When Students Think Beyond the Moment

Every educator knows the stirring silence that envelops a classroom after a curious student asks a question that opens a new way of thinking. Years ago, in a middle school science class one of us (Immordino-Yang) was teaching, a discussion about human origins led students to wrestle with what it means to “belong” in the natural world. The discussion unfolded into questions about identity, history, and how knowledge shapes our sense of self. That moment opened a monthslong conversation in which students used scientific approaches and ideas to understand observations and to make sense of themselves and the world.

We have come to call that meaning-making process transcendent thinking. It occurs when students connect happenings, facts, and procedures to values and ideas, integrate emotions into reasoning, and use what they are learning to imagine larger meanings.¹ Watching adolescents think beyond immediate classroom lessons has changed the way we see teaching and learning—and launched a new understanding of the adolescent brain.

Adolescence: The Brain’s Time for Meaning

Adolescence is often framed as a time of risk, rebellion, and emotional turbulence. Evidence from neuroscience shows that it is indeed a period of dramatic change, but what matters most for educators is how that change enables new potential during a period of accelerated brain development:

Brain development after birth does not just involve the brain getting bigger or stronger or increasing its number of connections…. Instead, brain development mainly involves the generation, pruning, and reorganization of neural connections to form brain networks that reflect a person’s experiences and help him or her adapt to the world in which they live…. As a person engages with situations, problems, ideas, and social relationships, these experiences influence patterns of brain structure and function that undergird a person’s changing skills and inclinations over time.²

During puberty, the brain’s major networks reorganize, and networks that support abstract reasoning, empathy, and self-reflection are shaped and strengthened. Because of this, experiences that feel deeply meaningful to teens—ones that engage their emotions and abstract thinking by inviting them to make sense of complex, compelling ideas—literally seem to help build the architecture of the brain.

In our research at the University of Southern California Center for Affective Neuroscience, Development, Learning and Education (USC CANDLE), we have seen how adolescents’ developing brains are primed for reflection, purpose, and moral imagination.³ This is the time when they begin to ask: Who am I? What do I believe in and stand for? What kind of world do I want to help create? As educators well know, these kinds of questions are powerful motivators for teens, but too often our lessons and expectations seem designed to headbutt rather than support and work with these developmentally important thoughts. And, as educators also know, that doesn’t go well. Students may fight the system and take their musings underground, losing interest in school and becoming defiant. Or they may push these important developmental proclivities aside and adopt an attitude of passive compliance, buying into a system that ultimately undermines their sense of agency and purpose to please adults and follow the paths others have set out for them.

But it does not have to be this way. Our neuroimaging studies suggest that when teens consider the broader implications of stories, lessons, or events—that is to say, when they think transcendently about the things they are learning—their brain networks are engaged in measurable ways that appear to strengthen them over time. In particular, the network that coordinates reflective, conceptual, and self-relevant thinking and the network for goal-directed focus come to communicate more efficiently. The brain systems that allow young people to plan, empathize, and learn are exercised when they search for meaning. What if our secondary schools were designed to incorporate and leverage, rather than thwart, this important developmental process?

The Science of Feeling and Thinking

While early neuroscientific theories assumed that emotions interfere with rational thought,⁴ today we know the opposite is true. In the brain, emotions guide attention, motivation, and decision-making;⁵ they are the bridge between knowledge and action and the reason you bother to think in the first place. Let’s put it this way: Whatever someone is having emotion about, they are thinking about. And whatever they are thinking about, they could possibly learn about. So, the question for educators is: What are the students in my class having emotions about? If your answer has to do with the powerful ideas underlying your subject matter, then our neuroscience studies suggest you are on the right track.

In one of our earliest studies with teens, a diverse sample of high school students watched short documentary stories and individually discussed with us how they felt.⁶ Just as we had previously found with adults, when the teens reflected on the bigger implications of the stories, grappling with the stories’ broader ethical, personal, and systems-level importance, they were more likely to report feeling moved or inspired.⁷

For example, Isela, a participating teen, watched a video of Malala Yousafzai filmed when she was a 12-year-old in Pakistan determined to continue studying despite the Taliban having forbidden it. When asked how it made her feel, Isela responded: “Um, this story makes me feel upset—how she wants to be a doctor and continue on with her education, but it makes her sad ... knowing her journey would be very difficult.”

