Essentials: How Emotions & Social Factors Impact Learning | Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now for my discussion with Dr. Mary Helen Imordino-Yang. Dr. Imordino-Yang. Good to be here. Great to have you. I've heard you talk before about inspiration and awe. Inspiration and awe seem to me kind of rather high level emotional experiences compared to say fear or happiness. What is the role of inspiration and awe and story in how we learn and experience life starting at a young age? Yeah, I mean, I think what you've noticed is actually fundamental to the conundrum of being a human is that our most high level complex brain states, mind states are also fundamentally hooking themselves into the most basic biological machinery that keeps us alive. Our beliefs, our experiences, our interpretations of the meaning of things, which that's where the story comes in, the stories that we conjure about, you know, collectively with other people, culturally in spaces inside our own selves. And 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. 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 is we get this amazingly both fundamental and high level state simultaneously where we feel expansive, we feel 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 that's in essence, the power of being a human. That's the power of our intelligence at this late stage in our evolution. I've heard you say before, and I love this quote and I wanna make sure that you get attribution for this, not me, that we basically have a brain to control our body. 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? So the first thing I'll say is that I learned that idea from working with Antonio Damasio and he taught me first that this notion that it's the feeling of the body, it's an organism's ability to represent or map the state of the interior and exterior of the body that becomes the substrate for consciousness and for the mind. The work that I've been doing, it's basically addressing exactly the question that you're asking, which is how is it that we construct a narrative, construct a conscious feeling into something that feels like a narrative, that feels like a belief state or an emotion state or an experience? And what is the role of embodiment in that? What is the role of the brain in that? And what also is the role of the culture and the cultural context and other people in that? Because what we're really learning across the sciences right now is just how incredibly social 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 and construct and co-construct a sense of self and a sense of meaning via those cultural spaces and those sort of nuanced ways of accommodating each other mentally and physically that lead to the feeling of us. So back to your original question, 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. And so we are managing our survival. We now have lots of evidence from across many kinds of science about the interdependence of our stress and social relationships and our immunity and our ability to digest food. And it's even now very clear that it's not even just us. There's a whole microbiome 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 separate thing. It's an outgrowth or an elaboration of that process. It's a specialization of that process, a localization of it in a way that provides enough processing power to be able to really construct all kinds of feelings and mental states and beliefs and imaginings out of basically just 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 and is modulated in response to mental states is also very real. So we have a kind of like a dynamic conversation happening of brain and body and mind that are kind of co-conjuring 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 chains of ideas, chains of experiences over time that we call story. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium in the correct amounts, but no sugar. Proper hydration is critical for optimal brain and body function. Even a slight degree of dehydration can diminish cognitive and physical performance. It's also important that you get adequate electrolytes. The electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium are vital for functioning of all the cells in your body, especially your neurons or your nerve cells. Drinking Element dissolved in water makes it very easy to ensure that you're getting adequate hydration and adequate electrolytes. To make sure that I'm getting proper amounts of hydration and electrolytes, I dissolve one packet of Element in about 16 to 32 ounces of water when I first wake up in the morning. And I drink that basically first thing in the morning. I'll also drink Element dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise that I'm doing, especially on hot days when I'm sweating a lot and losing water and electrolytes. Element has a bunch of great tasting flavors. I love the raspberry. I love the citrus flavor. Right now, Element has a limited edition lemonade flavor that is absolutely delicious. I hate to say that I love one more than all the others, but this lemonade flavor is right up there with my favorite other one, which is raspberry or watermelon. Again, I can't pick just one flavor. I love them all. If you'd like to try Element, you can go to drinkelement.com slash Huberman, spelled drinkelement.com slash Huberman, to claim a free Element sample pack with a purchase of any Element drink mix. Again, that's drinkelement.com slash Huberman to claim a free sample pack. I'm fascinated by the idea that early in life, we experience some interaction with the world. It could be with other people. It could be with an object in the world. And it makes us feel something powerful. And that lays a template of recognition, meaning that later in life and perhaps throughout life, we're always consciously or subconsciously going back to trying to experience that same kind of awe or inspiration. So is what we're learning across the lifespan a recognition of feelings in our body, or is it cognitive or both? Yeah, it's a dynamic emergent state. Let me give you an example that I use sometimes to help myself understand the notion. My little daughter, okay, Nora, when she was two, I was sitting in the kitchen one day drinking a cup of tea. I was sad about something that happened in my life, but I wasn't weeping or anything. I was just sitting there. I must've looked kind of lost in my own thoughts. She's playing around on the floor. She comes over to me and noticed I wasn't really there with her. My arm was hanging down. She picked up my arm and she held it against her face like that. And she said, don't worry, Mama, I'll take care of you. And I said, yeah. And I said, oh, Nora, that's so sweet, sweetie. I'll take care of you too. And she said, and Mama, I