Dr. Immordino-Yang: How Emotions & Social Factors Impact Learning
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Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I am Andrew huberman and i'm a professor neurobiology and opened ology at stanford school of medicine today. My guest is doctor mary Helen inordinate yang doctor in mor deo Young is a professor of education, psychology and neuroscience at the university of southern california.

Her laboratory focuses on emotions and the role of emotions in learning, as well as how social interactions impact how we learn. Today's discussion is one that I found absolutely fascinating, because IT will reveal to you, in fact, to all of us how our temperament, that is, our emotionality, combined with our home environment and the school environments that we were raised in shape, what we know about the world, in our concepts of self. In thinking about that, we also discuss the education system and how different aspects of rules and how we are told to behave, and what constitute good behavior, bad behavior shape how we learn information and develop a sense of meaning in life.

If any of that sounds abstract, I promise you that today's discussion is incredibly practical. You will learn, for instance, how different styles of learning are going to favor different people from children into, and how we ought to think about learning in terms of our motion systems being our guide for what we learn and the information that we retain, and how we apply that information throughout life. For those of you that are parents or who are thinking of becoming parents, or who were one's children, so I believe that encompasses everybody out there.

Today's discussion will ARM you with an intellectual understanding of psychology and neuroscience as IT relates to learning, but also practical tools that you can apply in order to be able to learn more effectively. What I like so much about doctor in ordinary Young research and the discussion today is that SHE frames up beautifully how those who best learn from traditional forms of classroom learning, as well as those who learn from non traditional forms of learning, either in or out of the classroom, can best use that understanding yourself in order to learn in the way that is best for them. Before we begin, i'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and researchers at stanford.

IT is, however, part of my desired effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, i'd like to thank sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is element. Element is an electoral light drink with everything you need and nothing you don't.

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And that had a lot of different types of military to place the braining body into different states, and that he liked IT very much. So I gave the waking up up a try, and I too found IT to be extremely useful, because sometimes I only have a few minutes to meditate. Other times I have longer to meditate, and indeed, I love the fact that I can explore different types of meditation to bring about different levels of understanding about consciousness, but also to place my brain body into lots of different kinds of states, depending on which meditation I do.

I also love that the waking up up has lots of different types of yoga eja sessions. Those you don't know yogananda a is a process of lingers still, but keeping an active mind, it's very different than most meditations. And there is excEllent scientific data to show that yoga ea and something similar to IT called non sleep deep breath or nsd r, can greatly restore levels of cognitive and physical energy even, which is to a short ten minute session.

If you'd like to try the waking up up, you can go to waking up dot com slash huberman and access a free thirty day trial. Again, that's waking up dot com slashed huberman to access a free thirty day trial. And now for my discussion with doctor mary Helen in ord, o.

Yang, doctor in ordeal. Young, good to be here. Great to have you. I'd like to start off talking about something that to me seems a little bit high level, but I think is the perfect jumping off point.

I've heard you talk before about inspiration and all and as somebody who is interested in the brain and as somebody who's interested in the role of emotions and learning and life experience, inspiration and aw seems to me kind of rather high level emotional experiences compared to, say, fear or happiness. And yet inspiration and all just seem so fundamental to how we learn and navigate life. And before we started recording, we were talking about David goggins, of all people. And we will get back to that. But if you could just share with us what is the role of inspiration and all and story in how we learn and experience life starting at a Young age, and then maybe we can transition to all their ages yeah.

I mean, I think what you've noticed is actually fundamental to the content of being a human, is that our most high level complex in states, mind states, are also fundamentally hooking themselves into the most basic biological machinery that literally we share with alligators that keeps us alive. And that is both the power and the potential of being a human and the danger of IT. So our beliefs, our experiences, our interpretations of the meaning of things, which that's where the story comes, and the stories that we conger about, you know, collectively, with other people, culturally and spaces inside our ourselves.

Also, those stories become kind of the through line that organizes the way in which we construct our own experience, consciousness, even, I would say so when we hook into those very basic survival systems by recruiting them into these narratives about the nature of reality, the power of the meaning, we make what happens as we get this amazingly, both fundamental and high level state sim multi evensen where we feel expensive, we feel uh like it's all so incredibly beautiful. And we are, I would argue, actually ramping into or catching into the very basic survival mechanisms that make us conscious, that make us alive. And and that's that's, in essence, the power of being human. That's the power of our intelligence at this late stage in our evolution.

So when I was a kid, I love stories of all kinds. I think like most kids, I loved my curious George books. I'm told I like the bad bar books, but then quickly didn't like the bad bar books.

I liked the book where the red phone grows. I like books and stories about IT generally was boys for me, for whatever reason, that had some idea in mind or some ongoing chAllenge and that played out over time. And the character evolves across the story.

Ah and of course, many, many, many excEllent stories have all those features. Yeah, I can recall specific passages in those books to this day that made me feel something in my body. A I actually very familiar with the sensation of having child go up my spine as opposed to down my spine.

Early on our, I realized there sort of difference. Sometimes that travels up my spine, sometimes I saw distinguish what what that orients me too, were away from. But it's a very silent memory and experience for me to this day, so much so that as i'm describing the book where the red friend grows right now, I can feel like starting.

yeah.

i've heard you say before and and I love this quote, and I want to make sure that you get attribution for this, not me, that we basically have a brain to control our body.

What is that? The role of the brain in controlling the body? And do you think that there are an infinite number of ways in which our brain does that? Or are we really talking about a language between brain and body of, you know, tingles on the back of our neck to go up, tingles on the back of our internet to go down, stomach feeling kind of tight and making us scree away or kind of warm and wanting to approach?

In other words, do you think that the conversation between the brain and body is primitive, sophisticated? How nuance is IT? Because the language is very nuances. We could I come up with fifty words just in english for the state of being happy? Yeah but the feeling of being happy, I experiences along a continuum of a little bit happy to the but it's it's kind of one thing really so if if you would could you comment on this notion of the brain being the organ that's responsible for controlling the body and what that dialogue is like, what the silly balls and confidence of IT are like, perhaps not at the level of biology but um at the level of psychology and how we subjectively experience that.

sure. So the first thing i'll say is that I learned that idea from from working with antonia to mozo. So, uh, he was my post croll mentor. And he taught me first that uh, this notion that the that is the feeling of the body, it's it's an organism ability to represent or map the state of the interior and exterior of the body that becomes the sub straight for consciousness and for the mind.

Um so I would want to give him credit because I did I didn't think of that first but the work that i've been doing is an elaboration of that. It's basically addressing exactly the question that your asking, which is how is IT that we construct a narrative, construct a conscious dealing, which that word I take from tonia and hanna right to mazo. How is IT that we construct a feeling and sort of narratives that feeling elaborate that feeling into something that feels like a narrative, that feels like a belief data and emotion data and experience? I mean that in a very verb, likely.

And and what is the role of embodiment in that, what is the role of the brain in that um and and what also is the role of the culture and the cultural context and other people in that because what were really learning across the sciences right now is just how incredibly and interdependent our species is. I mean, our biology is inherently a social one. We are directly dependent on other people for the formulation of our own sense of self.

And we interact with one another CT and co construct, uh, a sense of self and a sense of meaning via those cultural spaces and those sort of um nuanced ways of accommodating each other mentally and physically that that lead to the feeling of us. So you know back to your original question, there's a lot we don't know there. Um but I think what's very clear is that the kind of background sense of the body, the mapping and the regulation of the body is A A basic substrate, a kind of of trapline for the mind.

And so we are managing our survival. You know we now have lots of evidence from across many kinds of science about the inner dependence of our stress and social relationships and our immunity and our right and and our ability to digest food and and it's even now very clear that it's not even just us. There's, i'm hope, microbial and all kinds of other organisms that are assisting us in that and that are collaborating with us in that.

And then the brain is a specialized organ of the body. In fact, it's not a it's not a separate thing. It's an outgrowth or an elaboration of that process.

It's a specialization of that process, a localization of IT um in a way that provides enough processing power to be able to really construct uh all kinds of feelings and mental states and beliefs and imaginings you know um out of I out of basically just the the feeling of being here. And then the amazing part is that our brain is also imposing those back down onto our body. So the way in which our body reacts um and is modulated in response mental states is also very real.

So we have a kind of like a dynamic uh conversation happening that's happening in very raw and and direct ways that neurochemicals and others and also in broader, longer term, lower fluctuating patterns around, you know, other kinds of hormonal changes and things like that. So long multiple time scales simmun tane ously. We have a kind of whole right, a humanistic hall of brain and body and mind that are kind of co conjurin one another in real time.

And that leads to all kinds of dynamic possibility spaces for how we are and how we feel as we grow through time. And I think as humans, the legacy of our intelligence is to tap into those possibility spaces and start to construct them into meaningful, meaningful sort of chains of ideas, of experiences over time that we call story. And that, I think, is what you are tapping into. As a little boy, you are hungry for father, for for a kind of structure for those feelings, that you could start to help them evolve from one into the other and change them together in ways that produce meaning.

I'm fascinated by the idea that early in life we experience some interaction with the world, could be with other people, could be with an object in the world, and that makes us feel something powerful. And that lays attempt of of recognition, meaning that later in life, and perhaps throughout life, were always consciously, you're so consciously going back to train, to experience that saying kind of all or inspiration.

Because again, that the what the circumstances almost certainly vary from being a five year old to being a at a lesson in into adult od into the I guess gera ric years. Do they still call at that? Um probably I probably use the politically increate term but forgive me seventy five to one hundred and twenty five and yet the feeling is the same, right you feeling. And so it's as if a word can mean the same thing.

But we used fifty different ways, maybe five thousand different ways in in this analogy i'm saying that the word is the feeling and you know and it's used so many different ways because um occasionally you'll read of a scientific manuscrip is so cool it's the same way that I feel when I was nine years old and I spent all time in the pet store looking at tropical fish and tropical birds and thinking, oh my god, that fresh water disguised fish is the coolest thing i've ever seen and again, I I think I must have a strong memory for these kinds of things because I still I feel IT right now in my body so he says, if the the same thing maps to some different circumstances. So is what we're learning across the lifespan a recognition of feelings in our body as this is something I like because of the way that makes my body feel or is IT cognitive or both in from your answer a moment ago IT seems like it's so interconnected and by directional and fast that it's impossible to really say that feelings are in the body or in the brain. It's really happening similar .

yeah dynamic emergency. They give an example so that I use sometimes to help myself understand the notion. So you know, my my little daughter, okay, na, when he was two, two and seven months, two and four months of that, that shea, very variable kid, and I was in in the kitchen one day drinking a cup tea.

I was sad about something that happened in my life, but I said I was not we big anything. I was just sitting now. I must look kind of lost in my own thoughts.

She's played around on the floor. SHE came over to me. I'll never forget this tiny little person. SHE comes over to me and notice I wasn't really there with her, you know I mean and SHE my almost hanging and down SHE picked up my ARM and SHE holder against her face like that and SHE said, I wonder and baby talk because you want to understand he said, don't worry, mom, i'll take care of you and I said, yeah and I said, don't know that sorry.

That's so sweet really well, i'll take her of you too and he said, and mom, I where we love you, I really love you and then he said, I mean, I really love you oh, I really love your ARM mother, right? Fast forward two years later, almost exactly two years, she's four and a couple months. And SHE wasn't bed when nights and in her bed in the dark.

And I walk by and I listened at the door to see if you sleep in there. And I hear little whisper comes out and he says, mama, I love you more than i'm glad, but there's daytime, right? What's changed developmental from her at each two to her at each four? right? I would argue that the physiological substrate of her attachment to her mother is probably quite similar.

SHE had this sort of viral, automatic, biological, you might say, attachment connection to me emotionally, that he was trying to leverage in the service of making sense of, you know, being active in that world and adapting herself to the situation, helping me in first place, right? But what's change remarkably is not the sub straight of that attachment is her ability to conceptualize IT right? When she's two, her love is experienced, as is incredibly concrete, embodied, real physical thing, like, I love you. I mean, I really love the body part I am currently smashing against my face, right? Whereas two years later, he can concept ze that love in terms of an idea which is no, wouldn't be awful if there was nighttime all the time and there was no sunshine and daylight, and I couldn't go out to, and I could.

You're describing my biggest fear and people, listeners in this pogis. You know that i'm going to go into the grave hopely a long time from now. Yeah, telling people to get morning some light, please continue.

No, but that's right. So she's thinking about how much he is grateful for there to be sunlight. And in her little mind, SHE connected that to the feeling of being attached to me and used one to explain the other, right? So that both things now have meaning.