After pausing for a few moments, Isela went on:

And it’s crazy how it’s that powerful.... I mean ... it makes me think about my own journey in education and how I want to go to college and hopefully be a scientist someday. And even more, I guess what really hits me is how not everyone is able to get this chance, to go forward with their life and get an education or do what they want to do with their life. I mean, it’s not right.

Again, Isela stopped to think. Her gaze wandered from the image of Malala on the computer screen in front of her to the tree outside the window. Then she continued:

Ah, I guess when I think more, yeah, it makes me feel upset that, um, others live in certain parts of the world where they don’t want people to learn and they are trying to, like, hold them back. But then, uh, her story, like, inspires me to work harder so that, uh, I can prevent those things from happening maybe. Everyone everywhere should have the chance ... I mean, all human beings should be able to live free and choose their life future.

After reacting empathically to the concrete details of Malala’s situation, Isela went beyond these details to consider the personal and ethical implications of the story. All the teens could think transcendently, we found, but some, like Isela, did so far more than others.

When the teens watched the stories again during fMRI brain imaging, we saw that among those who felt inspired, the brain regions that regulate bodily states (heart rate, breathing, and consciousness) were activated alongside regions associated with reasoning, self-awareness, memory, and imagination. In other words, when the teens were so taken with the information they were learning that they dared to ask big questions that challenged their assumptions and changed their perspectives, they dynamically coordinated major brain networks involved in mental and bodily functioning. This suggested something quite profound: Deep emotional reflection on complex ideas leverages the very same brain networks that are responsible for keeping us alive.

Even more striking, when we brought the participants back two years later for follow-up brain scans, those like Isela who had done more transcendent thinking in the original interview had grown their brains more over time, irrespective of their IQ or socioeconomic circumstances, and irrespective of the state of their brain development when they started the study. Our work with the teens showed us how they move through the world daily—not complacently memorizing but challenging and reckoning with the things they witness in order to learn deeply. And the more they did this, the more they were habitually exercising their minds and brains, and the more growth they later showed.

These findings are important for educators to understand because they change the way we think about the purpose of learning in school.⁸ When teens develop dispositions for transcendent thinking, they build intellectual agency and strengthen the neurobiological circuits that undergird mental functioning and emotional well-being. For adolescents, whose emotions are amplified by hormonal changes and heightened social awareness, this means that learning experiences are particularly powerful when charged with genuine feeling and deep learning. Following our participants for three more years into young adulthood, we found that the more transcendent thinking they had shown in the original interview, and the more robustly their brain networks had changed over the subsequent two years, the stronger their identity development, self-liking, and relationships five years after we first met them.⁹

Now, can you imagine if teens’ learning opportunities in school regularly integrated their emotions with their intellect?

Building Classrooms That Support Development

Understanding this science of how youth make meaning as they learn is only the beginning. The real challenge, and opportunity, is translating it into classrooms. That is why we created CANDLE’s COLABs program, where educators and scientists work side by side to bring insights from developmental research into everyday practice. It means that relationships, relevance, and reflection are not add-ons to rigorous instruction; they are the mechanism of developmentally powerful learning itself.

The brain is shaped by how you use it, and adolescents’ brains are sculpted by the kinds of thinking they do most. When we give them opportunities to make connections across subjects, to question, to empathize, to imagine alternatives, to interrogate different perspectives, the data suggest we are literally helping their brains grow and integrate. The educator’s role is to provide the opportunity, resources, and structure for this exploration—to guide students through complexity without dictating conclusions.

At CANDLE, we think of this as teaching with a developmental orientation: seeing every lesson not only as academic instruction but as an opportunity for identity formation and civic growth. Whether in a COLABs workshop or a local professional learning community, teachers tell us that this perspective reenergizes their practice and changes the way they see their work. It validates what they already feel: that teaching is about far more than transmitting information. It’s about shaping human beings who can think critically and care deeply, who know what it feels like to be curious, and who are learning to link the specific examples and information from their academic learning to big, powerful ideas.

Thinking Beyond Academic Standards

Schools are understandably preoccupied with what students know and how this compares to standards, assessments, and outcomes. But our research suggests the mental habits and reflective capacities that students build will shape how they use what they know, and how they will develop their potential through acts of coming to know. Put another way, determining what students know and can do is not enough to assess their progress. The more important question for educators is how students’ daily activities invoke patterns of thinking and feeling that shape not simply what knowledge and skills the students acquire but how they think and, ultimately, who they become.

