“All our learning and thinking is driven by emotion. Everything. Emotions can be about ideas, about complex dilemmas, or they can simply be reactive. What you feel emotion about is what you think about. And what you think about is what you can learn about.” These are the words of neuroscientist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, who, along with her colleagues, is studying how children learn.

In this study, Children are placed in an fMRI scanner to measure their brain activity. They are first shown moving and inspiring documentaries about their peers, for example, about human rights activist Malala, who at age twelve is not allowed to go to school because she’s a girl. During follow-up interviews, the researchers discovered that children give meaning to these stories in two ways:

1) Direct responses
Concrete, empathetic, and direct reactions that are about the story itself. “I feel so bad for her, I’d like to help her.”

2) Transcendent thinking
When they use the story to discover something bigger about how the world works. “Why is the world like this?” and “Are you saying that not all children in the world can go to school because someone thinks that’s not right?”

Direct responses don’t encourage much further thought. Meanwhile, transcendent thinking is associated with much stronger emotions and encourages further reflection. It leads to learning and an attitude that produces more intellectual, deeper thinkers, and happier students.

In our current education system, we mainly teach children what the right answer is, that someone else knows that answer, and that you need to satisfy that other person by giving that answer. What we don’t teach and encourage is the desire to know why something is the way it is. To create a school system that encourages transcendent thinking, Immordino-Yang suggests a shift in perspective; treating learning outcomes as part of the learning process and fostering curiosity and emotional engagement with complex ideas.

Luckily there are different methods that evoke transcendent thinking:
One method involves using narrative documentaries about peers, such as the story of Malala Yousafzai, to evoke strong emotional reactions and encourage students to think beyond the immediate narrative. This method helps students engage in transcendent thinking by prompting them to ask broader questions about the world, such as “Why is the world like this?” or “Why can’t all children go to school?” This kind of engagement helps students connect emotionally with the material, leading to deeper understanding and intellectual growth.

Additionally, transcendent thinking can be evoked through an intergenerational storytelling program, which pairs teenagers with older adults from their neighbourhoods and engages them in all sorts of interesting activities. They tell each other stories about who they are. Older people share what they have achieved and what they can pass on to the next generation, and teenagers tell imaginative stories about who they could be in the future. Teenagers who participated in this research, over time, show to have begun to think more transcendently.

Immordino-Yang stresses that social-emotional learning is not just beneficial, but crucial for children’s brain development and forms the foundation for a successful life. How can we evoke emotions in our own learning paths?