And that is the way, that is the way I think that we start to elaborate these very basic physiological attachment states of versions, states, right, motivational states of various sorts into mental states, beliefs, poems, you know, a love songs, all the things that he does, right, even between age two and age four, that really are mental elaborations, meaning making of that very physiologically basic sensation. Does that answer you? Your question .

IT answers that incredibly clearly. And so much so that i'd like to continue to build on that example um because I think it's very related for people and it's the first time that i've ever heard the embodiment of emotions described in a developmental framework that truly makes sense. okay. So thank you. So the contact with your arms or your ARM or both was the was the life example that he was using IT IT as a two year old that maps to an internal feeling and and we're going to assume she's not here.

We don't ever in a brain scanner, we can ask, but we're going to assume that her experience of being put up at night and and feeling so so much love from and for you map to her then growing understanding of the the world around her, the fact that they are day and night and sunshine. So as her knowledge base grows, SHE can add examples to the feeling. And i'm assuming that doesn't matter how he is now, but i'm assuming there is a fourteen year old, the knowledge basis going to be different and is going to map to that feeling again and again.

So the question is, is what we are doing across the lifespan is recognizing um sort of I don't want to call them primitives, but um basic emotional states which are not infinite but can be alone at each one along a continuum. So a little bit of love completely in love along a continuum and everything in between, a little angry, annoyed to completely furious. Are we talking about maybe um ten to thirty core emotions that then we are just simply binning our experiences into and onto and mapping onto. And then that's our life story. And i'm not trying over simplify things, but that seems to me like a pretty great way for a nervous system to navigate a world that is infinitely complex yeah and has a lot of surprised, both positive and negative and in which, like every organism, our main goal is to survive as long as possible and not for everybody, but in many cases, to try make more of ourselves, mean those going to be the basic drive, survive and make .

more of oneself, as seems to be the .

so is that in an overly simplistic way to think about IT? Or does IT does IT work? Even if there is more that needs to be added? Does that work? As a twenty year old, I learn things in college, and like, this is awesome.

The first time I learned about the hypotheses, this little marble size structure, in the fact that different neurons sitting right next to each other can put this into a rage. Where will make us want to meet, or will make us thirsty or hungry or tired? I was like, wow, yeah.

I I mean, just blew me away. IT still blows me away. Yes, but the feeling is the same as looking at the discussion that in mona's pet shop in california avenue and i'm .

nine years old, so is about, yes, I think there is there's an awful lot of basic physiological mechanisms that are that become motivational mechanisms right in in all the senses, uh, adaptive mechanisms that we share with all life forms, not even just all animals, but all life forms, but they look different in different life forms for sure, because the adaptive functions, the time scales and everything are different.

If you're a tree and if you're a fish, then if you a slight mold or your me, right? But I think you're right that what we basically are doing is taking this very primitive physiological regulatory capacity that are essentially there to keep you alive. And and that's a very dynamic thing.

To keep your life, you have to constantly a for the the needs of the internal organism, the needs of the internal uh you know the the minds of the external l environment on that organism and being able to manage in that space over time is a very complex dynamic um of the iterative process. And we take those processes and we counter out of them a form of consciousness and awareness of those processes that becomes something that feels mentally powerful to us. And and I think one of the ways that we can know that what you're saying is right is that, you know, this is just our first experiment on this.

But but I think it's really point and we we we first started to study um the the ways people would react to social stimuli to have emotions like compassion or or admiration in the M R I scanner um by telling people uh stories of true people, situations that invoked the emotions in all kinds of pillaging. And then we ask people, how does that make you feel? Then we can see what do they actually feel that way and then we move them into the M R S. And and ask him again to watch the story and and what we expected we had some very basic hypotheses that things like i'm watching someone else under a physical pain would activate the same systems in your grain that allow you to feel physical pain um in the same with pleasure around admiration for skill by watching somebody do flips on their bike on a railroad tie or whatever is right um or virtue right watching a civil rights leader or somebody who does something that's incredibly virtuously powerful but not physically skilled um and we had a real surprise in those findings uh which I think really went against the prevAiling notion of how emotion works in which is still something which I wrestle with trying to understand.

So we hypothesize that feeling emotions about very physical, correct things, and feeling emotions about you are like drawing them in space, but feeling emotions about complex, elaborated things like compassion for someone having lost a smells or something where you don't see any real physical pain, but you can imagine how they're feeling based on your shared experience um of loss, right, or admission for virtue um that those things would build uh neurobiological ally the way that they build developmentally, the way that they build evolutionarily um and we did find that to be the case, and many other groups and experiments have found that too. But what was a real surprise to us is that emotions based in pain and emotions based in something rewarding or pleasurable, like virtue, which is really inspiring as people describe IT. We're actually recruiting the same brain systems, including the hypothesis, right? And other systems like the anterior insoo, which is basically visceral sama motor cortex.

It's cortex that feels the state of how you digesting your lunch, whether your heart pounding all these kinds of things, right? What we found is that these emotions, when they get complex, when they're about stories, the baLance is no longer the defining feature. The violence doesn't even matter that much.

Instead, what matters is, does the emotion pertain to a story that is countered in our minds, or does IT mainly pertained to what you can directly witnessed looking at the person? So they step off a curb, they break the ankle and you go, oh, that looks like a really hurt, right versus there's eating dinner alone in a restaurant and somebody tells you his bell died just a month ago, right? Where you have to tell yourself an entire story about how he must be feeling in that situation as compared, just looking at and seeing the ankle and go, you know, and IT was that leap, which is really uniquely human, which is fully developed, really, throughout a very protracted period, right? Little children do not fully appreciate those kinds of mental states yet, right? And anatole scent, kids are all about trying to conger and simulate these things.

And they do IT very, you know, they overdo IT and they do IT in these very sort of awkward ways that adults recognize as you know, um not likely to correspond fully to reality right at many times. And then we start to build more and more facility, more and more sort of wisdom around concerning the story that makes the most direct arsonist sense out of the things that you imagine someone else may have experienced, given the complexities of the context in which they find themselves. IT becomes more and more dynamic, more and more sort of inferential.

And so this also goes back to what you are saying about development. This is actually how I see development across less. My little two year old loves the ARM. Then he loves me as much as something else that he really appreciates, like daylight. And then he goes on from there.

And when she's eighty, got wings someday, right? She'll be making a different kind of story, picking out things that matter in more subways that other people may not notice, because of the historical context, because of her her more lived experience that he brings to that story, right? So the things that become silly ant, the things you learn how to notice and build a story out of our developmental, and they're learned across time.

But the basic fundamental processes around the emotions are always driving the need to make the story. And so just to come back answering what you said before, I think we have this incredibly complex dynamic set of basic emotions, or whatever you want to them, physiological states that we share with other organisms that are basically action programs that teach you run away from this, right, move toward that. Um eat this, don't eat that right.

But those things in humans, and to a lesser degree, animals become the father for not just action programs in the moment, but ideas that transcend time, ideas that become the narratives of the stuff of beliefs, of values, of uh, of identities, of those more affiliate. You know, essences of us that are conjured entirely by us in cultural spaces are fundamentally grounded into our ability to experience the world in a real physical, emotional ed sense. But but elaborated far beyond that.

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Again, that's a letter Greenstock comes slash huberman to get the five free travel packs and the year supply of vitamin d three k two. I started off staying the visual system, and I don't want this to turn into a discussion about the visual system. But in the visual system we know that there's a what's called a high article organization where the eye codes and can respond to edges and light verse, dark and red, Green, blue.

And from that very basic set of building blocks, there's an elaboration, or a build up of what's really called the iceberg model that was developed by my scientific grandparents, David, people on to the reason who won the nobel prize for that work, where you can look at somebody y's face and recognize IT, or see a profile moving IT in particularly direction, and still recognize that person, or see a word written in and conceptualized in your minds eye, what that word like bird actually looks like, like parakeet blue hera key. In other words, there is a high article build up, and what you're describing sounds somewhat similar, that there is a hierarch organization whereby through development, we first learned, I guess, earlier I called them primitives. But basic building blocks of when someone steps on my foot, hurt can hurt a lot or a little bit, depending on who stepped on my foot, whether I have a shoot.

Once he started learning context. But there's a build up on top of the basic symmetry experience of different examples that map to pain, including emotional pain and physical pain, because we know those are interpreted somewhat and that over time, this builds up so that we have your countless examples. But you added, you said something else that that goes beyond that.

The hierarchical organization that we see in the visual system, which is that when there's a narrative or a story that we have to add, IT changes something about the representation of emotion. I'm so struck by this, by this comparison between seeing somebody step off a curb and break their ankle, like giving as described, and just like a folding angle, like ouch. Yeah.

I just look at what you're doing with your face.

body. Yeah, I know I broke my left foot five times growing up the same sport and just I can still hear and feel the thing going. And that means six months in a cast or whatever is versus a story.

You seeing somebody sitting alone in a cafe writing in their journal, and then you learning that they just lost their spouse of seventy five years. Two fundamental different visual images, right? The emotion could perhaps be the same like, ah yes, that is rough. And yet the need to impose story, yes, changes IT. Do I understand that correctly, that there's something not just more on developmentally mature about adding in story and adding context, but that when we have to do that, that there's something that's fundamental different about how the emotions are mapped in the brain? I guess that perhaps the answer i'm looking for is, what did you see in brain scanning experiments where somebody views a simply a physical break of a somebody y's lim versus somebody has to add story. Is there something that that comes out in the subtraction of one from the other that tells us, oh, there's a whole set of brain networks that are not just about saying ouch, yes, but that have to do with the the need to counter up story and what what are those brain areas and then MIT perhaps a little bit and actually .

that that is exactly what we found, the whole system of brain areas that that did, which now many people have described. And we're still trying to understand the full role of these networks. But you know um these regions together are called in the literature the so called default mode network, right? Because there were these the co activation of these characteristic regions of the brain, which are in the back middle of the head and some characteristic regions no lateral prior to and you know um you know those were first described uh in newer imaging experiments where people were asked to just rest right, rest and relax.

Don't think about anything, just clear your mind for a few minutes right this is markets right on his colleagues back in two thousand one um and then and then contrasting that with um uh tasks where people have to do something very you attention focus requiring where you really have to work hard and think. And they found that these highly meta lic characteristic regions of the brain worth coming online and activating themselves when the person was resting and deactivating a decoupling from one another, not talking back and forth in exchanging signal very much um when someone was doing a really effortful mental task. And that was a real canon drum for a long time.

And what we now know is, you know, when you ask somebody to think about nothing, arrest for a few minutes, lying in the skin of thing. I am talking about anything. I'm thinking nothing.

And then you start daydreaming about all manner of stories. You start to imagine yourself into the future. Here I am when I know a pcs today.

You know where he is, my grandmother birthday week. I wonder you like to go alone? sure. If sh'd rather have flowers, you know, you're imagining other people's mind states you're thinking is like, I mad to me at work, you know, I wonder if I should, you know, change jobs. You know, you're thinking about all kinds of possible spaces that don't actually physically exist in the real here and now and and so what we found is that our our findings were, I think some of the first, if not the first, to to a actively demonstrate an increase in activation in these default mode systems.

Not a decoupling of them, but an activation of them when we ask somebody to do an effort, full mental task, and what was the task asking people, how do you feel about this story, which involves a lot of imposing of cultural and contextually knowledge to be able to appreciate? So the story of the dive, sitting in the cafe, writing in his journal, uh, who lost his spouse of seventy five years, you have to know a lot to be able to appreciate how he must be feeling. How does that make you feel? Let me pull up a lot of relevant knowledge, personal experiences and memories, and then hypothesize generate some kind of uh narrative, some kind of storyline that would accommodate his situation and allow me to to infer those kinds of stories which are very different from hear somebody stepping off the curve.

Look at that ankle, right? It's very obvious how you how that makes the person feel and how you should feel about that. You don't really need to bring a whole lot of cultural knowledge about their a personal history with their pose to be able to understand that breaking your ankle hearts, right? And what we found is that IT was those kinds of stories where people had to bring a lot of contextual knowledge to fully ate that activated these default .

mode systems.

the thing of the sing of the spouse. So what we later showed in a series of experiments contrasting us true stories that are meant to induce admiration for skill right like something physically skillful so we can uh or cognitively skilful and memorize a rubik cube and solve IT with your eyes closed right, or do flips on your bicycle and land on a road type right like this incredibly skillful things um as compared to uh uh the same kind of basic emotion in the sense of feeling like inspired um like attracted to IT, like it's pleasure, like it's really cool.

Like you wish you could do that too but now it's about a state of that person's mind or quality of character or disposition of self. So talking about the incredibly brave uh, actions of malaria in pakistan, standing up to the past, to the to the totally buton right where it's not about how well he walks down the street holding her school book. There's nothing really physically skillful to see there.