One powerful example comes from a student in a high school designed around performance-based assessment who was working on Zeno’s dichotomy paradox, the ancient puzzle about walking halfway to a door again and again.¹⁰ Will the person ever reach the door? Preparing his graduation project, the student described how his work changed his view of both mathematics and himself:

I have spent two months thinking about one problem called “walking to the door.” It led me to thinking about limits and the idea of asymptotes. I had to study fractions to be able to think about the problem I had. Through doing the problem, I got fascinated by the idea of finite and infinity. I was able to connect it to my life.¹¹

To make sense of the problem, he had to master very concrete skills (fractions, limits, algebraic reasoning), but he also began to wrestle with big ideas about the nature of infinity and about persistence in his own life. His narrative continuously cycled between the here-and-now (“I had to study fractions”) and the abstract (“I got fascinated by the idea of finite and infinity”), and he used that active toggling to connect the work to the empowering feeling of becoming a mathematician.

Moments like this reveal how deep learning often occurs when students link abstract concepts to their lived experiences. In doing so, they are not just mastering content; they are building the neural “cross-talk” that infuses their reasoning with emotion and purpose. Over time, this integrated pattern of thinking supports long-term well-being and lifelong learning. In other words, the ways students think about what they are learning—the stories they construct and the feelings they harbor about it—help grow them as people and help grow their brains.

What Transcendent Thinking Looks Like in Practice

Transcendent thinking can emerge in any subject area and in thinking about social and civic issues. It shows up whenever students move beyond describing what is happening right now and begin to think about the bigger concepts at stake. For any given thing or event, from a math problem to neighborhoods’ differing levels of tree cover, transcendent thinking includes students wondering how that thing or event works, why it happens, what systems or histories shape it, how it could be different, and what it means for themselves and others.

To gather examples of transcendent thinking in a social and civic context, we asked the teens who had come to our lab to reflect on the violence and crime many had witnessed or heard about in their urban neighborhoods. Why did they think these things happened, and what did they think could be done to make the problem better? In their reflections, some students focused on describing the violent events, explaining how people “get caught up in the moment,” are “really mad, and so they just kill somebody,” or make a “bad decision.” Those explanations are correct, but they stay grounded in the here-and-now. Other teens, talking about the very same events, described violence as “a cycle,” connected to family histories, community expectations, and what people have been led to believe about themselves. One student pointed out that “everyone has a history” that shapes how they act. These more elaborate narratives weave together emotion, context, and systems considered over time; they reveal transcendent thinking.

Classrooms can invite this kind of meaning-making. A history teacher might ask students not only what happened in a particular era but how patterns of injustice or courage echo in their own communities and what “cycles” they see repeating. A math teacher might use a data project to raise questions about whose experiences are represented, who is missing from the dataset, and how statistics can be used to challenge or reinforce stereotypes. A science teacher might encourage students to consider how climate change policies affect different neighborhoods or generations, prompting them to connect graphs and experiments to issues of fairness and responsibility.

In our partnerships with educators, we see that when teachers intentionally design opportunities for these kinds of narratives, students respond with remarkable insights. One teacher described how a unit on climate change turned into a conversation about justice: Students asked who gets to decide what sacrifices are made, brought in family stories, and debated the roles of government and community action. The teacher realized her students were not just learning science content; they were “practicing democracy” by building narratives about how the world works and how scientific knowledge and skills can be leveraged to understand and impact these happenings.

Neuroscience helps explain why these practices are so powerful. When adolescents engage emotionally with complex, real-world questions, the brain network that tracks bodily feelings of significance works together with the network for effortful focus and the network for reflection and imagination.* Deep, meaningful thinking dynamically engages this extensive brain circuitry, making students feel more alive, more agentic, and more invested in their work. Over time, adolescents who routinely cycle between concrete problem-solving and abstract reflection show stronger coordination among these networks and better outcomes in school and in life.¹²

For educators, the implication is clear: Transcendent thinking is not a luxury to fit in after the “real” curriculum. It is the real curriculum. When we invite students to build, share, and defend their own big-picture narratives—while also providing targeted support for the concrete skills they need to do so—we are helping them develop the dispositions of mind that grow their brains, sustain their learning, and prepare them to contribute meaningfully to their communities.

Our longitudinal research with teens from diverse Los Angeles schools shows that those who habitually engage in transcendent thinking—who think both about and beyond the immediate context and reflect on the deeper meanings, values, ethics, and possibilities that are invoked by doing so—develop stronger connections among brain networks associated with self-regulation and perspective-taking.¹³ They also report greater life satisfaction and sense of purpose as young adults.

