourself into the like, make it happen. Right. And so it's like a fluid kind of balancing act that you're always in. Does that make sense? So it's great. So you've got three, let me just go quick pass. You've got three basic networks that we're talking about. And one network is more about the arousal regulation, the emotional management piece, which is. Did I make an error? Is, you know,

is the right, all that, like the, and then that makes you go, Oh wait, Oh wait, you know? Yeah. Right. Okay. And that's not just the limbic system you're saying, which is like the am and then that makes you go, Oh wait, Oh wait, you know? Yeah. Right. Okay. And that's not just the limbic system you're saying, which is like the amygdala and all that stuff. There's much, it's the anterior middle cingulate, it's the dorsal and ventral anterior insula. It's the medial, there's lots of regions that are involved. So it's, yeah, it's reaching, it's extending from what people might consider the amygdala or the limbic system, and it's reaching into some of the cortical thinking parts. It's definitely cortically mediated. Yeah. I mean, the limbic system is kind of a, you know, it's sort of a misnomer in many ways. It's defined like that because it was anatomically defined back before we had really the functions, right? So people could show that

these had things to do with basic arousal, fear, physiological regulatory capacity in a very, very basic sense, right? And so, you know, these systems were called a system, but actually, you know, the actual interconnectivity of these networks is those systems are integrated into systems that are doing all kinds of more complex deliberations. And there's automatic quick, like, whoa, pay attention, that ball's coming at your head, right? That's more amygdala. But there's, you know, then what do you do with that, right? How does that feel to you? Does that excite you? Or does it freak you out? That bigger story about what it means and what you do next is also a part of what happens next time and how you learn. And right. So it's much bigger than just like that reactivity thing. So people that are able to do something extremely well on command in a high stakes environment, they're able to damp down or optimize the first network that you're talking about. And then they're able to quiet the second net or the default mode network. So they're not checking in to see how they're doing. Not at that moment. But they're allocating their resources

towards the on-demand doing. And sometimes we talk about like paralysis by analysis, like overthinking. And then I just don't know how to respond. Okay. So on, on imagery, you would want to crank up some of the emotional contextual, you set the scene, crank up some of the emotional responses that you think might take place and then damp down or just get the story, right? So you're, you're getting those two networks. And then the third network, which is the seeing and feeling yourself doing would be a complete absorption to ready yourself, familiarize yourself with when it might happen later. Does that sound about right? Yeah.

And the other thing to know about the brain is that the networks you use to visualize or to feel yourself moving your arms and legs in space, for example, are the same ones that actually move your arms and legs in space. So there's lots of good research showing that when you even visualize doing certain kinds of skills, you actually improve your ability to do even like a physical skill, like a tapping thing with fingers, right? You can learn it by practicing it, but you can also learn it by imagining practicing it while your hands are not moving. You won't get quite as good, but you'll still get better. Right. So it's like your, your brain isn't duplicative. It doesn't have like the thinking about it place. And then the, the, it, the, it, and the thinking about it are the same thing. That, that, that non-redundancy aspect of the brain is really important because you can activate

different parts of the brain through imagination to your point and then thereby enhancing skill. But it's also like this, it's a mystery still, like how is this happening? Yeah. Nobody really fully has got that. What a fun science this is. Okay. So let's stay on the default mode network and then we're going to come back up to schools and systems and learning in a minute so you're so skilled on a default mode network and i don't have the right language i understand the value i have some limited language on what it's doing but i've i think i've oversimplified it my understanding at from a very narrow perspective of the default mode network is checking in to see if I'm okay. Contextually understanding, am I okay in this moment? And I think I've over-rotated on the

reduction part here, but can you help me understand if that is in fact the case and the other regions that are, or the other functions of that network that are materially important. Let me just say, there's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of studies on the default mode network, and we don't fully understand, right? These are all just ways of trying to explain the data that we're seeing, which are extremely complex and dynamic and emergent. Okay. So that's the first thing. but rather than saying, checking in on, am I okay? I would say more like the default mode network systems are conjuring okayness, right? They are the feeling of their activation is what is enabling awareness of self. It is the substrate for the sense of being okay.

Separate from the actual being okay, right? You see what I'm saying? Like you could be ill or injured, right? But like, what I'm talking about is, it's really about conjuring the subjective awareness of that state, which is a story-like construction. It can be very, very different depending on the cultural way in which you value it, right? So a classic example of this is the pain that's associated with like childbirth, right? It's like the kind of thing that you would never, never live through if it weren't for a really important social, you know, aim, right? The reason you're doing this thing is just incredibly emotional and meaningful. And it's, you know, all of that. Otherwise, why the heck would anybody ever do

that? Right? So it's like that. It's the story. It's the meaning. It's the cultural way of being there that makes the pain feel different. Okay. Okay. So that does help. And then, okay, let me do a reductionist because you just expanded this in a healthier way for me. Is this, if there was a place, and I know the problems with what I'm saying here, but if there was a primary place that fear of people's opinions, FOPO, would it live in the default mode network? Would that be the place out of more complex than that, but you could think about different kinds of, uh, uh, the different ways in which that, that fear of other people's opinions may be conjured differently, depending on the kinds of neural, um, you know, the neural systems

that are doing the work at that time. right? So the default mode network is going to be where you're telling stories to yourself about, you know, the wondering of what the other person might be thinking that I can't see, right? That's that like narrative construction of stuff that is inferential, that's emotionally engaged, that's all that stuff that's meaningful. So there's all that. But then there's also social anxiety, which is much more direct, which is evolving much more fundamentally things like the amygdala, where it's just like people's eye contact at me. It's like, everybody's looking at me, right?