It's about the conditions under what she's doing IT and what you can infer about her state of mind and her quality of character to be engaging in these actions under those conditions and those complex kinds of inferences we found um activate these default mode systems uniquely and in fact we can in trial by trial experiment. So literally, depending on what you say about a story, whether IT inspires you that particular story out of fifty right in a two hour interview beforehand, if you are inspired by a particular story as compared to another or not, may not resonate with you right? Um then when we put you in the MRI scanner, we can predict that you will actually activate these neural systems differentially based on your psychological reaction in the interview.

So we can actually show that there are systematic ways in which these large scale networks of the brain, so the way in which the brains kind of balancing its activity and its cross talk around the different parts that are contributing different kinds of processing, those dynamic baLances are are different when someone is what we're doing, what we're calling out, transcending the situation of that person, right, and starting to learn something bigger about what IT all means or what the story is or the the broader reason why this inspires me um and not just is about her. right. So you can look at mola and you can say, you know oh uh I hope he makes IT that's that's that's really unfair and and like bright or you can look at her and say, and kids say this to us and experiments with teenagers um but wait a minute and they actually wait, they covered their face, they close their eyes.

They look away from the from the video and they look at the plane suit ceiling and we can actually get codes with the volume off to identify these periods of time and say that when they come back from that pause, their speech lose, their, their postures closes, right? They put their hands down, that kind of thing. They don't just sure, right? And when they come back from that, they are talking about two things.

They're talking about the broader inferential narrative around what all this means. We I didn't know not everybody in the world doesn't get to go to you know gets to go to school, you know that's not right, right and and these ethical interpretations, that's not right. And the third thing that comes up is a feeling of self and what that means for you, because you're using your own self and conscious ness as a kind of springboard, like a traveling, like we said before, to try to appreciate what IT must be like to be her.

So the next thing people say to us, or kids say to us, especially as IT, makes me realize that I go to school all the time and I kind of take IT for granted, and maybe I should work harder to try to do something about that for other people, you know. So we have this incredible confluence in the brain and mind, this layer of of, of real physical actions and things that happen that you can directly observe with the visual system right in the world. And then you impose upon those A A desire to construct a story or meaning, and you elaborate ate that meaning.

And in doing so, you also wrap up the internal sense of self awareness of me being me, of conscious systems, systems that support consciousness in the brain and brain stamp, very basic things we share with alligators, right, that become that kind of inspired state of you. Like, wait, IT makes me want to do more for the world. Or IT makes me inspired to know there are people like her.

SHE gives me hope for humanity. Wanted, told me, right? So we've got this incredible dynamically clearing of the feeling of the body, the real physical body, the observation and sensation perception of the world around us in a physical real or social real sense, and then the elaboration of that into these cultural narrative that become feeling states and where violence kinds of disappears, right?

IT doesn't matter so much anymore, whether it's painful or pleasurable, it's more about doesn't mean something i'm suffering because of helping someone else, right? And so IT becomes something desirable even though IT hurts me, right? Others SE none of us would go through child earth, right? And so it's that meaning process that makes us really uniquely human and that is the development of these emotions over time. I think .

incredible if I am understanding correctly, there's a feeling state in our body when we experience um or observe somebody in in their own feeling state or experience IT may be the same as theirs might be different. And Frankly.

as a neuroscience st, i'm gonna will never know .

exactly based on. So for my knowledge of color, vision and the distribution of coins to explain why i'm saying that the distribution of colon photo pigments in your eye and my eye are extremely different to the point where we're not working with the same power. And I think that makes lives. And but assuming that neither of us is color blind, red is similar enough to both of us that we both look at and say, that's red, but one in eighty males is red. Green color blind would look at IT and would see what you and I call red and call IT orange .

in any event .

when we let's say listen to or watch and listen to burn luther kings classic I have a dreams peach um or when I hear certain music that I first heard when I was fourteen as a particularly interesting for me time in my life, in part because I was fourteen. And we'll get back .

to that and adolescence.

right? I'll just say i'll go on record by saying that I think that the music that we listen to in our adolescence and ten years is one of the main ways in which we come to recognize the extremes of these feeling state template ts that you're describing. I can one of the ways I prepare for podcasts is to walk and and for my solo pod cases to walk and go through some of the narrative of neighbors think come crazy.

But that's okay. I think they're crazy too. That's exactly. And but I I always know what music to listen to before I do a solo podcast, depending on the state that I happened to be in. Driving into the studios is the one I need to be in, in order to deliver that particular material.

And I know because it's almost like knowing what pilot of colors, of emotional colors I have in me at the moment, in which ones are going to be required to deliver that material because IT is different depending on on the topic matter for that episode. What i'm referring to here is, is this idea that you, we come to understand emotions through our own experience, and how observing other people and listen to certain music can influence that. And I I realized that some people probably have more of a buffer between their um experience to the outside world, so called exterior tion, seeing things outside and their internal landscape.

Some people I realized have very little narrative distancing. In fact, live with someone who has very little narrative distancing. When SHE watches a movie, if the person gets punched, yeah SHE ducks SHE SHE flinches um if it's a happy movie, SHE gets happy yeah if somebody in the movie is sad SHE really feels in for a while gone. This is like, really seems a little extreme, but i've talked to professionals about this. And in something called lack of narrative distances.

transportation is another way to say that you being transported by a story, right?

And I think that is IT hasn't adaptive utility. I'm not being critical. I think it's an incredibly interesting aspect to ourselves.

Some of us. I have a lot more narrative, especially with violence. And I I think that I drop around a lot more violence than he did.

And so I see somebody you know get be headed in a film and I and I unless it's something where i've really been built into the story of that person and he was a real world thing that I knew actually happened, then I I just kind of go, okay, what's a movie? There's a movie. It's not real.

One of it's a movie about something those real that might be a little bit more of an emotional impact. And of course, if it's a documentary and its real footage, it's pretty rough. Yeah yes but I don't um i'm not horrified in the in the way that he is horrified. I'm horrified but not to the same. Um so obviously that some of us have more of a buffer than others and you can see this in a movie or in a classroom full of kids watching A A speech like the eyes of a dream speech, or hearing the rose apart story, for instance, or listening to and watching a David organs social media post which I my David earlier because your son had a question for me about David organs.

I happened to um have the good fortune of having met and know a little bit I don't know very well but I know um in from some in person interactions and he has every IT is intense and every bit as serious about his ongoing progression as he appears to be there there's no false so there IT is one hundred percent data fact he does what he claims to do and more yeah um that we don't hear about super impress of human being so when we see something like a David gans post or we watching listen to that I have a dream speech and we start to feel something yeah like oh we're feeling inspired to use the the basic language are we mapping to some subconscious awareness of that in ourselves um meaning are we mapping to sometime when we felt inspired in another circumstance or are we really is this merely a kind of a return to a feeling state that we have to recognize? I don't know experiments i've ever been done on this, but is there any way to to determine whether or not we can truly have novel emotions passage fifteen or we really just returning or we really just doing a sort of temple let matching of while i'm feeling this again and and this makes me feel capable like I knew out and run today, even though I was gonna basically not run today. Or you know it's possible to have A A fantasy view about how the world could be in terms of um equality that um and PPT unity.

And you know what that's so consciously is my brain saying, yeah I remember when I was six and and I didn't know the difference between some people having opportunity and other people not having opportunity. Um is that what's happening? Or do you think that we are more sophisticated than that and we are actually really um responding to what we think we're responding to.

okay. Wow, there's a lot in there. Um a couple a couple of things to starts. The the first thing I was thinking before when you were talking about the visual system, which I think is relevant now um is is that as humans, the more developed we get, the more experience we have, the more um we've adapted to the context in which we live you know the real physical context, in this case the visual context included um but also the cultural values of that context, the things we've noticed other people notice, right, how do you learn when you're live in in the jungle that one you see I balls, you no go stay in next to your mommy, right um so you learn what to notice. You learn what what you need to attend to in the world.

And you're so when we are perceiving things, either very basic things like a visual scene or hugely complex, elaborate things like, uh, mart luthor kings speech, we are as much imposing on to the world our own expectations of what is there as we are perceiving what's actually there, right? So as we impose on to the world, we bring what you might call our cultural ways of seeing and knowing our values and beliefs, and we push them onto the experience of what we notice. So even in very basic ways, things like cultural values, uh change the way in which people observe and remember scenes, right? So you know there's classic work by no kai yma and other people showing that in japan versus and.

Uh in the U S, uh when you show people a scene of um you know I can underwater scene with like all the beautiful things around water, rocks and plants and things and fish me by and then one big fish limby right and you ask a japanese person what's is a picture of, they tend to talk about its a scene of rocks and plants and little fish and then a big fish swims by um if you ask an american uh uh western educated person, what is this picture of, they say, oh it's a fish women through a scene right we we tend to notice first. And you can have shown that this is, you know, is very, very automatic. It's very low level.

It's perceptual, not just conceptual, and IT actually change what people actually notice in the scene and what they remember later and all that kind of stuff, right? We learn how to sort of filter input. We are not little, you know uh, robots or little, uh uh, video cameras walking around observing the world.

And so when we see something as complex as a social story, we impose on to that all kinds of personal experiences, so you said, are we ever able to experience new emotions after age fifteen? I think no. But we are very well able to experience new feelings, right? Which are the complex ellis orations of these physiological states and the stories we tell ourselves about the meaning behind them that is developing all the time.

And it's developing through all kinds of porto al cogniac media. We do IT through our science, right, by being inspired and IT in something, by being in all of something. We do IT through art, through trying to press an emotion or a feeling or a value state through the way in which we portrayed something to other people, right?

As humans we are driven, and an, even as cave people, we were driven to say, I was here, here's my hand print. I'm going to spit IT onto a rock. So forever more anybody else comes in here, he's going to see that IT was me who was here.

And I have a me, right? And so what we're really doing is moving through the world, not in this kind of receptive, passive way, but we are actively imposing ourselves onto the world. We're actively bringing our interpretive power and adapting what we do next relative to the way in which we accommodate, right? P, H, J talked about this one hundred years ago, accommodate or a simulate those things into us that we that that may disagree with our schema that may that may align and accord and reinforce them. So this matters a lot for the ways that humans experienced the world more broadly because think about, for example, um a terrible topic like genocide or the holocaust.

Does something like that happen, right? How is IT that people who have empathy, who who love their family, who love neighbors, can suddenly turn on each other, right? What's happened is they've shift, did the way in which they narrow ze, the context of those events, the way in which they impose interpretation on somebody else.

Pain has been fundamentally shifted from that's another human suffering to that's not a human, that's A A rat, a pig, a bug, whatever. IT is right. And that dehumanization process allows us to shift our stories set so that we bring another set of values and beliefs into the space.

Um can I just i'm glad that you brought up that dark example yeah because my understanding from my psychology courses in university were that as much as we would all like to think that we are incapable of being the commitments of genocide, that there are studies that we're done in the fifties but then have been repeated over decades, showing that in certain context, essentially everybody and anybody would respond to a an authoritarian figure and torture somebody else and and i'm sure as people are listening to us this, they're thinking, no, I would absolutely not do that, but all the data point to the fact that if the conditions were set in a particular way, you and I and everybody else most certainly would. A very easy idea that goes back to, I think, Young idea that we have all things inside of us and we certainly all the neural circuitry components inside of us for um rage and contempt and um and Harrison most treatment of others as well as all the good stuff. But I am just glad that you brought up this example because um I think that for a lot of people it's inconsiderable but i've never heard IT framed the way that you are describing IT which is that if the story becomes not about other person suffering but primarily about one's own story of suffering and that can suppress or literally inhibit the neural circuits that evoke empathy, then IT makes perfectly good neurobiological sense to why that would at least be possible yeah and of course I don't think it's a good thing is just like many aspects of our biology and psychology just happens to be the way things .

are IT is and I think IT really, I think, I mean, i'm the ever the optimist. I'm also ever the educator, right? You know, i'm a teacher. I'm very also very interested in the way that we design educational experiences for Young. I think the only hope we have to protect ourselves against these possibilities is to systematically develop dispositions on ourselves, procured ties within ourselves, question our own motives and to deconstruct our own assumptions about situations and to engage with other people's perspectives systematically. And when we developed those dispositions, the hope is that we are developing within ourselves a kind of um uh veto system, right, a system for checking our own motivations against other people's experiences of those motivations.

And you know so much of what's leading, I think so now we're going in another direction and kind of a political direction, but so much what's leading us into these very divisive political types, for example, not just and you know the rise of authoritarian and not just in the us or the threat of IT, not just in the us. But around many places in the world, all of which, by the way, western educated um uh is that we are taught that to know something means you owe something in yourself and then you take that with you and you impose on on the world further more. I know how to do algabid ii and I can do IT whenever you ask me kind of thing and that's what a good student is, where when people in learn to engage with their own knowledge states in in more curious, open minded, flexible ways, then we dispositioned teach ves to to check our assumptions, to rethink what we think we know.