We have found that transcendent thinking can even buffer the negative effects of stress and violence. For example, the adolescents in our lab who thought in transcendent ways about the problem of neighborhood violence showed resilience to the effects of this violence in their brain development.¹⁴ Meaning-making appears to protect the brain, much as exercise protects the body. For educators, this underscores the importance of helping students situate their learning and experiences in larger disciplinary contexts, connecting daily work to big ideas.

Teaching as Co-Construction of Meaning

When we speak with teachers around the country, many tell us that what drew them to education was the chance to make a difference in young people’s lives. Yet the daily pressures of standards and testing can make it hard to honor that deeper purpose. The science of transcendent thinking reminds us that teaching is itself an act of meaning-making.

When teachers design lessons that invite students to connect ideas and emotions, they are participating in the same developmental process they hope to nurture. Our ongoing research with teachers shows that teachers’ own curiosity, empathy, and reflection activate similar brain systems to those of their students. Learning, for both, becomes a shared human endeavor and one that matters for instruction.

Our recent study with secondary teachers across Los Angeles revealed how teachers’ own developmental thinking, or how they understand who their students are and what learning is for, is related to the quality of practices they enact in the classroom.¹⁵ Teachers whose professional narratives integrate both cognitive and social-emotional dimensions of learning, reminding students that they have “amazing ideas” and encouraging students to “develop the intellectual courage” to share their ideas and consider multiple perspectives, were more likely to create classrooms that encourage dialogue, reflection, and student voice. As one teacher described, “I don’t just teach biology—I teach students who are becoming biologists, citizens, and people who care about life.” In their classrooms, lessons unfold as conversations in which students’ perspectives and queries help shape the learning goals and deepen collective understanding.

Our neuroimaging data from teachers engaging with student work while in an fMRI scanner suggest that this kind of teaching reflects the same dynamic integration we observe in our adolescent participants: networks supporting self-reflection, empathy, and goal-directed focus working together. When teachers engage in this co-construction of meaning, they are exercising the same systems of the brain that underpin deep learning in their students. Teaching that integrates emotion, identity, and intellect becomes not just instruction but also a relational and reflective practice of growth for both teacher and learner—and youth benefit.

We see this every day in our work with educators: teachers leaving sessions with not only new strategies but also a renewed sense of purpose—a new way of seeing the classroom, of listening, and of engaging youth. They describe realizing that fostering meaning is not an add-on to good teaching; it is good teaching. When educators and students co-construct meaning and build a classroom culture of engaging thoughtfully with concepts and their implications, they build classrooms that cultivate the very capacities that sustain learning and democracy itself.

Looking Forward

Imagine an education system that recognizes adolescence not as a problem to manage but as a window of possibility. Imagine classrooms where academic rigor and emotional depth are inseparable, where students learn to think beyond the moment, and where teachers are partners in young people’s developmental growth.

This is the vision that drives our work at USC CANDLE. We study the science of learning not as an abstract pursuit but as a way to illuminate the artistry and science of teaching. Our brain research has clear implications: When students are invited to engage with rich, generative content and are given space to wonder, to wrestle with big ideas, and to connect learning to life, they don’t just perform better academically—they become more fully themselves.

We educators have the extraordinary privilege of guiding students’ journeys. Every thoughtful question and moment of reflection we nurture shapes the developing brain and the emerging citizen. Together, we can create classrooms that grow minds capable of complex scholarly thinking imbued with empathy, imagination, and purpose—the capacities our youth, and our world, most need to thrive.                            

Mary Helen Immordino-Yang is the Fahmy and Donna Attallah Chair in Humanistic Psychology at the University of Southern California (USC), a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the director of the USC Center for Affective Neuroscience, Development, Learning and Education (CANDLE). Early in her career, she was a public school science teacher. Christina Kundrak is a senior research associate at USC CANDLE and a former teacher in early childhood, secondary, and postsecondary classrooms. Kori Street is USC CANDLE’s executive director; their previous positions include leading the USC Shoah Foundation and academic programs across four departments at Mount Royal University. Portions of this article were adapted from “Transcendent Thinking May Boost Teen Brains” and reproduced with permission. Copyright © 2025 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, a Division of Springer Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved.