really love you. I really love you. And then she said, I mean, I really love your arm. I really love your arm, right? Fast forward two years later, almost exactly two years, she's four and a couple months, and she was in bed one night laying in her bed in the dark. And I walked by and I listened at the door to see if she was asleep in there. And I hear this little whisper comes out and she says, Mama, I love you more than I'm glad that there's daytime. What's changed developmentally from her at age two to her at age four, right? I would argue that the physiological substrate of her attachment to her mother is probably quite similar. She had this sort of visceral, automatic, biological, you might say, attachment, connection to me emotionally that she was trying to leverage in the service of making sense of being active in that world and adapting herself to the situation, helping me in the first case, right? But what's changed remarkably is not the substrate of that attachment, it's her ability to conceptualize it, right? When she's two, her love is experienced as this incredibly concrete, embodied, real, physical thing. Like, I love you, I mean, I really love the body part I am currently smooshing against my face, right? Whereas two years later, she can conceptualize that love in terms of an idea, which is, you know, wouldn't it be awful if there was nighttime all the time and there was no sunshine and daylight and I couldn't go out to play and I couldn't, right? So she's thinking about how much she 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, aversion states, right? Motivational states of various sorts into mental states, beliefs, poems, you know, love songs, all the things that she does, right? Even between age two and age four, that really are mental elaborations, meaning-making of that very physiologically basic sensation. So the contact with your arm or your arm or both was the life example that she was using it as a two-year-old that maps to an internal feeling. So the question is, is what we are doing across the lifespan is recognizing sort of, I don't wanna call them primitives, but basic emotional states, which are not infinite, but can be each one along a continuum. So a little bit of love, completely in love, you know, along a continuum and everything in between, a little angry and annoyed to completely furious. Are we talking about maybe 10 to 30 core emotions that then we are just simply bending our experiences into and onto and mapping onto, and then that's our life story? Is that the way you think about it? I mean, I think, yes, I think there's an awful lot of basic physiological mechanisms that become motivational mechanisms, right? In all the senses, adaptive mechanisms that we share with all life forms. What we basically are doing is taking these very primitive physiological regulatory capacities that are essentially there to keep you alive, and we conjure out of them a form of consciousness, an awareness of those processes that becomes something that feels mentally powerful to us. And then we start to build more and more facility, more and more sort of wisdom around conjuring the story that makes the most direct parsimonious sense out of the things that you imagine somebody 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. This also goes back to what you were saying about development. This is actually how I see development across the lifespan. My little two-year-old loves the arm, then she loves me as much as something else that she really appreciates, like daylight, and then she goes on from there, and when she's 80, God willing, someday, right, she'll be making a different kind of story, picking out things that matter in more subtle ways that other people may not notice because of the historical context, because of her more lived experience that she brings to that story, right? So the things that become salient, the things you learn how to notice and build a story out of are developmental, and they're learned across time, but the basic fundamental processes around the emotions are always driving the need to make the story. So 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 onto the world our own expectations of what is there as we are perceiving what's actually there, right? So as we impose onto 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 change the way in which people observe and remember scenes, right? So, you know, there's classic work by Shinobu Kiriyama and other people. showing that in Japan versus in in the US when you show people a scene of you know like an underwater scene with like all the beautiful things that are underwater rocks and plants and things and a little fish swimming By and then one big fish swimming by right and you ask a Japanese person What's this a picture of they tend to talk about it's a scene of rocks and plants and little fish and then a big fish Swims by if you ask an American Western educated person, what is this picture of they say? Oh, it's a fish swimming through a scene. He's shown that this is very very automatic. It's very low-level It's perceptual not just conceptual and it actually changes 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're not little you know robots or little Video cameras walking around observing the world and so when we see something as complex as a social story We impose onto that all kinds of personal experiences 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 Piaget talked about this a hundred years ago accommodate or assimilate those things into us that we that that may disagree with our schema that may That may align and accord and reinforce them this matters a lot for the ways that humans experience the world more broadly because Think about for example a terrible topic like genocide or the Holocaust, right? How does something like that happen, right? How is it that people who have empathy who who love their family who love their neighbors can suddenly turn on each other? Right. What's happened is they've shifted the way in which they narratize the context of those events the way in which they impose interpretation on somebody else's pain has been Fundamentally shifted from that's another human suffering to that's not a human. That's a rat a pig a bug or whatever it is, right and that Dehumanization process allows us to shift our story set so that we bring another set of values and beliefs Into the space. I'm just glad that you brought up this example because I think that for a lot of people it's it's Inconceivable, but I've never heard it framed the way that you're describing it Which is that if the story becomes not about the other person's suffering But primarily about one's own story of suffering and that Can suppress or literally inhibit the neural circuits that invoke empathy then it makes perfectly good Neurobiological sense as to why that would at least be possible. Yeah, and of course, I don't think it's a good thing It's just like many aspects of our biology and psychology. It 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? I you know, I'm a teacher I'm very also very interested in the ways that we design educational experiences for young people. 