And, and this is key developmental to notice when we need to do that and when we should just flow ahead. And it's totally fine. And and so what we're doing, I think right now to ourselves, both in the education system end in things like social media, is we're reinforcing our own biases by diving down rabbit holes where you rehear the same thing over and over again, that reinforces your own belief systems. And then you come to believe those things, and those put you on a train toward a particular kind of action, or believe m that never becomes deconstructed and is very comfortable and easy to do.

But the responsibility I think, we have as individuals and as groups, as humans, given the amazing intelligence we have, is to rise above that and actually look back on our own selves, reflectively and deconstruct our preferences, deconstruct our values and our beliefs, and systematically query them specifically around how they impact or influence or or or change the situations of those around us or don't, right? The situations and sustainability of the world that supports us, or don't. And so IT IT all comes back to the emotions that drive are thinking. So we have this very basic primitive physiological states which vary across individuals the degree to which they are you know incredibly powerful, easily evoked veris.

Not you know there's a lot of range that there are all of that variation makes things interesting, right um but it's our ability to learn to experience those and to no develop wisdom around when we need to query our own emotions and deconstruct the narratives that are that we're using to validate or substantiate those kinds of emotions in order to assess whether we actually are right, whether we should continue or whether we should step back and and and reframe, right? And so that kind of mental flexibility really comes out of an emotional disposition IT. IT is our ability. So IT takes IT back to what you are asking at the very beginning.

IT is our ability to not just dry from what feels like the bottom up, which of course is always starting on the top down because you've got some interpretation of the world that makes you feel fear, that makes you got to do that you right um but also to be able to rise above, to transcend and think about what are the broader systemic, historical, a ethical, civic implications of this narrative on telling myself which feels default like the truth and how might I construct those systematically and how might I invite others to give me their version of those events and engage with those systematically in order to be able to really appreciate the implications of my beliefs. And so the bottom line is that the emotions that we're talking about today are actually the fundamental drivers of all of our thinking, decision making, relationship building, right, our community lives and our personal well being, all in one mix. But that doesn't kind of excuse us for acting on the request. IT actually abuse us with a responsibility to then developed dispositions to systematically query those and reframe them when they are not serving .

as the worldview. Exactly what you said, so much so that, you know, I am a big believer in following lots of different types of social media accounts. Yeah, i've taken some heat here in there. People automatically assume that if you follow an account, that you subscribe to that ideology. But I follow many accounts to my disagree with what they say yes specifically so that I can learn different perspectives um as far as I know where the same species I mean these other people.

yes far as we are.

yes, sometimes I wonder but um they probably onder the same without they wonder to um and there's enormous range in in those of those accounts that I follow um and I follow different accounts for different reasons some for entertainment, some for information, some for chAllenging myself, some for um my desire to be baffled every now and again but to always return to this idea that we we are all basically working with the same building blocks of neurons and neurochemistry some people's dope in which whether not you're into bitcoin or um traditional currency, the one true currency that universal is dopamine everyone is working for dope yeah and exchanging their own dopamine with world experiences.

But there's n one of the reason. I think it's important to not be silloth ed in ones thinking or exposure to different things on social media. A somewhat controversial statement actually because I think a lot of people assume that if you follow somebody from a particular political party that that means that you vote that political party at a um but that to me always seem crazy unfortunately, have is a good friend who was on this podcast, rick rubin, who was extremely accomplish music producer and instead produce music from essentially average age of music puncog, which I got my start and still love punk rock music so much by classical and hip hop and everything in between. And rick is somebody who forrid is so broadly, and I really learned to try and forrid broadly in terms of ideas and ideologies. And it's, I think a lot of were just scared to be exposed to something that they hate so much because they don't like that feeling in their body .

of of disagreement um but I have since is very you know that kind of cognitive distant because that is very difficult .

IT takes work to resolve that yeah I I guess is I like think there's a way to step back from that and observe IT not from a disconnected stance but from a place of curiosity about what's driving those mechanisms in people and and maybe where we need to adjust thinking maybe not to adopt their mode of thinking one hundred percent, but maybe you know ten percent or two percent.

I think one of the the reason things are so divisive right now is because of social media and the silvering, or of very divergent trajectories of people only following and listening to him know being certain kinds of information and other people who other. And I think the pandemic is the place where all that really clashed very heavily and continues to clash other areas too. Certainly not something is going to be solved inside of this conversation.

And yet I do have um a question that that grows from this aspect of our discussion, which is you what do you think can be done at a concrete level in terms of education of Younger people as well as education people who are out of high school and and beyond to a trying to adopt these more um encompass modes of of learning and experiencing the world. I mean, it's one thing to say expose yourself to a lots of different ideas. Um it's another to to understand how to how to do that in a way that that is an adaptive in that any ideas you have um I think I know iron and the audience would really appreciate and feel free to to make this an editorial or or map back to data I M obviously this is your view house is this is your expertise. So i'm curious what what should we do? Should should I send my family members who have very divergent political base for me information um to the to the contrary, their thinking or what what do I do and what do I do for me what we all be doing with our and ourselves well I won't .

I won't comment on to family members are there are other people that do that. They do that work .

and they know how to .

each other get o we all love .

each other anyway.

But one thing I really do think a lot about in this is the way in which we educate our Young people. What do we do without ten year old rate? And it's like first thing i'll say about that, I don't have you actually attended but is um is is query that about their beliefs when they follow something, when they think something impressive or bad or you know ask them why, teach them to unpack their own beliefs.

That doesn't mean that you that you don't still hold them necessarily IT doesn't mean that you adopt the opposite belief. Afraid if I talk to someone who has a very different value system that I do and I disagree with them, that's legitimate. But to IT also but but in deciding that I disagree, I have sort of revisited my own belief and Carried IT. I i've externalized a little bit made that thinking visible is why we talk about IT in education, that David parkins, that a harvard talks about IT that way, you know, making you're thinking visible and then examining that thinking. And and so I think one really important step that a society will have to take, or we won't make IT.

And I I know that sounds a little um dramatic, but I actually think it's true, sadly, and i'm starting to think it's more and more true, is that we need to really get brave about how we think about the process of educating our Young people and what that actually means to expose Young people to developmental appropriate each appropriate opportunities to grow themselves as thinkers, as individuals and as civic agents and community members. I I think that our western designed education system has in IT some very basic beliefs about what counts as knowing and what is worth thinking about and knowing about. And how do I know that? How do I test you on that? That I think is deep ly.

They are deeply problematic and lead us. I mean, I know this is a strong steamer, but they lead us to a place where we are. We are actively punished, not just not encouraged, but I would say actively discouraged, from really playing with ideas, engaging systematically with our own beliefs, deconstructing those beliefs and engaging with complex perspectives on topics and ideas.

That is just not what school is about. And IT needs to be. We need to shift. So right now, the way in which we think about school is about is basically judged by quote and quote learning outcomes. right.

What have you learned and how do we know that we make you demonstrated by yourself under time pressure in a particular set IT? right? Or you're going to come back and i'm going to give you a question and you're going to give you the answer I had in mind.

And if you you do that in time, then i'll say you learn that and now we're done check right? As compared to a system and there are educational systems like this. This is not um there are people. For example, the performance uh assessment consortium in new york city is is a consortium of public schools, some of which do this extraordinary well they have a uh disposition from the new york's state government, uh not to give the regions exam as their graduation requirements um and their um and and their their benchMarks of learning but instead to have alternative ways of assessing kids where kids work for months to years depending on the project.

On this in depth intellectual multi disciplinary projects where they explore a topic and they engage with their own process of learning about that topic and they bring in teachers and community experts and other people, and they present their work, and they query the work, and they talk about their own learning process and what could happen next and what decisions they made in all these kinds of exactly. You have to invent not just the work, but the question you need to look at the world and notice what IT is. We're not understanding that we would benefit from understanding and find a way to to isolate and systematically query that why don't we build education systems from free school all the way up that that engage people systematically, that kind of intellectual curiosity.

We don't do that. So we we know that little kids education, free school education, if you don't have the water table in the same table, and the cool stuff and the choices and the ways to engage with each other, and I mean all the stuff being really each appropriate for three rolls to touch and motion, try to taste and whatever else, they're gonna a mess on the phone that just not going to come. They're onna refuse to come to school right there, going to be playing and in the door way throwing temptresses right.

But as so we know how to do little kid education, wealth doesn't an we always do IT. But we know that they need to be intrigued, they need to be invited to think, and they bring their natural curiosity, and then you expand the range of ways they can leverage that curiosity to discover new things they hadn't known to think about before. Right then we get to the standard coron code educational system.

And we somehow think that that natural human to engage curiously and meaningfully with deep thinking about ideas in the world, is is like inefficient and inappropriate and frightening. And we teach kids, no, no, no, no, no, turn that off. It's, it's, it's dangerous.

If you do IT, it's considered insupportable, right? And what we want to instead to do is just let me give you what i've already figured out for you. I'm going to give IT to you, and you are going to give IT back to me.

So IT seems to me that in the way that things actually happen in school, what is created is kind of desire for the kid to be a computer, not a human. And they do have a dopamine system, however. And so what becomes the the buzz, the emotional buzz, is performance. Yes, if IT becomes a buz at all. So for the kids that don't get that buzz from performance, or they, or they don't intrinsically love the math or the english or the books s that they are being presented with or or whatever the subject happens to be um or maybe they only like one or two things, then they emotionally associate from the rest of the material emotion. Y describing a bit of myself in high school, I was not I barely .

finish high school. I dropped out of six grade for .

a few months yeah didn't work know eventually got back to IT so we ended up as academics but um I think what you're describing is so key um and I never thought about IT from the perspective of oh ah as Young kids like we're given all the things that are going to drive our sensory world in the appropriate ways, touch and sound and vision and trying to .

build meaning in our mind and that we get to um .

as students Young very Young learners impose some of our own intrinsic motivation to do certain things and not others and that that isn't supported as were adult. What you're describing is so vital, what age do you think this clifts off? So you okay.

So in high school, kids are allowed to do this. In kindergarten, they are allowed to first, great, they allowed to do in most schools. But at what point do is the expectation imposed on kids to become little rote learning computer machines and to get their dopamine from performance, rather from intrinsic pleasure?

And what they are learning?

And also, how do we address this issue that there are certain basic skills that not everyone is going to perform well out?

And so of the kid that says, I don't like math.

you still have to learn IT appreciate how how do you come up and an appreciation in that kid, I think seems I get A A hard thing. I mean, I eventually set myself along a academic trajectory um to that worked out but that was initially just had a pear fear because my life was really bad. I made circumstances in myself made IT bad.

Um and I was rescuing myself from basically becoming more of a loser so I like, okay, schools the thing and I did school and and that was that was the turn hard right into into academic for me but what do you do for the person who is like really doesn't like math because that they're struggling with IT or doesn't like biology or psychology? Mean, how do we how do we evoke a at least an appreciation for that? Um IT sounds like the emotion system is the key system to leverage in order to learn and and so could you talk about the relationship between emotion and learning because I realized this is really bit the center of of what you do.

So I mean, you could say that this way, right? So whatever you're having a motion about is what you're thinking about, right? And whatever you're thinking about, you could hope to learn about, remember something that right, understand and differently.

So the key question for educators is what everybody y's always having some kind of emotions all the time. If there was you're dead, right or unconscious, what are people's emotions about in this space? If the emotions because whatever those emotions about that is what you're learning about how the emotions are about the outcomes.

Did I get to write and i'm going to flink and I can lus. I'm so smart. I'm so stupid with any one of those, right?

If those are the main drivers and that is what you're learning about, if the emotions are about the actual ideas in play, the math, the physics that why does the ball roll down the rap? Wait a minute. That's the same as why the moon goes around. You don't mean like they are right when the emotions are about ideas than what you're engaging with is learning about ideas.

And so what I would argue is that in setting up the kind of accountability system we have, we have taught people that their emotion should be about these high stakes accountability measures, which means that what we're learning, how to think about to perform, not how to think about the idea, is, is not the intrinsic power of using math to understand the world in a different way. So how do you engage kids? right? You engage kids by setting out which problem spaces that in problems that invite them to try to engage with something that picks your curiosity that's meaningful to them, or have them bring in where the kid really hates IT.

Like, what is that, that you do find interesting kid, right? Start there, start there and start using your your academic skills in a way that will give you power to do what IT is. You're interested in doing that the way in. Use your writing, use your math, use your persuasive argument skills, use your film making skills, whatever is to tell the story of something that you find deeply meaningful ly powerful to understand, and all the sudden you need the math.