Like anybody who's ever raised a teenager knows there's a period of development where it's like, even for just a couple of weeks. So like, why is everybody staring at me? And that's neurological, right? And, you know, the rest of us, you know, neural typical people, like there's a, there's a range of sensitivity to that. Right. But like, you know, and sometimes autistic people really have a high level of sensitivity to it. Some people have a markedly low, it's also shaped by culture. You know, when you go to somewhere in the world where the eye gaze norms are somewhat different, you develop your brain around those norms so that those norms feel normal. And if they're violated, then you feel like something weird happened. Right.

So so there's also that piece of it where fear of other people's opinions can also be just flat, got a social anxiety perspective to it, right? So I think those two things. And then there's also a third piece, potentially, which is I'm telling myself stories about what other people are thinking about Visha, that she's going to think that I'm right, whatever. But then you also can plan, I'm sort of pushing it forward in the head now, where you can also use those stories to guide your behavior as you planfully move forward and execute with the things that you're going to do next and part of it seems like part of fear of other people's opinions is also how you let those uh conjured narratives about what other people are thinking relative to what you think they

ought to be thinking about you, how you let those shape the way you engage going forward. That's it. Yeah. And that's the third network, more of the executive functioning. Yeah. The go-do-it network. Because now you're going to start seeing in the world the things that are reaffirming the narrative you were constructing for yourself. That's okay. Yeah. All right. I think I think I'm on the right track. I need some sophistication in it. But the the idea that I think is compelling to me is that it's below it's a latent and pervasive experience for many of us that we are checking and are we okay? I'm thinking that's like we're talked about. It's too limited, but it's in that network. And then we're giving some meaning to it. And then it's influencing the decisions that we make, which is like, am I going to go or not go?

Am I going to wear this or not wear that? Am I going to say this or not say that? And it's this linking between those two networks that is mediated by that first network we talked about, which is, you know, that arousal, emotional, regulatory, you know, experience. And which is also part of, am I okay? Right. This is like also the network that feels physical pain in the guts and viscera, for example. Okay. So label those three networks for me. Like, give me one way to think about it. I mean, this is very rough. Like don't go out and neuroscience should be like, it's exactly these parts, but like, you can think of this as kind of like the salience network.

Okay. This is kind of like the default mode network. And this is kind of like the executive control network. Executive control. Yeah. Okay. Not functioning. You use the word control specifically. Well, control is a major part of functioning. How do you function? You function in a regulated, organized way, not just flailing around. So control and motoric functioning are actually not redundant in the brain. They are leveraging the same systems. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Cozy Earth. Over the years, I've learned that recovery doesn't just happen when we sleep. It starts with how we transition and wind down.

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I love your work and I've got so many questions about systems around school and education and methodologies for teaching well. And then you also gave a gem about beliefs and values. So I just want to lob it to you and say, where do you want to explore the next part of this conversation? You can go wherever you want, Mike. I mean, I'll make one comment though. And that is, this is something that's sort of implicit in the conversation you're having, but which I think is actually not so obvious in education settings like it is in sports performance settings, which is that in order to build out the capacities to manage yourself in a context and make stuff go, the person themselves needs to build out those capacities. That means the whole thing they need

to slowly start to engage with in order to build the capacity to engage it more systematically over time. In school, we do it for you way, way too much. We manage it, we hypermanage it, we micromanage it, we control it, we test it, we, you know, gate it, depending on whether you pass this test, you can go, right. And we don't let people actually have the deep skill building experience of managing themselves in difficult intellectual spaces. And you only build your mind and brain and skills by managing it yourself, by doing the work of doing it. And we do not let that happen. It's inefficient. It's messy, right? It's got false starts. It's a little bit not,

you know, perfectly standardized. We don't have tolerance for that in our education system. Give me, make it concrete. Give me an example of, so I can get my arms around what is, what is happening now that you're saying is violating some of the core principles of learning. So let me give you a counter example of somewhere it's done really, really well. Yeah. Okay. Like, oh yeah, we don't do that. So, you know, when my own kid, one of my kids was in 10th grade, we sent her to school in Denmark and in Denmark, just for one year, right, she had to learn Danish. So it's not something that's a solution for everybody,

because she was the only foreign kid. But Denmark, they have these, they have these one year residential intensive programs that there are these schools that only run for one year at a time, kids just only come for one year and they're themed. So they're built around a particular kind of interest or skillset that kids, and they can just, how you get in is you just sign up. You can only sign up for one. So you got to pick one. You sign up and you're in your first 130 people you're in, right? The government helps pay for it and all that.

