by Every parent’s wish is for their child to grow up and live a happy life. During adolescence, this desire often leads to a laser focus on grades, test scores and the chances of getting into college. After all, it’s hard to find happiness without securing a steady paycheck. But what if it’s not a young person’s grades, but the kind of thinking they’re doing — inside and outside of school — that sets them up for a happy adulthood?
What kind of thinking promotes teenage brain development?
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, a professor at the University of Southern California, is part of a group of researchers who have been investigating how adolescent thinking predicts their brain development. Some of their results are not what you might expect.
They conducted a study over five years involving 65 participants aged 14-18, all young people of color living in an urban area.
In face-to-face interviews, the researchers showed the teenagers what Immordino-Yang described as “really funny mini-films about teenagers from all over the world”. The teenagers were then asked, “How does this person’s story make you feel?”
“They could say anything they wanted,” Immordino-Yang told HuffPost.
Given the engaging content, it’s no surprise that the teenagers in the study made connections between the stories and their own lives, as well as big-picture social and moral issues. The researchers call this “transcendental thinking”.
“Transcendental thinking is really that tendency to move beyond the present context, to grasp the current context, to build a bigger story and to engage with the psychological kind of meaning or implications that transcend the present,” said Immordino-Yang.
Although we tend to associate this type of thinking with children who are academic high achievers, the researchers observed transcendental thinking in their interviews with each of the teenagers in the study to varying degrees.
“All the children started thinking about these big questions spontaneously and asking us about them, or trying to connect it to their own story or their own life or to big ideas, values or beliefs that they have,” said Immordino -Yang, who noticed. “that some kids did it much more than others.”
Furthermore, the amount of transcendental thinking shown by teenagers was not correlated with their IQ or with markers of their socio-economic status such as their income, ethnic background or parents’ level of education. (For comparison, SAT scores are highly correlated with all of the above.)
Researchers then used functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to study the relationship between transcendental thinking, brain activity and brain development over time. They looked at images of the teenagers’ brains taken while they were resting and thinking about the stories and measured the degree of connectivity between two major neural networks that are activated when people engage in this type of thinking.
The teenagers then returned to the lab again two years later for another round of brain scans. They found that the children who showed more transcendental thinking showed more brain development over time. Again, this was independent of IQ and socioeconomic status. The more transcendental thinking your teen showed at first, the more brain growth was measured.
In subsequent follow-up surveys over the next three years as the teenagers moved into adulthood, researchers found that the level of brain development they exhibited had a major impact on their lives as a whole.
What is the connection between transcendental thinking and a happy life?
In follow-up surveys, the young adults were asked questions about their identity development and life satisfaction, such as how much they liked themselves and how they felt about their relationships with others. What the researchers found was that teenagers whose brains showed more growth—not just more transcendental thinking but more brain development over time—scored higher on these measures of well-being.
“What we found is that the level of brain growth – but not the original idea in the interview, that you have to do the work of growing your brain – is related to the growth of who you are as well,” a Immordino-Yang said. “And then that identity development, a year and a half or two years later, predicted how satisfied kids were with their lives and how much they liked themselves.”
In the study, the researchers propose a “developmental escape” effect in which transcendental thinking leads to brain growth, which leads to life satisfaction.
Immordino-Yang emphasized that each step in this process is critical.
“You couldn’t go straight from the idea in the interview to the results for young adults,” she said. “You have to go through the work to grow yourself.”
What are the implications for how we raise and educate teenagers?
Immordino-Yang believes these results are good news for teenagers, parents and teachers. They support a growth mindset, where intelligence is not a fixed trait but one that can be developed and nurtured over time. Teen brains change as they grow up, and we can help shape this neurodevelopment by giving teens plenty of opportunities to think in a “transcendent” way.
Instead of focusing on the end goals of test scores or grades, educators could focus on the processes by which children learn, maximizing the types of experiences that support brain growth.
“I think we need to attend closely not only to what teenagers know how to do and what they know, but also how they get to know it,” Immordino-Yang said.
She added that the curiosity of teenagers and their willingness to rethink issues and weigh multiple perspectives “appears to be a really important force in the development of teenagers in terms of their well-being, in terms of their productivity, and in terms of their successful transitions to. young adult.”
Unfortunately, instead of encouraging children to challenge authority and ask probing questions, our current education system often rewards unquestioning compliance.
“Our standard structures and traditional ways of engaging youth in education in middle and high school tend not to support these mindsets, and, in many cases, punish them,” Immordino-Yang said. Instead, she believes we should be encouraging kids to think deeply and critically and ask, “Why?”
Lisa Miller, who is not involved in the study, is a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College and the author of “The Spirit Child: The New Science of Parenting for Health and Life Thriving.” The capacity for transcendental thinking complements her own work on the importance of teenagers finding deeper meaning in their lives.
“There are different ways to get information,” Miller told HuffPost. Schooling tends to put “a lot of emphasis on logic and empiricism,” she said, but “that alone is not enough. Narrow, strategic and tactical thinking alone is not enough. There needs to be a fresh, creative and innovative way of thinking from the bottom up.”
To sustain their happiness and prevent what Miller calls “the disease of despair” that has become an epidemic in Gen Z, kids need to tap into something bigger than themselves. Whether they refer to it as intuition, spiritual awareness or a mystical connection, research shows that spirituality can help prevent depression, addiction and suicidal thoughts.
Miller said it also has an impact “if a parent talks about their own higher power, if the parent talks about their own struggle, pain or struggle, and then if they have a breakthrough that is greater than the sum of the parts.”
Just as the researchers in the study used true stories to encourage transcendental thinking, parents can tell their own stories to shape different kinds of meaning for their children.
The research, said Immordino-Yang, “provides a piece of scientific evidence3 that these alternative pathways may educate the brain to grow the brain in ways that are central to healthy young adults.”