Kids actually say things like like there's this lovely um there's this lovely a long quote from a from a sudanese immigrant kid in one of these new york schools with the performance assessments uh in up in an article I wrote with calling them to connect um the article is called building meaning build teens brains who can find in its and in educational leadership。 There's a big long quote from this kind of the end, and he's basically spending what math class meant to him, what he had never passed the math class before. And he says he got this problem called walking to the door, which is basically zenos paradox.

You get halfway to the door, half way to the door, half later. Or do you ever get to the door? Why or why not? right? And they spent months learning the math that would help them get out that problem.

And he talks about how I had a problem, he says, and I had to learning fractions. I had to, in order to be able to solve the problem I had. And as I engaged with fractions and that problem I got fascinated, he says, by finite and infinite.

And these ideas were driving my need to learn to do fractions, right? So we've got the before the horse. I'm not saying you don't have to learn that or you don't have to learn to read a rider or do all these other kinds of skills, but we make those which is in the houses cart, you know what's in the cart?

We call that the the metric of the education system. Any aim of IT when in fact it's the quality of the horse. Can that horse pulled the thing, right? That's the development of the person.

And what they put in their car then serves that development is the tool set of ways of knowing and understanding that come with you as you move into the world. But this takes real, real developmental skill on the part of educators, right, who are not supported or or, or resource or train to think about development in these ways. I mean, so you asked, when does this fall off? IT really depends on what school system you are and in what demographic you are when IT falls off. But for almost every everybody, except for the privileged few who are in very progressive alternative schools, IT falls off by adolescence, which is when school gets serious and is also, ironically, when developmental kids are developing the neural capacity and the psycho social capacity and the drive to infer complex narrative meaning from the things they are doing. You know, these aren't just my shoes.

These are a statement about, you know, what I believe about sustainability and about sports and about adults and counter culture, right? And as we grow into a space where we're driven to try to, you know, chAllenge and think about big meanings and engage with perspectives and emotions and social issues and road important existence, al questions, be they in physics, or be they in art, or be they in the social civic domain, right? What do we do? We double down on controlling the input and the output transactional mechanisms that count as, quote, unquote academic rigor and achievement, right?

We start to ask kids, you know, what's the name of the, the, the servant who shows up in the scene in in, in great expectations, right? Is IT Molly or is IT mary? And it's, you know like who the heck knows that is not the point of leading great expectations, right?

We take away because we're afraid as educators, as society, we've got this narrative around Young people is a particular about everyone's propensity to build and construct meaning in these spaces and self in these spaces. That agency frighten us because we're worried they're going to take risks. They're going to do something stupid. They are going. They're going to fall off the tracks. They are gonna make IT in the traditional system and in trying to protect them and shield them from their own curiosities, their own disposition for meaning, making we, I would argue, stunt their ability to grow themselves to the point where we have mental health crisis, literally crisis in in mental health right now in adolescence, across demographic groups.

to especially .

bad Young girl. Yes, that's right ad in everybody and it's worse and girls, yes we don't fully understand why that is um uh get some you know suggestions uh you know what we're really doing is actually producing people who are got ted of their own inner drive to become someone who thinks powerfully in the space of the world. We are frightened to let our Young people have that power, which is the role of adults to wrap around Young people and help them learn to to be reflective, to be systematic, to be rigorous with themselves as they develop the capacity and dispositions, to deconstruct their own beliefs, to deconstruct their own aims and goals and the ways they understand the world, and to rebuild them iteratively over and over in this, in this serve intellectual, humble, curious way, where we're constantly quarrying ourselves, constantly querying other people, where we're willing to sit with uncertainty in complex problem spaces and think through the possibilities.

Rather than settle quickly onto one solution, what the school expect you to do, settle immediately onto one solution, which, by the way, the solution already had in mind, when I gave you the question right, as compared to sitting with Young people and allowing them this in safe and appropriate ways, the space in which to actually grapple with complex, powerful questions. When kids developed the peculiar to do that, they learn how to manage those very human capacity that we've been talking about the whole time that can lead to, you know, terrible evil as well as amazing virtuousness. They learn to appreciate and manage those capacity within their own selves.

I think so much of what we see in terms of these quote, quote, failure to launch examples are are because I know some of these, the children of friends, really, really smart kids that didn't map well to the system and therefore are not doing well, really struggling and clearly have the intellectual power IT just wasn't served up to them in school, wasn't served up to them in a way .

that was says as much about the system as IT does about the kid.

right? Yeah, I teach a course, stanford, to the medical students that every first year medical student takes about neuroscience. It's team talk is a phenomenal course um because of the the range of expertise uh um in the teaching that comes through. And one thing I noticed um is that the they are all phenomenal teachers but the best instructors and do two things simultaneous ously when they teach, first of all, they come to the table with incredible expertise. Obviously.

these deeply understand what you're trying to get, that if you want people .

to engage with ideas, that they are true luminaries in their respective fields, addiction, pain, memory, every system of of the the body and rain that release to the nervous system has taught in this course but that i've noticed every once in a while that um there's a subset of them that as they teach from that position of expertise, not only are they clear, not only are they engaging, not only are their slides spar enough to understand, but rich enough to include all the relevant details, but they also flip back and forth from the position of expert to the position of novice learning IT for the first time.

Almost intellectual curiosity that they're keeping a lot they have this disposition were talking about cultivating sorry.

touch up please do um as academics were familiar with that right interrupting in the landscape of academic interrupting me is is a sign of interest I think and who told and he is read killed she's right the great killed work yeah and so um but i've seen this especially so you know there are some topics that um you know I like to think that I might do this reflexively for because life says I I started off a neural development and I adore the topic so I can't teach neural development without being completely blown away in the positive sense how a brain developed yes, I still never taught this.

I ve done a podcast on IT because IT IT tends to require visuals. And we don't use those. And because the podcast, most people listen to the podcast. But maybe i'll do something just for youtube at some point. But I think it's the same experience occurs when I see somebody um like a doctor, shaan macy, who runs are our pain clinic at stanford, teach about pain and the systems of the body that relate to pain in emotion and had to cure certain forms of pain at sea, treat pain. It's like he's he's clearly the world expert but the way he describes the system, you can tell he's he's learning IT again for the first time in parallels all of that and I feel like that ignites the emotional systems of the learners brain in such a powerful way um that is distinct from just hearing an expert talk about something .

he's not relying. He's not a squirl with nuts and giving all the nuts to the kids. He's invented the knowledge in front of them.

right? That's a great way to put IT as usual. Others are more sustaining, collecting my ideas and expressing them then I am. Um so I think that that's a powerful thing.

I I went to a high school that uh has kind of a split reputation, is is known as being one of the best public high schools in the country, is also the high school that at least for a while and one of the high suicide right the country is written up in vous, uh newspapers and so on and so much so that nowadays forbid the kids there from meeting a more than an hour before school to practice for the standards ized test. By the way, when I was at school, the only thing that school represented for me in high school was something that came between breakfast and skateboarding and a lot. And Frankly, I was in in school a lot.

And I don't recommend that kids go to school, stay in school. I missed a lot of school. I had, I had a lot of lot of making up to do in in college as a sequence to get the best, but this is actually where i'd like to go.

You have a very interesting trajectory. Here you are university professor. You um study emotion and learning and many other things across cultures and um analysis and and so many other important topics, but um you are not a story of of like growing up in an academic family. You group on a farm um I sort of a .

gentleman's farm. My dad was a surgeon, but we had animals in a farm and tried my parents tried to have us, you know, growing the things we ate.

You've had a number of different experiences that we were talking about before we start recording. But but one of the things that you mentioned was getting involved in education um where you were exposed to students of who had very different background and you um maybe you just talk a little bit about some of the nodes of your experience. So you group on this farm and then maybe just hit some of the other nodes.

And and then let's let's take a foray into when you ve first got exposed to educating others. And because I think that's an important backstop for what what we've been talking about here. And services are jumping off point for where i'd like to go next.

I'll just jumping in. I know it's always hard to have quite yourself. I don't know what's interesting .

and what's not me. I think what's interesting is is knowing you know where where you've been in things that that mark that mapped back to your emotional yes um uh networks in a way that for you feel like what that mattered in terms of what you're doing.

Now as a little kid I remember even as a little kid not liking school, I was very good kid. As a very well behaved kid I went to a decent public school. Um but just the whole idea of IT, I just always felt like I had two left feet. I never felt like I was really me there.

I was always trying to escape a little bit, I mean, and thinking about when I first started educating others and like my first memory of educating others like specifically that comes to mind as I was six and I went on a little vacation in the summer to stay with my cousins in pata, skii, michigan which is a place on lake michigan where there are these um stones where there's my understanding from when I was sex, is that there are these like two hundred million year old facilities. Ed warms in these stones and you can see him when you look at the those like little worms and you can see him yeah so I just was fascinated by these stones that these are actual fossilized two hundred million year old worms. And I enough that numbers correct? That's what I remember from eight six of some people and how to stop their contract.

Me, um but I collected these stones and I went to the little local exhibit they had at the library, whatever. And I learned about these stones, and I brought some back, and somehow somebody thought to ask me to teach my second grade class when I started school, about these stones. And I just remember, I don't know how I got asked to this, but I remember standing in front of my class and talking about these stones and just looking around the room and suddenly noticing, you know, that feeling when you're lecturing and you think, oh my god, they're fascinated by what i'm saying like every kid is looking at me and like, only grab, you know, like and I was so like, all right, i'll keep going. I i'll tell you more about these stones and I passed them around whatever. And I must have been OK because I was then as to give that talk all way up to the fifth graders .

who were way older than .

me and the Price I was already fascinated by the natural world and able to, like, make out of something in a way that inspired other people. If I can be so bonus. I said that. And yet I was constantly in trouble at school for not having my homework.

I was just, you know the feeling of release on the friday afternoon and the feeling of dread on sunday evening is hard to like describe you know and I went to a reasonably well resource school, you know um anyway fast forward up to when I was older. I mean I I was just always fascinated by and I think someone just comes from my mom too um trying to you know speak different languages, engage with people who are different than myself, just have conversation. So from the time I was old enough to barely qualify to do these programs, my parents had the the resources locky to be able to let me to do these things. But I know I went off to france and stayed on a farm there for a summer, went to um you know ireland. I went to rush out, was working with these little kids off the street and camping with them in sudden side and all these kinds of things when I was cold.

as they say.

gloomy and rainy and .

muddy and no yeah no.

that's a real threat. I mean beautiful in many ways but yeah this that was a sad that was a sad, sad story um anyway um you know I think what I was trying to do was actually learn by doing, by being, by engaging with other people who knew things I didn't learning how to you know, a build things I was always really interested in word working and boat building. I went to kenya, spent eight months there as an undergraduate, right, documenting this traditional deal construction in, uh, northern cost of can deal, which are sailboats, the boat construction .

and .

no electricity.

actually built financier. So when people say they built friendship, but they basically assembly french, we're not .

talking about that. And my friends have pieces I made for them. I don't anything for myself. Ves I don't have um but um yeah I mean, I think I was really torn between trying to build things and learn by engaging with other people. And in these different cultural spaces, you know, being a woman in a cabinet, in a cabinet shop and connected ticket is is really not a cultural space that I had drawn up in and then got, you know, I mean, and yet, right, moving myself and changing myself to adapt to these different situations somehow felt like learning to me.

I think um and I ended up in a strange situation where I cut my hand, uh, opening a window at a job site and I needed to I was on workers comp and I had to take some time to let IT heal and I couldn't run machinery so I had to figure what to do with myself. I was twenty three years old and I was not going to go back to my parents for more money, right? So I thought I have to support myself so I thought, okay, I I went to college, you know, high level.

I think the school and I, I, I measured in french because I could. That's basically what I was like. I don't know.

I Better finish. I got to not flunk. I can do french. I know, I know, I know. I speak french for me, out do a french literary major, and then would be quickly not like, what am I going to do with myself? I never thought I could be a scientist, but I loved sciences.

So I just want around taking, like, a year of every science I took a year of astronomy and a year of biology and a year of physics and A A year of um you know human anthropology, pending anthropology like all these things, psychology and realized holy crep like this is super interesting. You can study how babies think and and the natural world and then also uh be be bringing sort of a scientific lens to bear that helps you understand things in anyway. So so here I was as A A twenty three old with a cut hand, and I thought what i'm gonna with myself.

I convinced the message of the board of education that I know had the background knowledge to be able to uh to to teach some you know sections of ap biology in physics that they had in their high school. So when I got to um uh I finally got an interview with this a public school district and south post where they were desperate for a teacher t like i'm noticing in the boston globe for two weeks into the school year and you still don't have a teacher. You want to take me and convince the message board of education a to give me provisional teachers certificate ation based on the course word i'd done and how well I did in that course work because I did I was really supermoto vate.