So it's a very different kind of society, right? Than here. And I'm not saying take Danemark and put it here, but I'm just saying they've designed these schools. There are schools that are known for their sports. There are schools known for their orchestra music is one of them. Every kid across Denmark who's super into orchestra music takes their 10th grade year and goes and does orchestra with all the other Danish kids who love orchestra, gives concerts, teaches lessons, does all the whole thing, right, For a year, really engaged them. My daughter went to a kind of an interdisciplinary, they called it a social studies school, which

was really about, you know, over the door in Danish, it said, find yourself. That's what it's about. You go in there, they've got artist studios. They've got recording stuff. They've got dance studios. They've got sports. They've got outdoors. They send the kids on three-day camping, hiking trips by themselves. And they have to play without cell phone, like all these kinds of things. They've got academic classes that they can choose to be in all this stuff. So here comes my kid who's like a super good student. You know what I mean? Does what you're supposed to do and gets there. And, you know, for example, she goes into math class and cause she signed up for

the math science, he kind of stuff for one of her whole tracks. Cause she loves that. And, you know, and they were, she was, she called me and she's like, I already know all this math they're doing. It's like basic, you know, algebra and geometry, whatever I'm doing pre-calculus. Like why am I new? And the teacher said to her, you know, just stay here. You're learning Danish. You're making new friends. Just try it. And as she got further into it she realized she's like this is a completely different way to do math than i've ever done it in an american school because they don't give you the problem we give kids problems they solve the problem you got it right you got it wrong right there they give you the like i mean they give you the problem in that we're going to all shoot off rockets across this field.

You need it to land as close as possible to that dot. What angle should you shoot it and how much force? They don't tell you what math pertains. You've got to go figure out, is this a geometry problem? Is this a calculus problem? Is this a, right? Should I just fling it and try it a few times and see what happens? Right?

Like you figure out the math you need. They don't neatly tie it up with a little bow. And when you get done, you know, you've done it because they told you here's the list, right? So here's the next part. So, so she signs up to do physics with something different than she'd ever done before that she was scared to do. There's no rubric. There's no grading. There's not right. They give them a whole curriculum around something like, and she was doing a project on it with, and she was like showing it to the teacher and getting feedback. And they're like, well, you know, what about these ideas? Explain to me how you're thinking there. And she's like, well, am I done yet? Is it good? Am I done? Do I move on? Like, I don't know. Are you done? Do

you want to move on? Or do you still have more to work on, right? It's up to the kid. And she called me at about, she'd call me every night before she was going to bed in about January or so. And she'd been there for months already. She found this so difficult that nobody told her what's expected. What, did you got an A plus?

Pat you on the head, you worked hard, right? They're always like, well, what's the next thing you want to try, right? And she got there and she said, you mom I realized something about myself that I'm not I'm embarrassed to admit this but like and I was like yeah she's like you know you know those kids who in high school kind of have a girlfriend or a boyfriend or whatever not because they really love the person but just because they they want to have somebody there to eat lunch with every day who tells them they look nice and laughs at their jokes. So they don't walk into the party alone

and all that. And I'm like, yeah, she's like, I realized that's grades for me. Right. That's grades for me. I don't really think getting an A is smart. It's just that I, I stuffed into my pocket to remind myself how hard I worked and how great I'm doing and how much potential I have as a student. They just won't give me that here. It all has to come from me. I need to figure out, am I done? Am I smart?

Did I work hard or not? Did I learn anything? It's up to me. And the hardest part of school was to figure that out. But imagine how much she learned from that. Nobody's going to come along and tell you, congratulations, you got it right. You're now going to Harvard or Stanford or whatever, right? You just invent it. You stop and think with experts, unpack what you did, deconstruct your understanding. What could have been other things? Why'd you decide to do it this way? You know,

all that stuff. And then you figure out, am I done yet? Have I learned what I'm going to learn? Is it time to move on? Or do I still have more work to do? We outsource the most important part of the learning and development process onto a standardized curriculum. And then wonder why people aren't motivated and don't have the ability to actually solve complex problems when they get done with our school system, for the most part, because they're waiting for somebody to tell them what to do and whether they did it well or not. But that's not in the real world how things happen, right? No, it's not. And I want to add to that at one other level, which is we outsource our self-esteem, our sense of value.

