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Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, a USC professor and affective neuroscience researcher, explores how emotions, stories and culture shape learning and identity. They discuss attachment evolving into meaning, narratives that foster empathy or dehumanization, and how social media can reinforce bias. The conversation also examines curiosity-driven education, adolescence, uncertainty and developing the whole person.
Our highest-level experiences — awe, inspiration, beliefs, and stories — connect to the same biological systems that keep us alive.
The brain is not separate from the body. It maps and regulates the body, while also imposing thoughts and emotions back onto it.
Consciousness emerges from this dynamic brain–body conversation.
At age 2, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang’s daughter said she loved her mother’s arm — a concrete, embodied feeling.
At age 4, she said she loved her mother more than she was glad there was daytime.
The attachment stayed similar. What changed was her ability to conceptualize it, turning physiology into ideas, meaning, and stories.
We actively impose our expectations, values, and culture onto what we perceive.
In one example, Japanese viewers described an underwater scene as rocks, plants, and fish. Western viewers focused on a fish swimming through a scene.
Culture changes what people notice and remember — even at the perceptual level.
Dehumanization changes the story we tell about another person’s pain: from “another human suffering” to something less than human.
That shift can suppress empathy and enable cruelty. Immordino-Yang’s proposed safeguard is a learned disposition to question our motives, deconstruct assumptions, and engage other perspectives before acting.
Traditional schools often define learning as producing the expected answer under time pressure.
Alternative systems, like New York City’s Performance Assessment Consortium, let students spend months or years on multidisciplinary projects — creating questions, consulting experts, presenting work, and examining their own learning process.
The goal shifts from recall to meaningful inquiry.
“Whatever you're having emotion about is what you're thinking about.”
If students’ emotions center on grades, failure, or performance, they learn to focus on outcomes. If emotions center on ideas and curiosity, they learn about the ideas themselves.
Start with what interests a student, then use math, writing, or science as tools to explore it.
By adolescence, schools often tighten control just as young people develop the capacity to explore complex meaning, identity, and social questions.
Adults should help students become reflective, rigorous, intellectually humble, and comfortable with uncertainty.
The goal of education needs to not, learning is not the goal.
— Mary Helen Immordino-Yang