I did extremely well and all that um and when I got there, uh they basically send donation up for the interview you know um another the high school teacher wants to take those ap classes. Can you just teach full time seventh grade? So it's like, okay so I I I you know I had my full contention of one hundred and thirty kids right semester ATS come.

My classroom and uh the middle school had just been shut down because I wasn't sufficient funding in the town for IT. So they had taken the midst school kids and pushed him into the high school space uh with that basically meters, I suddenly found myself in uh fully equipped high school classroom with microscopes and all kinds of scientific equipment that would be used to teach later courses with my seventh graders. And IT also happened that the messages its board of education had changed the um the uh the requirements for for the way they organized science instruction and curriculum from you know seven grade life science.

It's great physical science whatever was you know different sciences each year. They wanted an integrated just ony science all the way across and of course that was very difficult for the traditional science teachers to do, because they're been teaching only biology, or only or science, or only physical science for their whole career, and they didn't know how to teach the other subjects. And here comes me would like one intensive year of study in each of these domains.

I was perfectly situated to, like, try to pull IT together. So some of the high school teachers helped me thank you to them. And I built out as a new cover cullum for seventh grade for that district around this inner demonic approach to science. And together with other teachers.

he was very hands on.

very and IT was very much like a web of concepts. And we'd study nuclear vision and atoms and reactions, and then the sun and astronomy, the solar system, and then and then how the the energy is being, you know, shine over to the, onto the planets and then the earth. And then these organisms called plants, are actually using those photons to do something chemical.

Let's talk about photosynthesis and where the right, and then can talk about chemical reactions and breaking down sugars and molecules. And we built this whole web like curriculum that I was trying to help the kids appreciate the sort of dynamic complexity of the natural world. And some of my professors from cornell also sent to me materials and all kinds, of course, stuff from the coronal museum that that they didn't really need.

And then I gave IT back when I was done right with all these instructions, what all the stuff is on human ID evolution, and actually, I, an hand axes and all kinds of stuff. So I built out a cricket around all this stuff. And I realized to the first time that I was in this amazingly fascinating space, because IT just happened at the school I was working in was one of the most diverse culturally in the nation at that time.

I think we had something like eighty one languages spoken out of eleven hundred kids. That's a lot of first languages. And kids were arriving from all over the world.

This was right after the rWandan genocide. So kids were coming in from east africa. There were refugees from uh kazair o and east n europe. There were kids coming in from jamaica. There were kids coming and from hate. There were kids from malaysia and a mon mar like there were, uh, there were kids landing in that class, like deer in headlights from very, very broad ranges of cultural backgrounds. And they're landing in my science class.

And what I quickly realized is they were using these scientific ways of expLoring the world and thinking about questions and and trying to a make sense of what they had witnessed to try to understand their own serve cells, their own origin story, their own place in the world, why different people in this class look and eat differently than me, dress differently than me. Like, how is IT that? You look like that, and I look like this. And there was all this, a crazy, you know, adolescent, a turmoil layer into the space where kids were grabbing onto the scientific ways of knowing as a handle to try to make sense of who they are. And those kids started asking questions of me.

I'll never forget this one girl, black girl, raised her hand and all the other kids were looking at like, yeah, yeah, yeah ask IT, ask IT right um and like, you know, he was being brave, actually talked about IT before school like I had say them no I can I say say and SHE said missing more do you know why is that that when we're studying home and the evolution and you show us these this nova episode with early harmonize in africa, why do they always show those creatures looking like they have dark skin? Why do they always look like black people? And I was like, well, because they're on the equation and you meet that level melon in your skin to be able to adapt and live without getting skin cancer in that space, right? And IT opened up this amazing class discussion that actually went on for months, like evolved into a whole curriculum that was biology, was cultural with social, where we started to really unpack the ways that we, as humans, are natural beings in the world, and the ways in which our cultural experiences are extensions of our natural ways of adapting.

And that had me hoped, I realized that that I could bring science right, the science of at least development, and of learning and of emotion and of culture, to this very pressing real world problem of how do we help our kids actually figure out who they are, invent themselves in this really crazy multi cultural space, and become scholars and intellectuals who engage systematic with the ideas along the way. And so I I took those ideas, and I started going to night school at horvat extension school, to study a cold of neuroscience and to study language and cognition, an and, you know, all these kinds of topics, and and quickly realized, like, I really needed this developmental perspective infuse, right? I wanted to understand not just how these things works, about how they got that way.

And so I took that back to grad school at harvard and began to study, uh, you know, social, cultural and emotional and cognitive development in kids. And and quickly there also kind of hit a wall where I was. I went back to the school district, which I worked, and I went back to the teachers who were my colleagues and I, I worked with them, and I observe their classes, and I interviewed their students.

And we did all kinds of work around how kids were building scientific concepts in ways that reflected their cultural concepts and ways of approaching the world. And I I quickly realized, you know, IT seems to me that kids are doing all this meaning making, and we as adults are doing all this, uh, all the supportive, you know, meaning making. We're also do engaging and growing and learning in ways that reflect not just you know knowledge bits like little computers, but also that reflect the biological substrates on which the learning and the thinking are happening. And I wanted very much to understand how we could use and leverage developmental biology as a kind of uh, constraint to from which to appreciate the kinds of theoretical frames we were inventing in the in the real world sort of anthropological educational space, the developmental psychological space. How could these two systems, you know, IT is a one diagram, and how could the inner section between them the places were the theorizing about the natural behaviors and the way kids we're making meaning and learning and describing their knowledge and engaging with each other on the one hand, and the ways in which the brain and the biology are engaging in or supporting those processes on the other hand.

The places where those two circles were to overlap IT seemed to me that was where we could moh directly target to start to deeply understand the nature of our developmental psychology, logical growth themselves and so I set out to try to study about um the ways in which culture and sociality shaped the brain uh and physiology and and survival mechanisms and development and at that time, which wasn't even that long ago, you know, it's like two decades ago, quickly realized very, very little was known you know about the way in which emotions beyond things like fear I flash a snake in your age and you're middle lights separate like I was thinking of something a little more nuon, do you know what I mean? Like what i'm seeing happening in science class among a kid from cosell o and a kid from rWanda as they are trying to figure out why they understand how they look different, right? Those deeply emotional conversation they're having, but they're not so cut and dry as the things we had been studying. And so that's what really drove me to try to start to understand in an integrated way the way in which are are biological development and our psychological development are actually sort of two sides of who we are and of how we're organizing ourselves to build capacity, uh, mental capacity as well as sort of physical health and capacity over over the course of our lives as are .

engaging with living incredible um story and foray into what sounds to me like really um your ability to identify how the universal among us, like the universal biological features, the universal psychological teachers can really strongly inform specifically what's happening now in a classroom interaction in the mind of of you or somebody else or of any of us but to approach IT from the other direction, in other words, to take what's happening now and say, why is what's happening now, happening now and I do .

is actually ens underneath the surface the behavior right .

I suppose to saying, okay, this is uh this is the psychology of character structure. This is the biology of the hypothetical most but rather say, you know, is anyone else really um shocked about the school shooting in nash well and go through the the feeling of shock and and go from there to the biology as a round of learning again.

And of course I don't want to take away anything from the real world seriousness of that but but IT sounds to me like you you saw that there's there's a different portal through which to teach and understand, experiencing that we are all, but especially Young people are really tied to, or our emotional states as the as the main filters, but which we like that just like that, and therefore make decisions and move through life. I mean, I think it's so key that early on, I mean, we like a teacher often times we like the subject. If we um happen to fall in love with you know figure for b in a paper, great.

But that's not that's not how I went to graduate school. I just was blown away by the fact that spr meets egg, you get bunch of cell y implications. And then, then and and really amazing.

And I was blessed with the graduate .

advisor who literally told me this is outward in my lab, is what he said. h. SHE said, um we have everything you need here.

I'll help you if you need help but based you're gna mess around on stuff. You're not onna burn down the lab. You're not gna kill yourself with any other poisons in the stuff.

But then you're going like mess some stuff up and and do some stuff, you're going to figure some stuff out. This is literally the description and and I liked her lab because that dream counter tops. And he had pictures of interesting animals on the wall.

And then he said, and I want to have two kids while you're in graduate school. I'm not going to liberry much. You're going to figure IT out on your own. And I said, what can I play the music I want? SHE said, sure.

And I think, can I put tinfoil on the windows because I don't want to be bothered and he said, sure and I was like, okay, this is the place for me. In other words, he gave me a room to explore yeah and of course, he gave me a lot of guidance along the way. I she's amazing, amazing graduation, extremely blast.

But that sounds to me like that identifying what's what's really going on now is key and that the other thing that key is an openest ideas. I mean, earlier you talked about um of the latest luca admit where we're out, right? We're we're in a culture war right now.

We're in a weird space right now.

It's very divisive. And one of the major problems is that we can't really talk about things. I mean, I think um fear of getting cancelled, fear of um expLoring ideas is real.

It's very real not just for academics, it's just real people are. So it's important to be sensitive to the experiences of others absolutely. But if we can't actually explore ideas and feel like we can walk out of the room safely, then we can't really explore ideas.

And so I think right now it's not just social media. I think it's the fear of offending anybody and and probably the fear of a voicing how upset certain people are about their experiences or the experiences of others. Whatever IT is, I don't see a landscape right now where there is true open exploration of ideas anywhere yeah anywhere at least in this country.

So what do we do if there if at least two of the requirements are um you know an emotional gripping of of something around the learning um plus and openness to thinking about things that maybe we don't feel right to us as as a way to learn how to think something and I think we both agree, if I may, that is really critical yeah and that the world would be a far Better place if people could do that um and how do we navigate this landscape? I mean is what has to come first uh, a demonstration of the value of openness and of ideas. And here I all state my stand.

I I feel like any idea should be opened to at least discussion, any idea. But then IT needs to be systematically dissected with some rigor so that people can just assume any idea is true just because it's true for them, or because just because it's true for them. In this, I actually learned from my graduate advisor in your shoes to say, you know, tolerance has to go both ways.

Like when IT comes to thinking about ideas and criticize zing, IT can't chesly i'm right, the're wrong, or I don't tolerate that. IT has to be tolerance for all ideas. And then you arrive at, hopefully eventually, core truths, or at least court trajectories.

And what do you think could support this? How early should I start? I mean, should kids in elementary school be discussing um the current landscape of politics and what they see from a place of like we talk about safe spaces but is a safe space one in which no one gets offended or is a safe space one in which any idea can be discussed? I think that's never really find .

for me yeah who that's a really flood issue I mean, first let me go back to something you said, which I would set IT differently so you said our emotions are A A filter, right? And they do act like a filter, but I actually don't think emotions are really filter like so much as they are the drives that are underground, the inputs to think right, they're pushing us to think about particular things.

And I think, I mean, as a scientist, my disposition is always that to understand something is good. And the more complexly, the more thorough you can interrogate and understand something, the Better. So there's nothing i'm afraid of knowing, right? And what you're really talking about there is the fear of knowing we why are people so afraid to engage with each other? Basically because.

It's deeply threatened to reveal things about your own experience that are not gonna land in a in in a space where we can kind of collectively engage with them as legitimate experience that's see, I saw the opposite of cancelling people right to the opposite of dismissing people. It's actually developing spaces of trust where we can engage with ideas and and and take them from ourselves, right? So that were they don't they're no longer personal value judgment.

They become cultural memes or or or or or models or schema that we can we can dissect together, that we can engage with together and construct understanding around right? And and I don't really understand my own position unless I also understand your opposition to my position, even if I still disagree with you. I think there are really important conversations going on right now. I'll take you back to the education system because that's that's what I know what most about. There are really important conversations going around on right now around reframing the experience and outcomes and aims of schooling, around civic discourse and reasoning.

So there was just a major report that was produced by the national academic education and uh uh another academies uh collaborating with IT for example, around this topic and helping us to move as a society toward a space where we learn to um kind of lay ideas out and develop skills for reasoning around those ideas, including bringing ethical, experiential, emotional, cultural values to bear, but then being willing to deconstruct and engage with those ideas, whether the the ones that are commensurate and fluid with our experience or that appear to be um conflicting or deflect with our experience, we need to develop as a spaces for Young people, especially bit for everyone in to engage with the deconstruction of our own assumptions, like I said before, and to engage with the with the deconstruction of others assumptions and to try to reconcile the building blocks. And that's what we can build some common ground, but we can also disagree we but we don't really understand our own position unless we appreciate someone else. Disagreement with our position unless we can actually articulate and appreciate how IT is that person's opinion is opposed to mine, I don't really understand. Mine is such a .

key point one of the reasons why I do read all the comments uh on podcast on youtube IT takes me some time but I do IT or on social media is that um often times i'll get a comment to a criticism that makes a very clear that I wasn't clear about something.