That's right. By looking to the person that's- That's exactly what she was saying about the, like, that's the boyfriend thing, like for grades for me, right? She's like, I just am dying for somebody to tell me I did a great job and I'm so smart and you worked so hard and nobody will say it. She's like, they won't say it. You know what I mean? That's just not what they do. That's not their job as teachers. Their job as a teacher is to help you think about your work, help you figure out what you want to do next, point you to resources. They're not going to tell you whether it's done or not, whether it's good or not, that's not their job. Okay. So how would you begin to fold in some of those best practices or better practices in the American system or the US system? Yeah. Well, so there's a couple of things and it's very, very tricky. So the first thing I just want to quickly, before I talk about how

to fold it in and there are people doing it, right? This is not happening anywhere in the US. There are pockets of visionary, very, very skilled educators who are doing this with a range of kinds of kids, right, around the country. And, you know, I can talk about that. But before I do it, I want to first say, this is where the values and beliefs conversation comes in, because you need to know what you're redesigning around. And so often the school systems, it's not their fault, right? They're under, they're overworked, they're underpaid, right? They don't know what they're aiming for. They don't know what it looks like to have high achievement. They think high achievement is high achievement on our standardized metrics, but that's like a circular argument, right? So if you're aiming for high quality development, full self-actualization of every youth in that system, as they engage deeply

with whatever it is they are interested in and good at, and bring that to bear on the world so they make the world a better place together, you want to think about it that way, then we need to really help educators and parents and all society actually understand what learning is and what achievement actually entails, not just, you know, success on these pre-designed standardized metrics. those can be useful little things, you know, she did fine on her SAT and whatever, right? But that's a little game on the side, just to prove you can do it, right? The important part is how do you think, how do you engage with the meaning you're making out of your opportunities to be in the world, taking with you the skills and ways of thinking about stuff and the tools you've learned in school. Can you

leverage those for something for good out here? Can you write editorials? Can you organize businesses? Can you write, like, do you notice a need and then figure out a way to engage with other people to manage that need, right? All of those kinds of sort of self-starter, you know, skills for managing yourself in a complex world need to be at the fore. We need to be thinking about those as hallmarks of achievement and skillfulness and intelligence and scholarliness. And so when we shift what the outcome is, what we're aiming at, and let me just be clear, this is not code speak for anything goes, or sloppy academic skills and wrong answers in math is fine. You're not going to get your rocket to the right place if you didn't calculate right. You have to do it properly. The proof is in, did it work or not?

And then deconstructing what happened and what you learned from that. Right. So it's, but it's a very different way of assessing. So a major problem, and it's not just me saying this, right. A major problem with our education system. And it, you know it was it explore it comes out of a deep desire to do right by kids so it's not like it's evilly intended right but a major problem is that we have tried to legislate intentions right by by instituting a standardized and very rigid system of accountability achievement, high stakes testing as the way that we judge our education system outcomes. As you say that, I almost can't get out of, it's like that solution has been dropped in and so ingrained in me and I haven't spent any of the time.

It's just, and you never unpacked it to say, well, what does that actually show? If your kid can get a hundred percent on that thing or gets a 50% on that thing, what does that mean? Well, I, yeah, I, that, that is less concerning to me other than I, point taken, where I'm going with it is like, what, what else I've swallowed that pill, you know, that the SATs or whatever. And so how else do you do this? Like, so other ways that this is done and there are so-called progressive or alternative schools, right. That, that, you know, in, in New York city, for example, there is a whole consortium

of schools. They're not all the same. They're all different, but they all have a shared value around and deconstructed structures to a shared value around very deep developmental performance based assessment. So in other words, and this this kind of aligns with sports in that sense, like the proof is in, can you do it? Right. Right. So, you know, kids work in various ways in different schools, right. But they work intensively on portfolios of work that they design in collaboration with teachers, with experts, with community members, they iteratively rework them. They present them publicly, they get feedback, they, you know, they move forward, they step back. Now a final portfolio looks like that is, you know, graduation quality, themselves in a process-oriented way toward being able to manage that kind of complex,

engaged thinking that goes into making a portfolio of high school graduation quality or something like that. So it really puts a huge burden on the teachers to be development experts. They need to recognize in young people by talking with them, by working with them, by examining their work and talking with them about how they did it. They need to recognize in young people that the paths that little Mikey is taking that aren't aligned with the standardized thing maybe, but, oh, he's got some good ideas. Let me steer you this way. Try it this way mike and then like you right so they really have to help the kid engage in the process which is exactly

what you're talking about when you're preparing people for the olympics right there's no test you pass there's a performance-based thing you pass right and it's expected that it's going to be dynamic some days you'll do great and some days you might not, right? And that's the nature of it. Well, guess what? It's not different in math or social studies or science experiments. Some days the things I design come out to be really important ideas and some days they flop, you know, but it's what I do with that over time. But we don't have a tolerance for engaging with that learning slash developmental process in our young people. And that is where we need to reorient around that. And that's going to take a very different kind of structuring of our school success metrics,

our assessments, our, you know, graduation milestones and all those kinds of things. And it's going to take a very different way of preparing our communities, our kids, and our teachers and administrators to appreciate the developmental processes that they're seeing and should be nurturing in students, rather than the developmental outcomes, which are easy to measure, but are very poorly mapped onto what actually the kid has developed into. You're going to need all the fire in this conversation that you naturally come with. I know, I know. People tell me, but it's not possible. But you know, I'm like, well, darn it. I'm going to give it a pretty good whirl. I got one life on this planet. I'm going to see what I can do. Oh, God. Okay. So let's do something digestible or snackable.