*These three networks are (1) the salience network, which constructs feelings of all kinds, weighing their relevance and urgency to shift thinking between the other two networks; (2) the executive control network, which is outwardly focused and enables attention to specific goals; and (3) the default mode network, which is internally focused and reflective, helping us build a sense of self. (return to article)

Endnotes

1. M. Immordino-Yang, “The Power of the Adolescent Mind,” Phi Delta Kappan 106, nos. 7–8 (May 2025): 48–54.

2. M. Immordino-Yang, L. Darling-Hammond, and C. Krone, The Brain Basis for Integrated Social, Emotional, and Academic Development: How Emotions and Social Relationships Drive Learning (Washington, DC: National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development, Aspen Institute, 2018), aspeninstitute.org/publications/the-brain-basis-for-integrated-social-emotional-and-academic-development.

3. M. Immordino-Yang, Emotions, Learning, and the Brain: Exploring the Educational Implications of Affective Neuroscience (W. W. Norton & Company, 2015); M. Immordino-Yang, “Transcendent Thinking May Boost Teen Brains,” Scientific American, January 21, 2025, scientificamerican.com/article/transcendent-thinking-boosts-teen-brains-in-ways-that-enhance-life; and M. Immordino-Yang et al., “Civic Reasoning Depends on Transcendent Thinking: Implications of Adolescent Brain Development for SEL,” Social and Emotional Learning: Research, Practice, and Policy 4 (2024): 100067.

4. B. Casey, S. Getz, and A. Galvan, “The Adolescent Brain,” Developmental Review 28, no. 1 (March 2008): 62–77.

5. M. Immordino-Yang and A. Damasio, “We Feel, Therefore We Learn: The Relevance of Affective and Social Neuroscience to Education,” Mind, Brain, and Education 1, no. 1 (March 2007): 3–10.

6. R. Gotlieb, X.-F. Yang, and M. Immordino-Yang, “Concrete and Abstract Dimensions of Diverse Adolescents’ Social-Emotional Meaning-Making, and Associations with Broader Functioning,” Journal of Adolescent Research 39, no. 5 (2024): 1224–59; R. Gotlieb, X.-F. Yang, and M. Immordino-Yang, “Diverse Adolescents’ Transcendent Thinking Predicts Young Adult Psychosocial Outcomes via Brain Network Development,” Scientific Reports 14, no. 1 (2024): 1–11; and R. Gotlieb, X.-F. Yang, and M. Immordino-Yang, “Default and Executive Networks’ Roles in Diverse Adolescents’ Emotionally Engaged Construals of Complex Social Issues,” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 17, no. 4 (2022): 421–29.

7. M. Immordino-Yang, L. Darling-Hammond, and C. Krone, The Brain Basis for Integrated Social, Emotional, and Academic Development: How Emotions and Social Relationships Drive Learning (Washington, DC: National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development, Aspen Institute, 2018), aspeninstitute.org/publications/the-brain-basis-for-integrated-social-emotional-and-academic-development.

8. M. Immordino-Yang et al., “Weaving a Colorful Cloth: Centering Education on Humans’ Emergent Developmental Potentials,” Review of Research in Education 47, no. 1 (2024): 1–45.

9. Gotlieb, Yang, and Immordino-Yang, “Diverse Adolescents’ Transcendent Thinking Predicts.”

10. For a video of this student presenting his project, go to go.aft.org/zjw; his portion begins at 5:34.

11. Gotlieb, Yang, and Immordino-Yang, “Default and Executive Networks’ Roles”; Gotlieb, Yang, and Immordino-Yang, “Diverse Adolescents’ Transcendent Thinking Predicts”; and Gotlieb, Yang, and Immordino-Yang, “Concrete and Abstract Dimensions.”

12. Gotlieb, Yang, and Immordino-Yang, “Default and Executive Networks’ Roles”; Gotlieb, Yang, and Immordino-Yang, “Concrete and Abstract Dimensions”; and Gotlieb, Yang, and Immordino-Yang, “Diverse Adolescents’ Transcendent Thinking Predicts.”

13. X.-F. Yang et al., “Transcendent Thinking Counteracts Longitudinal Effects of Mid-Adolescent Exposure to Community Violence in the Anterior Cingulate Cortex,” Journal of Research on Adolescence 35, no. 1 (March 2025): e12993.

14. C. Kundrak et al., “The Power of Developmental Thinking: Social-Cognitive Complexity of Urban Secondary Teachers’ Pedagogical Narratives Predicts the Quality of Their Classroom Practices,” Sciety Labs, October 31, 2025, osf.io/preprints/osf/95d2e_v5.

[Illustrations by Enrique Moreiro]