Other times i'll get a commentary criticism that makes a clear that and the other person fundamentally disagree about something, both of which are a great and for a scientists is a delight to keep IT coming. And of course, when people agree and they agree and make IT clear that they agree from a stance of understanding, that of course is also gratifying. Um so it's exactly what you're saying and it's one one of the upsides, I think, of social media, which is that unless you block their comments section and I do occasion block people if they're being offensive to other people, stead whatever you want to the .

people that's not inviting people onto a conversation that's .

not constructive. I actually have a rule, which is I call classroom rules. I never announced tip, but I I allow for classroom rules.

You can swear but you can't swear at people. Yeah, that's what I was taught to graduate school, that swearing what you can swear at people also rule at home. Although we try not to swear, you can swear, but swearing at people is not not okay.

And that a certain decorum of you is required in order to have open. So that works for me. I think that um it's been a while since i've been in school, but I work at a school and I think that the ability to um not just reinforced but chAllenge one's own stances, which sometimes leads to reinforcing .

our own senses of and that legion.

I mean, I have to assume that in high schools they still do debates and things that short. I mean, do they allow that? I mean, could you throw kids in the class and say, let's debate something really controversial and then but you have to debate IT from the other side.

I mean just as as a experiment of forcing the brain to um try to be effective uh for sake of winning. But from the other perspective or stance, IT seems like a great exercise. If I if I were high school teacher, that's the first thing I do. We picked the most controversial topic, and then i'd picked, i'd asked people to divide along that topic, and then i'd swap them into the other one and help them argue from the .

other one that learning to appreciate perspective. This very, very.

And we would use fourteen nouns. Thes, no, i'm kidding. IT wouldn't be physical. That would be purely intellectual.

And I mean, let's take, when we take IT back to the brain for a moment, to the conversation that we are having earlier, right? So we were talking about that in our experiments are now in whole, you know, whole bodies of newer scientific knowledge.

We know that there is this very interesting neurobiological sort of processing difference between emotions and the thoughts that are part of those emotions that are, you know, the result of those emotions that are also incipit ating those emotions right like that whole process when IT pertains to uh the direct actions, observable characteristics, behaviors, you know um of another person or situation that you can actually directly, pretty much directly and learn or infer as compared to when you have to bring a whole lot of conceptual content knowledge to bear experiential knowledge, uh simulation capacity to bear to be able to fully appreciate the nature of a situation and we talked about how the second kind of processing that I called transcendent is is the essence about um distancing yourself from the immediate physical you know situation, the observer able perceivable situation in a direct sense and instead constructing a narrative in your mind that's built from that but that then brings to bear all these other kinds of of um information that allowed you to elaborate this into a narrative that takes on emotional meaning and and psychological power as a narrative that becomes part of identity beliefs so that comes up and we talked about that kind of thinking being associated with the so called default mode which is deactivated systematically and decoupled from itself right? The different reasons aren't talking to each other, to each other. When you are in the world acting, doing a task, paying attention inhering.

The direct things that you need to notice around, you know, you're in middle playing a cycle game, the balls coming at her head. That's not a time to stop and news about you know title nine and girls have access to sports, right? You're going to you're onna trip and follow or you're gna miss you your shot at the goal or you're gonna IT get hit with the ball, right? So we need to sort of manage that space in order to have these conversations.

And I I think what's important here is to remember that the default mode network, that is the substrates that that is playing out your own sense of self and inner consciousness and self awareness and is also the basis on which we construct these broader inferential narratives that are the elaborate stuff of stories and beliefs are fundamentally incompatible. The activation of those systems is fundamentally incompatible with uh, needing to be vigilant into the immediate physical or social situation around you. So if you feel physically, emotionally, culturally, socially unsafe, and you feel that you you need to watch your back, either literally or metaphor ally, as you are thinking about things neurobiological ally, that situation is inconclusive. IT is not conducive to being able to actually conger an alternative perspective in which you construct a meaningful narrative with alternate ethical implications, with alternate prospective possible future outcomes, with alternate views of the historical precedent or context. Being able to sort of mentally time travel into the space of those ideas is only really possible when people feel safe to think together.

So is IT sounds like its anti creative?

Yes, creativity is also associated with the activation of these networks, yet casually. So in some recent work.

I had the good fortune of having dinner last year with somebody. I want to reveal that he he runs a major social media platform. And he told me that in japan it's common for people to have two or three or even as many as seven different social media handles yeah um and that they do this in order to embody different versions of themselves safely.

So these are not true accounts. These are not the accounts. And by the way, I see you true accounts that say whatever, and then you go to their accounts at some private account where they hide. Rather these are individuals who have multiple accounts um in one account they might be a bit aggressive, maybe even in a bully online there I say in another account they might be very funding and show up as the person that everyone knows them to be in the real world. In another account they might be a university professor and another there are an athlete and it's fabricated in the sense that the the post that they put up often don't accurately represent who they are in the real world, but it's accurate in the sense that IT represents the different dimensions of their persona that are driving their real world decision making.

At some level it's .

and play for little pretend play, but it's not pretend because it's five space um alc i'll just can h go back to rick rubin who um in addition to be this incredible music producers is a enormous final professional restlessly for many years and I asked him know from a perplexing like why professional restroom is the athleticism he says it's the only thing that's real because everyone agrees it's not real. And so these are characters, right? So you you're agreeing for IT to not be real and yet IT allows these characters to fully embody these different personas and and I had the experience years ago that called free harbor laboratory, summer can't for scientists, where I attended in top, and I was in a cab driving out to cold spring harbor from the train station.

So I asked, and I got into a discussion with a cab driver, and he said, okay, you're from california he said, in new york x and I won't try limited he said you from california and he said, you know, your governor who at the time was shorts and eager he said, he's great and and I said, tell me more happened to like shorts or for a number reasons he actually signed my P. H. D.

Because he was governor and I went to a uc. And and he said, well, because if terrorists show up in california, he's gone to go out there with a machine gun and take them down so in his adult man, he's determinator. He's determinator.

And I realized in that moment this was was a smart guy. This captain was smart guy, that that he wasn't a lack of narrative distancing. No, he had conflated the actor with the roles he played. yes. And I realized in that moment that this was not a reflection of him being unintelligent IT was a reflecting in the fact that the the brain often collapsed as identities of others and makes these I .

think it's just an .

an efficient way part. It's an efficient .

way to pass the world yeah I and then we put over on right.

So so to return to the discussion that that we're having, I think that the ability to embody different aspects of self, but also the ability to transiently embody the personas of other people, and to do that in a way that allows for really throw exploration of idea space. No, I feel like can only be a good thing 没有 provided IT doesn't get physically but I went or something but that to me seems like the exact opposite of what's happening now which is that um people are slowing off into their camps where specific language and specific ideas are accepted and others are not。

I mean, it's it's it's so interesting and perplexing and disturbing to me that the way that certain things that have nothing to do with politics get lumped with one group or the other you know that it's so crazy to me on the one hand and um and yet I I think what you're describing seems to me the route out of all this. I really mean that I 需要 去 the education system starting Young and getting people emotionally engage。 Learning what they like, what they don't like, but then also teaching them about their emotional systems and how IT helps them pass the world is really the solution so that when we're upset, we can and realize, yeah, i'm upset that makes sense.

Why i'm upset, let me explore IT from the other side. It's IT also makes sense why they're upset. And that seems to be what humans have done somewhat throughout history, never perfectly well. But IT seems like IT ought to be possible. I mean, the four brain is there for a reason.

So could you in in wanting to go back to a little bit of the biology in the research, what have you seen in terms across cultural consistency yeah about the role of emotions in the in our ability to parse and learn and um because obviously were not to solve these problems today, but although I think you have shed and light on some some potential solutions, what do we know for sure about human beings in their capacity to do what you're describing to to really um learn differently? IT worked in the classroom where you are teaching, but how could each and every one of us do this? I mean, how would we approach this? I guess I want to take this to the practical um what can we do when we read a newspaper article? What can we do when we we're on social media? What can we do when our kid is like refusing to do something um because they simply don't like IT or or the teacher they don't like the teacher. Are there are there part through that that you've identified or that you can sense work?

I can get funny examples of my own kids when they didn't like things at school, right? This isn't, do you? Yeah so so my my son, when he was in third, great he was he was very upset about the behavior chart that is future had at school, right? So he had he had a behavior and they had a behavior chart backdrop.

The principle didn't agree with this, but a teacher was there for a year. And okay, so there was this behavior. Child, you have Green. You start and Green with your little clip. And then there's yellow. And then those red, which is like your parents, which I never understood why they don't put call your parents on the Green, but anyway, right? So you know, you start on the Green and then I you get down to the yellow and they get around the red.

And you know that ten little friend is always get on the red by nine am I could we just over, you know and and he tried to talk with his teacher about why this behavior charge made him so uncomfortable, because and SHE couldn't SHE could not understand his perspective, because he kept saying, but you're always on Green. You're always doing what you're supposed be doing and you respectful in your, well, behave. So why is that a problem? And what he was trying to say was that somehow I just made him uncomfortable to have that there.

So he was costly, bothered me with this. I finally told me was trying to work one day, and he was home from school because I would let him work from home some days because we needed to to kind of buffer little bit. And you know, he's bring all this working, and he do IT himself. I'd be working.

He'd working, right? It's fine. He had all kinds of projects going on, you know. And this is a kid who is all size, the kid who went to first grade and about two weeks, and the first grade, good first grade class. He was crying on the sunday night to me is wrong in, I know you can finally looks me to goes, 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?

I can relate, I can rely.

can you late because you're actually a motivates, right? We take kids motivations and the things they're interested in, and we sideline them and try to structure them in.

So back to our legos to there.

Yeah, he was ill. He was way in the building armor at that time. He would know we're proud of terrible parents. So we gave some safety glasses, and we taught him how to use that, and we explain how metal shark.

And we gave him some shit and some snips, and he made a whole suit of army in the backyard that, you know, second great. Anyway, IT took a months and months. I made a chain mail the whole bit. He was super .

amazing .

no anyway and me made airplane's me eat did all kinds of things um but so here's this kid and he's bugging me about his teacher and this behavior N I said, ted, go red a letter to your teacher that bothers you that much.

You go red a letter about why IT bothers you right? Because in doing so he is first of all helping to solve the problem secondly he he was formulating his understanding of what this behavior chart is and why specifically IT bothers him and in so doing, and helps him not be so bothered. Diet, right? So that's an example of something you could do, right? So he wrote this letter to his teacher, which ended up being published in the national academy of science underneath, and that book, how people learn volume too.

Because I was on the committee of people that voted, and we needed an example of kids making sense of motivation things, and actually took his name and the t have put the letter in the book. IT basically is a little kid saying, listen, teacher, when you put up this behavior chart, he called on a bad behavior chart, which IT wasn't. IT was just a behavior truck, but he interprets IT as bad behavior.

C, when you put that up, it's as if you're you're daring me to do something bad. You're basically he doesn't say like because he says you're basically making me uncomfortable because you are laying out a perspective on me, a possibility space for me that you're now bringing into the conversation that I could be like that. And let's see if you're going to be open up today.

Will still arrangement. And so where does this come? IT goes back to the idea that kids are, and all of us are interpreting the interactions and the structures around us, not only for what they are, but for what they represent as somebody else's interpretation of what we are or are not capable of.

And he saw that behavior chart as a marker that his teacher assumed that all kids in that class are capable of being badly behaved, and that their main name of being in school is to be well behaved, right? And so he writes all about saying, saying their teacher every day, I come to school every single day, and every single day is new, that so what he says, and I could learn something new, except then I see dt, t. Dt, the bad behavior.

Child, right? He's saying school is supposed to be about learning and and not engaging and you're making IT about something so low level in basic as are you going to behave yourself today where we are insulting him by the way, we frame the context. So take you back to the bigger issues of civic discourse and all these things. I think so much of the way that we're organizing our lives, our social relationships, our community, our civic structures right now is miring that teachers behave. Your chart right?

Take the chart down. I don't I don't think so.

And I asked because .

i'm not sure that IT matters. I think what probably matters is that he had the chance to voice is understand yeah.

he's understanding of the chart. Yeah, that's right. And now, you know anybody can rate his understanding the chart cousins polished and like, you know, the most widely red text book on learning right and motivation.