What can parents do at home to start to shift the home narrative just a little bit? What are some controllables that we can do? Great. That's great. So what I would say is engage thoughtfully and listen and ask questions as your kids are sharing with you how they're thinking. Have conversations. Do things together and stop and unpack what it is. If your kid brings home a test, it doesn't matter what their grade was. That's not the start of the conversation. The start is, hey, tell me

about this problem. I see you did it like this or like that. You know, maybe it was right. Maybe it wasn't right. It doesn't matter. They're engaged with you. Like, oh, I can, do you see where the, so that's actually not valid that your right triangle has this, that, and the other. So no wonder it didn't work out. Hey, let's, you know what I mean? So you really start to engage with the child in a process oriented way and take the power away as much as you can, but it's very difficult in today's world. Take the power away from the standardized outcome metric, right?

Take the power away from the standardized outcome metric. Here's another really quick story. My other kid, when he was, you know, fifth grade, like a little duck he was, he managed to get himself selected to be at the Ad Astra School, which doesn't really exist anymore in the same form, but it was Elon Musk's little micro school inside of SpaceX. And my husband worked at SpaceX at the time and,

you know, whatever. So it took Teddy overdraft off, let him play around with all the stuff and they let Ted be a student. Right. So, so, so my kid was a student there and, you know, he, lots of stuff. I can talk about that for a long time. It's amazing. But a story I want to tell is in January, again, halfway through the year, that seems to be the pivot point, right? Where he comes home and this is not a kid who, he's a kid who does, obviously he's a bright kid, motivated kid, right?

Does, he's a kid who, oh, he's a kid who came home from first grade, first time he'd been in school all day, about two weeks into the school year. Sunday night, he's crying. I don't want to go to school. I'm like, what's the matter? You know, I'm thinking, is he getting bullied at school? What's going on? He finally said to me, I'm laying there on his bed, but I'm trying to put him to sleep.

He finally says to me, mommy, I have so much work to do. How do you expect me to get my work done if I'm sitting in school all day? Right. That's an indictment on the learning environment. That's right. Okay. That's Ted. And it's a pretty good school, right? And you know what? This sounds exactly like what people in the modern workforce are talking about. They're like, listen, I'm in meeting, meeting, meeting, meeting. I'm not doing my work until after dinner. Right.

Yeah. I've got all this stuff. I'm building sets of armor. You know, whatever he was doing at that time in his life. Right. It's like, yeah. Okay. So that's Ted.

So you get him in sixth grade. Halfway through the first school year, he wasn't a kid who like brought home school work and put it on the front. Not just, I'd have to take it out of his background. No, no, look at this. Yeah. Right. So he puts this math test on the fridge. I'm like, okay, Ted, just put a math test on the fridge. And again, like, this is that, like, let me think about what it says. I'm like, Hey, Ted, see your math test is on the fridge. You must be really, you know, wanting us to see it. I see you got a 50 percent he's like yeah I'm like yeah so uh tell me

about it's like this is amazing mom look at this you see that see this over here this question well I didn't get it right but I my teacher said I I hadn't seen this kind of math before but the other kids had but I just joined this year so I hadn't seen it but I did figure out part of it and she said next year I was going to learn about how to do this part. So, you know, I really kind of got some of the answer right. And then this other one over here, like, I didn't know how to do it. But I thought hard about it. And I tried it a different way.

And my teacher said, this is, you know, this was good thinking. I mean, it was very interesting. But this one, this one I actually got. Because I, right, he was so excited about that math test that he got 50 percent time you know what i mean because it was like look how much i managed to figure out on a test that's like a real math test you know that's got calculus problems on there or whatever he's like i didn't know how do it, but I sort of made it with rectangles and I got something sort of like it. And I got 50%.

And was there no part of you that was like, oh my kid, my kid is going to end up in like shambles when it comes to college. Like there's no part of you that race forward. There's a tiny part that's like, oh my God. Yeah, right. But it's tiny and I shut it up really quick and like you know whatever it doesn't matter but like my daughter people were like oh my gosh you're sending nora to to denmark for a year she's missing ap physics she's trying to learn it in danish she doesn't know what she's doing she She's going to be terrible. None of the kids at Stanford, right? And being like, whatever, you know, it's a crap shoot.

But she's doing great, okay? Like she just did her thing. You don't, you're not educating your kid. And I don't know, my kid isn't in college. I don't know if he's going to get in or not. We'll see what happens. If he doesn't, he'll go to community college, make it go and then get himself in

wherever he's got the program he's interested in. Like, I don't care. It's what you build out of yourself. Well, you know, just on that, this is a really important note for me because when I first got into my professional life, I didn't want to tell people where I went right out of high school. Which was where? A two-year school.