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 and when we develop those dispositions the hope is that we are developing within ourselves a kind of a Veto system right a system for checking our own motivations against other people's experiences of those motivations So much of what's leading I think though now we're going in another direction in a kind of a political direction But so much what's leading us into these very divisive political times, for example Not just and you know the rise of authoritarianism 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 are Western educated. Is that we are Taught that to know something means you own something in yourself And then you take that with you and you impose it on the world forever more I know how to do algebra 2 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 dispositionally teach ourselves to to check our assumptions to rethink what we think we know and And this is key developmentally to notice when we need to do that and when we should just plow ahead and it's totally fine and And so 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 and it's very comfortable and it's 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 all comes back to the emotions that drive our thinking so we have these very basic Primitive physiological states which vary across individuals the degree to which they are, you know, incredibly powerful easily evoked versus not You know, there's a lot of range in that now all of that variation makes things interesting right it's our ability to learn to experience those and To know 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 reframe right and so that kind of mental flexibility Really comes out of an emotional disposition it is our ability. So it takes it back to what you were asking at the very beginning It is our ability to not just drive from what feels like the bottom up which of course is always starting in the top down because you've got some Interpretation of the world that makes you feel fear that makes your body do this that makes you right but also to be able to rise above to transcend and Think about what are the broader systemic historical? Ethical civic implications of this narrative I'm telling myself which feels default like the truth and how might I deconstruct 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 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 their bequest It actually imbues us with a responsibility To then develop dispositions to systematically query those and reframe them when they are not serving us or the world Well, I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor a g1 I'm excited to share that a g1 has just launched their newest formulation a g1 pro Ag1 pro takes the clinically backed a g1 formula, which is a blend of vitamins minerals probiotics and adaptogens and adds three important new ingredients creatine monohydrate Calcium HMB and zinc carnosine each serving has five grams of creatine monohydrate to support muscle strength and performance as well as brain health calcium HMB to support muscle recovery and reduce muscle breakdown and Zinc carnosine to support and improve the lining of your gut all three of these ingredients have compelling science to support them and Therefore I love seeing them added to the existing a g1 formula as most of you know I've been taking a g1 every day for nearly 14 years now I started taking it long before I even knew what a podcast was It's a great product and it's now made even better with the new a g1 pro formula If you would like to try a g1 pro you can go to drink a g1 Comm slash Huberman to get a special offer Ag1 is giving away a free bottle of omega-3 coenzyme q10 with your first subscription again Go to drink a g1 comm slash Huberman to get a free bottle of omega-3 coenzyme q10 with your first a g1 subscription What do you think can be done at a concrete level in terms of education of younger people as well as educational people who are out of high school and and beyond to Try and adopt these more encompassing modes of Learning and experiencing the world. I think one really important step that as society will have to take or We won't make it and I know that sounds a little Dramatic, but I actually think it's true. 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 opportunities to grow themselves as thinkers as Individuals and as civic agents and community members, 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 Deeply they are deeply problematic and lead us to a place where we are 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 right now the way in which we think about School is about is basically judged by quote-unquote learning outcomes, right? What have you learned and how do we know that we make you demonstrate it by yourself under time pressure in a particular? Setting right or you're going to come back and I'm going to give you a question and you're going to give me the answer I had in mind and if you do that in time, then I'll say you learned it and now we're done check Right as compared to a system and there are educational systems like this, for example, the performance Assessment consortium in New York City is a consortium of public schools. They have a dispensation from the New York State government Not to give the Regents exam as their graduation requirements instead to have alternative ways of assessing kids where kids Work for months to years depending on the project on these in-depth intellectual multidisciplinary 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 then they query the work and they talk about Their own learning process and what could happen next and what decisions they made and also your graduate thesis 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 preschool all the way up that engage people systematically in that kind of intellectual curiosity we know that little kids education preschool education if you don't have the water table and the sand table and the cool stuff and the choices and the ways to engage with each other and you know I mean all the stuff being really age Appropriate for three-year-olds to touch and smoosh and you know, try to taste and whatever else they're gonna be a mess on the floor They're just not gonna come they're gonna refuse to come to school, right? They're gonna be laying in the in the doorway throwing temper tantrums So we know how to do little kid education. Well