I mean, the point in this a couple points. First is that we are structuring the way we structure our environment, can unwittingly impose our mental models of other people's possibility spaces on to them. And people find that inherently aboard, right? So think about how we're doing that in many context, not simply in schools.

And then the second thing is, from the king's perspective, deconstruction exactly why and something bothers you by understanding how IT is that you are interpreting that thing then opens you up to be able to manage those spaces in a new way and to engage them in the way. So if we take the conversation back to the idea of civic discourse, of civic reasoning, of engaging with with any idea, right? There are ideas that are deeply problematic.

There are ideas that are deeply herself that have long histories of trauma associated with them, of long history of power dynamics uh, and oppression associated with them. The way in which I think we deconstruct those ideas is going to be critical to how those ideas live on, implicated in our social relationships in our society. If we cancel them, if we negate them and pretend they don't exist, all we're doing is burying them in a place where they can be reconstructed.

And only by actually taking them apart and appreciating the pain, the the relationship structures, the limitations, the resource allocations, the in equities that are implicit in those concepts, only by deconstructing and deeply understanding those can we rebuild them in a different way. So it's very difficult because, on the one hand, we have a space created for ourselves right now in society that is deeply unsafe for many people. And when you are in an unsafe space, you are not in a space that is conducive to constructing and deconstructing, meaning using those default t systems and other systems just to be crashed about the brain, right? And kind of oversimplify IT that are the substrates of autobiographical self.

Of possibility spaces, of ethics, of deep uh, moral and ethical emotions. So on the one. And we have a space that is deeply unsafe for individuals to think together.

And genuinely so there are real implications for people to reveal certain kinds of identities, to engage for certain kinds of ideas in culturally, uh culturally formulated spaces， right that we've constructed together. And the irony is that we can only fix that and create a different way of interacting with one another by actually boldly going in there together. So it's a very nuances line where we need to develop skills.

And this is where I think, and and many people think now that schools should be focused across discipline domains, whether it's math, science, social studies, s history, art, the arts, right sports should be focused on helping Young people and teachers develop capacity and dispositions for deconstructing and constructing, again, safe, uh, safe cultural spaces to think together about, you know, interpretations about narratives, about stories, about assumptions about ideas, because as we engage in those thoughts together, we call that civic disco, right? We learn kind of rules for not trigger ing and sensibilities for not endangering another person's ability to engage on equal footing with us. Because if we trigger those unsafe, right, dangerous places for people they can't neurobiological ally, then engage with us deeply around sharing their perspective and deconstructing hours together to build something where we have a shared understanding in the middle, we have to trust one another.

And trust, trusting one another really means we have to have a space established in which we can feel safe to deconstruct our own beliefs and to allow others to do the same, and to assure them that we can engage with those beliefs no matter what they are, and then actually exterior ze them and evaluate them together and think about them around core values. We probably both hold like well being, like sustainability of society and of cultures, enough groups, right? These things are cool.

Everyone wants to be well, everyone wants to have a sustainable life in a life future, in a cultural set of value. And so when we all appreciate that, we're bringing those things to the table, but then are systematic about constructing a space for civic discourse in which we are supporting one another in deconstructing our own beliefs rather than each other other's police, right then we are at a spaceship. We can start to construct some kind of understanding, some kind of nuances, more um uh adaptive, more prosocial. And the true sense way of engaging with one another would not necessarily way of agreeing with one another, but way of engaging and constructing and deconstructing meaning together, so that we can be adapted, so that we can build a society where everyone can flourish, so that we can build a society where everyone can belong and can, can actually have the resources they need.

I would argue as long free speech is not possible for everybody that nobody say, nobody say, and that there's an illusion of safety around the idea that people who who have voice are going to get what they want simply because they are the one who allowed to talk and other people armed. Yeah, I mean, I think he said that perfectly when he said that any time ideas get buried, there's no way they can be sold here. We know this from the scientific literary forces. The results within social science and biological science tire were deeply troubling.

Yeah um you know I can think of experiments that we're done in the rem of neurology, gery on humans in the one thousand nine hundred and sixty um people stimulate different brain areas and seeing rage or seeing very politically controversial ideas emerge when the person's mouth in real time as a function of stimulating that brain area and then you say, well, do they really believe that and they just never were saying IT and the person doesn't recall that happening during the surgery or I mean this idea that Young had that we have all things inside of us, I think can be seen as a very dangerous notion and territory that we have all these shadows. But the the i'm also an optimistic I feel that the the optimistic view of IT is that by knowing that we have all things inside of us potentially and and by embracing that fact that we can manage that to steal what you just said, we can manage that and that we can function so much Better when we see something in the world that we think that's not me. I'm not that and I hate that when if we understand that, that also lives inside of us, but that we just don't realize IT.

And I realized some people here and go, that's not true. You I have my stances and I disagree with other things. I would say absolutely yes.

But the difference between one person stance and another person stands is could be purely development hiring IT could be um IT could be difference of having read different childhood books and an IT towards one book versus another. I mean, I don't I think that we are very similar at the level of core wiring and core algorithms that we run. But somehow these days, we have the perception that we've diverge so much. I think the only thing that's really missing is what you're describing is, is a place where any and all ideas can be explored freely, not to establish consensus on the validity of certain .

kinds of ideas but to actually externalize them and and dick construct them for what they actually are.

Absolutely um thank you for working through that that space because it's a tRicky one.

I really is very .

fraught um but so so very important. I have a question that's very basic, but i've never gotten a good answer on. I was raised thinking that mary neons were a real thing that there are these neurons that exists in the brains of us and other old world primates um like my cake monkeys um but especially humans.

The so called mirrors that are activated when we see somebody experience something and IT evokes a sort of impair ic understanding in us. I've also seen some reviews written recently in some popular press saying that um minerals are perhaps not playing that the critical role that we thought they were. Um what's the story on marions? Um and we're not going after anybodies work in particular. I just want to know whether not there's real validity to this notion of mirrors.

I'm not the next problem, but I can tell you what I know about IT in the way that um I think about IT.

So I mean, I think it's pretty clear now that there are no such things as mirror like some special kind of cell type that's in the brain that they they have not been found, they were predicted, but they were not found um but something else was also predicted back in the late one thousand nine and eighties um uh by antonio damazer um where he talked about the brain um in terms being organized, in terms of what he called convergent and divergent zones. So he talked about um the brain being organized as networks converging and then diverging again back out. So you have places where processing is kind of coming together. And then then then what happens in there then determines how things get spread back out. And you've got these sort of loops happening in the brain and and his his thinking on that was very much um commensurate with others thinking about the notion of uh of goal directed action and perception so if you think back to developmental scholars who know nothing about the brain, very much like john pj right back in early uh uh twenty twenty th century um where he was observing Young children and noticing that they were interacting with the world and they expected certain things and they were, he thought, imposing theories or schemers onto the world and then and then accommodating was the word he used uh the world with their actions when I didn't act where they expected and then assist late that back right to change what they expected next time so that he had this model that he built from systematically observing children are three in particular right um where he what he realized is that kids are not just flaking around, sort of discovering things have hazards. They're imposing a certain logic onto the world and then they're .

systematically .

testing that logic. So their right they they are expecting things and then when the world does what they want that reinforces, and when he does something different, that surprising, and then they have to accommodate and make sense, and then they have to expect differently in the future. So what does this have to do with me in our, I think when you bring these different ideas together, that the psychological observation ideas and then the neurobiological ideas, what we basically have, and I I wrote about this a little bit in, like, I think, two thousand and eight ever paper called something like the smoke around more in irons.

And I forget the second of the title, but he has the word goals and and uh and directed actions and things right um the idea I think is is is not that there are special neurons they're firing when we see another person the thing right now but that we are the coffee to the notion of us imposing our expectations onto the world. You have to share and understand intuitively the goal of the other one's action in order to activate these mirror regions, right? Um uh where and what are those mayor regions? They are basically regions that are deeply interconnected with each other, right? They're thoroughly interconnected with each other ms of White matter fiber tracks and their regions involved in an action, a uh planning, you know go all interactions and perceiving the outcomes of those actions.

So it's a kind of a loop between acting and perceiving and acting and perceiving and and I argued at the time rate that goals are emergent, like high level goals are emergent from the dynamic feedback loops of acting and perceiving, right? I was really taking a very pejeta view, but imposing that on the so I think you take what I am saying together with like a PH edia constructivist view there, many other constructivist and our scientists, constructive psychologists also, and and then also the neural data. What we see is that we don't have these special neurons built into our head.

What we have is a natural proclivity, and I don't know where that comes from, right? But we have a natural proclivity to try to appreciate another person's actions, feelings, experiences, by leveraging our own similar actions, dealing experiences. And so when we can share goals or experiences, that becomes more fossil, right? And that's been turned over and over in these mirror typed papers, right? And when you a distance yourself from those goals and actions or don't have an intuitive sense of them, then you don't get these mirrors activations, you don't get these kind of wrapped up um uh sharing of of of of goals right or of of experience.

So I think IT really comes back to the way the nervous system is wired to be inherently social. We are cultural learners. We are situated in social spaces from the moment were conceived, and certainly from the moment were born.

And that social space. Serving others, interacting with others, could regulating each other's physiology, each other's attention, each other's um emotion, right? As we do those things, we accommodate to each other and we wire ourselves to expect certain kinds of feelings and then to recognize those same things in other people.

And so as we share constructed experience together, we start to appreciate the same ess, right, the parallels between other people's and our own emotions, thought, goals and and we can also uh dehumanize them, make the other the other person not share our thoughts, emotions, goals, and then we are capable of all kinds of horrible things we've talked about before, right? Where you where you actually distance ced yourself. So what's the scope of iran's? I don't think mira neurons exist.

I think that's the consensus. But our propensity to engage with other people by simulating on the substrate of our own self and then inferring the goals and the feelings and the outcomes and the experiences of those experiences that we've simulated, that's what is very essential to being a human. But keeping in mind that there's also this layer of learned, lived, cultural developed expectations we impose on to the world and we not filter, but we um we steer our attention, we steer our perception to accommodate to alive with our expectations.

So it's never just the reality of what the person experiences or what happened. It's always our perception of that reality as we expected IT to happen. So there's this very dynamic cultural struction happening that is um that is messy, that is iterative, that you can learn to do in different ways in different context and and that's kind of how I understand this notion of mirrors.

Before we conclude, I do want to answer your son's question. Um so so so prior to recording um there was A A text message that came we don't have to read IT a vita with a text message very ell's son um is a late teenagers and he's been doing deliberate codex was a cold showers on on a daily basis and reported that he's not get IT hasn't had any codes since starting this this is actually a pretty common experience because the pulsing a journey that is inevitable with a uncomfortable ly called but safe yeah no .

he jumped out of bed in the morning, doesn't hope bunch of exercises to get warm and and .

jumps in a freezing shower amazing on that Spike of a genuine, we know is no protective if it's a short .

lived Spike in a gentler not .

we know that from the beautiful work of Bruce me and and both and others yeah so um but then he asked, should he get should he continue the cold showers and and the answer is no. I think that then that would be hot showers and hot bears and sona type stuff is is probably very but not so hot that it's stressful. You really want to reduce stress on on an ill system.

Yeah so he sounds up for many reasons like a remarkable Young man as as is your daughter something like and this and you're remarkable and I I really mean that I feel like we could go on forever expLoring these ideas. I absolutely would love to have you back for another discussion or or many about your research. I want to thank you for taking the time of your research schedule, you're teaching schedule, to come educate us today.

These ideas are so widely important and and you provide so many real world examples. In fact, it's one of the things that I love so much about your work is that it's really nested in real world applications. Thank you.

And your thoughts and perspectives on the education and how IT could be Better at the level of educating kids at home, teaching ourselves, teachers um and the education system. I I hope we will ring far and wide because they really can be implemented. We're not about the need to purchase .

a bunch of stuff, need with a yeah the goal of education needs to not learnings, not the goals, not the outcome. IT is to be the development of the person, right? How is the person changing themselves having learned this? And then you designed learning opportunities to change who people are capable of becoming, right? So the learning is there, but it's not the end point. It's just the means to something else which we haven't been attending to enough, and that's the development of the person who they become having learned .

that beautifully. But well, thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much for the work you do, and I can't wait. Have another discussion with you about the virgin searching.

I'll be back.

Thank you. Thank you for joining me today for my discussion about emotions, social interactions and learning with doctor mary Helen in mor. Dino yang.

I hope you found the conversation to be as informative and enrich ing as I did. If you'd like to learn more about doctor inordinate Young's research, please find the link to her laboratory website in the show. Note captions.

In addition, doctor emogene yang authored an incredible book called emotions. Learning in the brain is a book design for the general public, incredibly informative and has a lot of practical tools as well. We provided a link to that book in the shown o captions.

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