Great. I couldn't get into a four-year cause I didn't take the SAT. I went surfing or the PSAT. I went surfing. And so now I I'm like, listen, I, I navigated and I had people along the way that helped shape me that I trusted, like try this and try that. And have you thought about this and that? And, And so I found three professors at this two-year school that was like, I mean, I fell in love with the invisible, learning philosophy, psychology, and theology. I was like, this is amazing. And so it set me down a path where I was reading more than the professors would ever expect anyone to read because I was lit on fire with it. I've heard this story before, by the way, Mike. Yeah. Yeah. And so like, there is hope, but I think it's the harder path.

It's less traveled. There's definitely more potholes. There's a couple of cliffs with some shales that can break away. Like it, I could have been easily where most of my friends ended up, which is not, you know, it's really, really hard. So, so I shared that. Um, and I hear you say that, and you know, you're working at one of the top universities on the planet and obviously you value education. So like to hear you say that, I'll just share one other context is that the school my son is at, the headmaster of the school says, okay, we're making a shift. We're moving from helping kids prepare to go to the best school to the best fit. Parents revolted.

That headmaster, it got run out. And I stood up and I was like, right, I love this. And like I had all these heads look at me like, like, oh, you must not understand excellence. You must not understand. You do not understand what it takes to be, you know, like, because I'm not very involved in the school in that way.

And so he's out and we're back into the, you know. Yeah, I know. I see a lot of that. But that's a false narrative. I understand. I've written a blog post about this. I can send actually. Oh, please do. It's like years ago, but I got this thing from my daughter's public middle school saying like, do you want to hit the ground running and ninth grade and out compete and get into the top school? Let us help you

strategize. And I was just like, oh my gosh, right. Get out. You know what I mean? Like, what is wrong with this development? Like, here's the thing, you know, all my daughter's friends were the ones who were doing all that stuff. And they're, you know, real good schools now, no doubt about it, but that does not guarantee that you are a happy person or that you're going to actually achieve in the long run. You know, I too took a very circuitous route,

but then I came to my work with a very deep purpose, you know, of, you know, engaging why I wanted neuroscience, why I wanted education. The thing is, I, when you take your kid's math test and you deconstruct it around the ideas of the math and forget about the grade, what you're actually ironically doing is helping the kid learn math and become interested in math and know what it means to understand and engage with things in a systematic, deep intellectual way. Our schools don't value that. We just, for the most part, we just want the outcome metric. We don't care how they got there. And it's very superficial and short lived. Even, I mean, I don't want to use names, but even at the like super high level, you know, university that my kid's at now, even there, I mean, it doesn't matter, but she's like, even on the

standardized metrics there in the final exam, she's outperforming her peers. She's in the top few percentile. Why? Because these kids who came from super high performing, you know, private schools to get them in, which she did not, right? They don't know what it means to understand something. They know what it means to have the right answer. They know what it means to react. If somebody gives you this, you give them that. But when you get to that level and they're saying, here's a problem, what do you help somebody learn? What are the ways to fully have their brain engaged with the outcome? You help them by supporting their developmental process, understanding how they're thinking about things and what really good thinking about things in that space would look like and help them to see that and to try that on. That's what you do. You have

to, that's sort of more developmental way of mentoring and teaching. You're helping that person discover in themselves the strengths they need to be able to do the thing. How do you do it without inspecting? So I found that there's a fine line between exploring and inspecting. And so inspecting without like, show me, you know, like prove to me or some sort of like critical lens on it. How do you approach? I would bring a critical lens. I mean, if my kids bring it home in English paper, I'm not going to pussyfoot around when the ideas are, you know, seem haphazard or they're

contradictory. You're saying your thesis is this, but this, these two paragraphs don't actually prove that. Right. I don't care if your teacher gave you a 40 out of 40. This paper doesn't make sense. Let's sit down and deconstruct it and figure out how you really would make it argue for what you wanted to say. So you're starting with that person's idea. You're validating their idea, but you're doing them the honor of actually legitimizing their own idea as a worthy aim, and then helping them to actually achieve it as compared to just, you know, somebody else telling you you've achieved it. Got it. I am very critical. Ask any of my grad students. We go through every word of every paper that gets submitted out of my

lab. We write them, they write it, and then we go back through every single thing. And we think, is that what you mean? Is this what you want to say does this title reflect you know somebody just sees the title is this what you want to say is that absolutely correct given what the data were right it's extremely tight this is not just a loosey-goosey anything goes right but it's harder than actually like when my daughter went to Denmark you know just somebody says you meet the standard you are done well's easy. I just took all the work away from you figuring out whether you actually engaged with something at a particular standard of complexity or not. I'm inspired by what you're talking, like how you're, and then I see my son, he's so casual. He's like, yeah, it's good. You know, like the 50%. Yeah. You know, 85% I did pretty good. And I'm like, well, hold on. Did you do your best?

