Dr. Immordino-Yang: How Emotions & Social Factors Impact Learning

What we're doing, I think, right now to ourselves both in the education system and 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 belief system that never becomes deconstructed.

I think one really important step that as society we'll have to take or we won't make it... is that we need to really get brave about how we think about the process of educating our young people and what it actually means to expose young people to developmentally appropriate age appropriate opportunities to grow themselves as thinkers, as individuals, and as civic agents and community members.

Whatever you're having emotion about is what you're thinking about. And whatever you're thinking about, you could hope to learn about ... So, if the emotions are about the outcomes... If those are the main drivers, then that is what you're learning about.

You said, 'Are we ever able to experience new emotions after age 15?' I think, no, but we are very well able to experience new feelings, which are the complex elaborations of these physiological states and the stories we tell ourselves about the meaning behind them that is developing all the time.

I think the only hope we have to protect ourselves against these possibilities is to systematically develop dispositions in ourselves, proclivities within ourselves, to question our own motives and to deconstruct our own assumptions about situations and to engage with other people's perspectives systematically.

As a scientist, my disposition is always that to understand something is good. And the more complexly, the more thoroughly, you can interrogate and understand something, the better.

What's very clear is that the kind of background sense of the body, the mapping and the regulation of the body, is a basic substrate, a kind of trampoline, for the mind.

What we found is that these emotions, when they get complex, when they're about stories, the valence is no longer the defining feature; the valence doesn't even matter that much. Instead, what matters is does the emotion pertain to a story that is conjured in our minds, or does it mainly pertain to what you can directly witness by looking at the person?

When we are perceiving things—either very basic things like a visual scene or hugely complex elaborate things like Martin Luther King's 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.

What we're really doing is actually producing people who are gutted 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.

Our most high-level complex brain states/mind states are also fundamentally hooking themselves into the most basic biological machinery that literally we share with alligators that keeps us alive.