doesn't mean 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 Quote-unquote educational system and we somehow think that that natural human proclivity to engage curiously and meaningfully with deep thinking about ideas and the world is Is like inefficient and inappropriate and frightening and we teach kids. No, no, no, no Turn that off. It's dangerous. If you do it, it's considered insubordinate, right? And what we want you 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 I think what you're describing is so key And I never thought about it from the perspective of oh, yeah 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 and a mind And trying to build meaning in our mind and that we get to 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 we're adults. What age do? you think this cliffs off? And also, how do we address this issue that there are certain basic skills that not everyone is going to perform well at? And so for the kid that says, I don't like math. You still have to learn it, you need to appreciate it. So how do you conjure up a joy or an appreciation in that kid? It sounds like the emotion system is the key system to leverage in order to learn. And so could you talk about the relationship between emotion and learning? Because I realize this is really the center of what you do. So, I mean, you could say it this way, right? So whatever you're having emotion about is what you're thinking about, right? And whatever you're thinking about, you could hope to learn about. So if the emotions are about the outcomes, did I get it right? Am I gonna flunk? Did I get an A plus? I'm so smart, I'm so stupid. Well, any one of those, right? If those are the main drivers, then that is what you're learning about. If the emotions are about the actual ideas in play, the math, the physics, the why does the ball roll down the ramp? Wait a minute, that's the same as why the moon goes around. You know what I mean? Like there are, right? When the emotions are about ideas, then 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's what we're learning how to think about. Perform. Perform, not how to think about the ideas, 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 rich problem spaces that in problems that invite them to try to engage with something that piques your curiosity that's meaningful to them, or have them bring in where the kid who really hates it, like what is it that you do find interesting kid? Start there and start using your academic skills in a way that will give you power to do what it is you're interested in doing. That's the way in. Use your writing, use your math, use your persuasive argument skills, use your filmmaking skills, whatever it is, to tell the story of something that you find deeply, meaningfully powerful to understand. We've got the cart before the horse. I'm not saying you don't have to learn math or you don't have to learn to read or write or do all these other kinds of skills, but we make those, which is in the horse's cart, you know, what's in the cart, we call that the metric of the education system and the aim of it, when in fact it's the quality of the horse. Can that horse pull the thing, right? That's the development of the person and what they put in their cart then serves that development. It's the toolkit 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 resourced or trained to think about development in these ways. I mean, so you asked, when does this fall off? It really depends in what school system you are and in what demographic you are when it falls off. But for almost 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 it's also ironically when developmentally kids are developing the neural capacity and the psychosocial 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 what I believe about sustainability and about sports and about adults and counterculture, right? As we grow into a space where we're driven to try to challenge and think about big meanings and engage with perspectives and emotions and social issues and broad, important existential 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 servant who shows up in the scene and great expectations, right? Is it Molly or is it Maria, right? And it's, you know, like who the heck knows? And that is not the point of reading great expectations, right? We take away because we're afraid. As educators, as society, we've got this narrative around young peoples in particular, but everyone's propensity to build and construct meaning in these spaces and self in these spaces, that agency frightens us because we're worried they're going to take risks, they're going to do something stupid, they're going to fall off the track, they're going to not make it in the traditional system. And in trying to protect them and shield them from their own curiosities, their own dispositions for meaning making, we, I would argue, actually stunt their ability to grow themselves. 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, which is the role of adults is to wrap around young people and help them learn to be reflective, to be systematic, to be rigorous with themselves as they develop the capacities 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 sort of intellectually humble, curious way where we're constantly querying 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 does school expect you to do? Settle immediately onto one solution, which by the way is the solution I already had in mind when I gave you the question, right? As compared to sitting with young people and allowing them in safe and appropriate ways the space in which to actually grapple with complex, powerful questions. When kids develop the proclivities to do that, they learn how to manage those very human capacities that we've been talking about the whole time. They learn to appreciate and manage those capacities within their own selves. You're remarkable. And I really mean that. I feel like we could go on forever exploring these ideas 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 and the education system, I hope will ring far and wide because they really can be implemented. We're not talking about the need to purchase a bunch of stuff. No, we need to start with a different disposition. We need to start with a different goal. Yeah, the goal of education needs to not, learning is not the goal, it's not the outcome. It needs to be the development of the person, right? How is a person changing themselves having learned this? And then you design the 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 put. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much for the work you do. And I can't wait to have another discussion with you about the verging research. Okay, I'll be back. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.