And he's like, ah, I think so. Yeah. It's like, you don't know what your best is yet, son. Like, you know, so I get, I get nervous on the other side of it, you know, with the younger minds and I know how to have that conversation with adults, but with the younger minds, I, I, I don't. So can you just course correct that a little bit for us parents? Yeah. Yeah. No, I would forget the 85%. If my kid brought home an 85% in class, yeah, we'd sit down and look at it. And if he brought home 100 and two, we'd still sit down and look at it. Be like, hey, how did you figure out this problem? Tell me about it. Right? So you're not going to right wrong answers as the topics of conversation over right answers.

You're going to have conversations about the actual math. Show me what you're learning. Tell me about it. Let's go through your test paper together. Wow. Number one. Like, you know, how did you do that? Explain that to me. Oh, that relates to that concept we were talking about last week with the triangles right or no help me right like actually you and him have a real conversation where you're both learning together and you're modeling what it looks like to think deeply about what happened in that test and leave the freaking 85 out of there but you know you also have to you have to play the game a little but you've got to set up everything i'm talking about first right then you play the game a little right now my kid's a junior i'm like dude you got to play the game a little, but you've got to set up everything I'm talking about first, right? Then you play the game a little. Right now, my kid's a junior. I'm like, dude, you got to

bring home straight A's at this point because you're applying to college next year. So if there's something in there that you're not getting an A on, we do have to fix that because, you know what I mean? Like it's going to have to happen or you're going to, it's up to you, but then you're going to curtail the opportunity you have to make choices next year about where you want to go. So I'm relieved to hear you say that because that's the exact narrative. We're just talking about what, keeping the opportunities as wide as you possibly can.

And one of the ways to do that is have, you know, the best output you have on your current grades, you know, but that's not for a while. We're not into that discussion. He's in seventh grade, so it's fine. So, okay. Like I love this. Right now is a kid who has, here's the thing. You want a kid who has within himself, the self-discipline to make himself focus and follow through on whatever it is he likes doing and cares about and wants to be good at. Oh, cool. We got that. I'm actually having to help him shut down like his studying at night to get

good sleep and shut down, like get him out of the gym because he's loving volleyball. Like I'm having to kind of pull them out of the environment. Yeah. You got to help him balance a little. Yeah. Cool. Okay. All right. Tell me about like your lab and many labs look for funding. And I don't know, I don't know if your funding is like, like, but tell me, tell me about position is funded, right? I'm a tenured professor, which basically means the university has agreed to pay for me in perpetuity. So long as I don't speak on, it takes a lot to get to that point, right? You've got to really prove you've got a fire idea. You know, so I'm not paying for myself. I could teach my couple of classes, go to my faculty meetings, do my service and go home. Or I could, you know, try to change the world, right? So that's what I'm doing. So how do I change the world? I have to bring in the money for all of that.

So we do it a couple ways. One way is we write grants, right? And there's like the National Institute of Health, the National Science Foundation, there are various kinds of foundations, family foundations, and other kinds of academic foundations that fund work competitively. And we're constantly trying to, you know, explain our ideas, justify them to peer reviewers and all that to try to bring in the funds to do the projects we want to do. So that's one thing that we've been very successful at that, but it is a constant, constant struggle. And then the other thing is we have philanthropists and we're also searching for a partner right now. We have a few leads, but there's always room for philanthropic support from people who just really believe in the work and who really believe in the aims and are willing to let us become a little more

programmatic and open-ended with the way in which we dig in on this. And so what I'm trying very hard to fund right now is the center I founded right before the pandemic, the Center for Affective Neuroscience Development, Learning and Education, which we are actively working in schools with teachers, with administrators, with policymakers, with parents. We're conducting research with teachers,

doing MRI research with teachers, also going in and observing teachers, like teachers who are really great, that the kids really focus and learn from and trust right trying to lift up what they're doing especially middle and high school teachers because you know they just get not appreciated at all we don't really understand at all the kind of social work and emotional engagement that goes into effective teaching in those tough disciplinary contexts you know know, by, I mean, like intellectual disciplinary context. So we're studying teachers, we're trying to lift up what they do. We're trying to write papers about that, you know, talks about that. And then we're also

studying kids, understanding how it is that they make meaning of the things that they've witnessed, the stories and narratives that they construct in their mind, how they learn from the news, from the things they see, and then what do they turn that into in terms of a lesson for themselves. And the way that those, you know, sort of constructed narratives actually we're finding literally grow the teenagers' brains over time, above and beyond the effects of IQ, above and beyond the effects of family socioeconomic status, parents' education level, the ways kids interact with complex stories about other people's lives and try to make sense out of it for themselves and then apply it in their world,

just the way they do that actually grows their brain in all kinds of important ways. Okay, real quick, because you've got a predictive model of success for middle school adolescents about self-actualization, success in school, relationship satisfaction. You've got some indicators, some positive indicators for later. So just really- We followed the kids longitudinally in adulthood and saw that, yes, indeed, five years ago, the way his kids were talking about Malala's story in Pakistan when we played her videos and talked to them about all that, that actually predicts their brain growth over time. But it's not that they were just talking about it. It's the way that they were talking about it.

