transcendent thinking = analyzing situations for their deeper meaning, historical contexts, civic significance, and/or underlying ideas.
This kind of thinking, which the study’s authors call “transcendent,” moves beyond reacting to the concrete specifics of social situations to also consider the broader ethical, systems-level and personal implications at play. Engaging in this type of thinking involves analyzing situations for their deeper meaning, historical contexts, civic significance, and/or underlying ideas.
Our study suggests that as mid-adolescents engage in transcendent thinking, trying on their newly expanding capacities for making meaning, they coordinate neural networks involved in effortful thinking and internal reflection. This spontaneous, active coordination across development may contribute to the growth of both their brains and their minds, lifting them over the threshold to productive young adulthood.
adolescents who grapple with the bigger meaning of social situations experience greater brain growth, which predicts stronger identity development and life satisfaction years later.
What the researchers found is that all teens in the experiment talked at least some about the bigger picture—what lessons they took from a particularly poignant story, or how a story may have changed their perspective on something in their own life or the lives and futures of others. However, they found that while all of the participating teens could think transcendently, some did it far more than others. And that was what made the difference. The more a teen grappled with the bigger picture and tried to learn from the stories, the more that teen increased the coordination between brain networks over the next two years, regardless of their IQ or their socioeconomic status. This brain growth—not how a teen’s brain compared to other teens’ brains but how a teen’s brain compared to their own brain two years earlier—in turn predicted important developmental milestones, like identity development in the late teen years and life satisfaction in young adulthood, about five years later.
The findings reveal a novel predictor of brain development—transcendent thinking. The researchers believe transcendent thinking may grow the brain because it requires coordinating brain networks involved in effortful, focused thinking, like the executive control network, with those involved in internal reflection and free-form thinking, like the default mode network. These findings “have important implications for the design of middle and high schools, and potentially also for adolescent mental health,” lead researcher Immordino-Yang says. The findings suggest “the importance of attending to adolescents’ needs to engage with complex perspectives and emotions on the social and personal relevance of issues, such as through civically minded educational approaches,” Immordino-Yang explains. Overall, Immordino-Yang underscores “the important role teens play in their own brain development through the meaning they make of the social world.”
Adolescence is a period of marked cognitive, emotional and psychosocial growth1, as well as a sensitive period for neurological development2, the second such period after infancy. It is characterized by sensitivity to the social context and by the emergence of increasingly sophisticated abilities to interpret the social world and react with complex emotions to its happenings3,4. By middle adolescence, from approximately 14–18 years of age, youth develop the capacity for “transcendent” thinking. That is, mid-adolescents are disposed, and often motivated, to enrich their concrete, empathic, and context-specific interpretations with abstract, systems-level considerations that transcend the current situation5–9. They invoke broader perspectives on themselves, other people, and social systems, and draw on cultural values and associated emotions to infer social and ethical implications and build deeper understandings10,11. Moving into the later teenage years, transcendent thinking supports late-adolescents’ identity development, the process of building self-definitions rooted in reflections on experiences, hopes, relation-ships, values, and beliefs rather than on happenstance. As such, transcendent thinking may contribute to stronger identity achievement and less identity diffusion12–14. The identity development process can support a healthy transition to young adulthood15–17, in the early twenties, with emotionally fulfilling and stable relationships, a positive sense of self and life purpose18, and productive, ethical use of educational and work opportunities19,20. Especially among ethnically diverse youth, and youth from families of low-socioeconomic circumstances, transcendent social thinking and identity are important developmental assets, given the likelihood these youth will face complex circumstances and social challenges11,21.
Using an innovative combination of long 2-hour interviews and brain MRI-scans of individuals, her research shows that during moments of reflection, so-called transcendent thinking, youngsters have widespread neural activity that link brain regions typically associated with thinking, feeling and keeping the body alive and well. These patterns also come to determine how their brains grow as the children become older. These findings have further been replicated across cultures.
When we feel pain or pleasure physically or we are revolted by ideas of torture or thrilled by solving a mathematical equation this is all located in the anterior insula, our ‘gut’ feeling. This is why learning and emotions are intertwined as values, beliefs and ideals are hooked into the biological make-up.
“Emotionally engaged thinking activates brain systems that keep you alive,” Immordino-Yang’s brain studies reveal.
Concretely, this means that when the young people transcend, go beyond, the concrete experience and start to make ethical and moral implications of stories or experiences, a process of narrativizing the reality begin of imagining possible futures and possibles ideas. So, thinking deeply is essentially telling complex stories to yourself that activates memories, emotions and basic life processes.
Young people’s ability to reflect on and think deeply about stories or experiences, further, predict their brain growth later in life, and importantly also how content they are.
What if educators were experts in human development?
Her research team found that when teens make sense of social stories by using what she calls “transcendent thinking”—that is, thinking that transcends the here and now to connect to bigger ideas, values and systems-level implications—this process appears to grow their brains in patterns associated with identity development and life satisfaction in young adulthood (p. TK).
Making meaning of belonging | USC Rossier School of Education
You've got the taste for transcendence
That translates your love into action
And participate in the fight now
For a creed you can truly believe