That's right. That's the meaning they were making. Were they curious? Did they try to extract what we're calling these transcendent lessons? Things that would be true for me in my world that have the same sort of intention behind them, even though the situation is not the same here. managing their real social world around them. So kids who did this more also had a better acceptance of diversity, of friendships. They had a stronger sense of what we're calling values-based life goals. So the things they are trying to achieve in school, they're doing for a bigger purpose than just to get the thing done. You know, all that kind of stuff.

They're happier. They have better relationships. And then that brain growth. So we're not talking about across kids whose brain is like, what we're talking about Mike, two years ago, Mike, now Mary Helen, two years ago, Mary Helen. Now how has my brain changed? We can predict it by the way. I'm like curiously engaging saying like, not just Malala, like, Oh, that poor girl, you know, that's terrible. I hope she makes it, right? I wish I could help her.

That's nice. But do they also say, like, wait a minute, I didn't know not everybody in the world doesn't get to go to school. You mean girls don't get to go to school some places? Well, that's terrible. Why is that? I bet I could do something about that. If I should work harder in order to try to do something about that.

Maybe I could, right? When they start really taking it back to themselves and think about, well, but education is actually a human right. That's how you get access to choose your own life future. So that's not fair, right? When they start making these bigger ideas out of the thing, which we never said, all we said was, here's a girl got shot in the head for trying to go to school, when they do that no matter their iq that deep emotional engagement with this kind of you know transcendent story making is actually predicting their brain growth over time it's amazing what was okay so it predicts brain growth brain growth is it is it growth or connectivity? Is it like the actual site? It's

both. Okay. So it's two kinds of growth, gray matter, like the stuff around the outside and the white matter, the fiber tracks that are going through the middle. It's like the whole thing. It's so awesome. Crazy. Yeah. And then what was the, what was the prompt you would give them after they watched the video? How does this person's story make you feel? That's it. That's it. And, and if a kid writes, did they write or speak? No, they spoke on video. We were video. We're doing a video interview.

And if they said like, uh, what age group was this? Uh, 14, 15, 16. And they go, it's really sad. They could do that. And that's it. And that's it. Then you would lump that into like. Very concrete meaning making making very concrete. It's concrete. And doing that was actually

associated with getting along well in your life around you saying, but I got to tell you though, kids really got into this because we sat with them. I sat with them for two hours and shared them a whole series of really compelling, all of them true stories from kids around the world. I'm like, well, here's a kid in this place called Pakistan. You know where that is? Okay. So there's this group called the Taliban. Have you heard of them? All right. Well, it's the right. And they don't believe in girls going to school. So here's what happened. Blah, blah, blah. Now let's watch her explain how she thinks about it. Video of her when she's 12, right? How does her story make you feel, right?

You know, the first one or two, they're like, oh, sad. And then they start really getting going. I mean, there's not a kid who did not talk at least some of the time in these big transcendent ways. It's a very, very moving interview. It's meant to be very, very engaging because it's true. All of the stuff in there is true. It's hard to dismiss it. This is, this is in my mind, leveraging two first principles that are groundbreaking. One is your, your, your longitudinal that is really

important to be able to measure from this to that. but then you're looking at how structures and how emotional, how emotional making narratives are informing structure and then overtaught, which is like, I love what you're doing and that's why I wanted to highlight the research. And so, yeah. And then, so how can folks, if they, you know, none of the money goes to me, right? The more the money we bring in, the more I can hire young scientists, train them, engage, bring people to do the scanning, you know what I mean? It takes, it takes resources to do all of that. You can go to candle.usc.edu, right? So that's the Center for Affective Neuroscience, Development, Learning, and Education, candle.usc.edu. And there's a,

there's a button you can click where you can contact us. You can donate directly, or you can contact us to discuss, you know, a bigger gift where we can structure it, you know, with the university in a way that will suit you. That's very clever. If you want to put your name on a building, we can make that happen. We can, yes. Or you could put your name on a building or you could put your name on an experiment or two on a program that we run for teenagers and elderly people to get to know each other and help them build stories and watch how their brains grow. I mean, there's all kinds of opportunities to fund stuff that is really cool. I'm so happy to introduce you to our community.

Your fire, your intelligence, your ability to cross-pollinate complicated ideas and bring something meaningful to hopefully the now and next generation of learners. So thank you, Mary Helen, for contributing in your body of work and the way you've done before we met, but then the way that you've illuminated that research and those insights here. Thanks, Mike. Thanks for having me. It's really a pleasure to be part of your community and to be able to contribute something. I'm glad it's useful. Let's do more. Okay. All the best. Thanks. You too.

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