Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

Rest Is Not Idleness Implications of the Brain’s Default Mode for Human Development and Education

When people wakefully rest in the functional MRI scanner, their minds wander, and they engage a so-called default mode (DM) of neural processing that is relatively suppressed when attention is focused on the outside world. Accruing evidence suggests that DM brain systems activated during rest are also important for active, internally focused psychosocial mental processing, for example, when recalling personal memories, imagining the future, and feeling social emotions with moral connotations. Here the authors review evidence for the DM and relations to psychological functioning, including associations with mental health and cognitive abilities like reading comprehension and divergent thinking. This article calls for research into the dimensions of internally focused thought, ranging from free-form daydreaming and off-line consolidation to intensive, effortful abstract thinking, especially with socioemotional relevance. It is argued that the development of some socioemotional skills may be vulnerable to disruption by environmental distraction, for example, from certain educational practices or overuse of social media. The authors hypothesize that high environmental attention demands may bias youngsters to focus on the concrete, physical, and immediate aspects of social situations and self, which may be more compatible with external attention. They coin the term constructive internal reflection and advocate educational practices that promote effective balance between external attention and internal reflection.

Implications of Affective and Social Neuroscience for Educational Theory

The past decade has seen major advances in cognitive, affective and social neuroscience that have the potential to revolutionize educational theories about learning. The importance of emotion and social learning has long been recognized in education, but due to technological limitations in neuroscience research techniques, treatment of these topics in educational theory has largely not had the benefit of biological evidence to date. In this article, I lay out two general, complementary findings that have emerged from the past decade of neuroscience research on emotion and social processing, with a view to beginning a dialogue about the meaning of these findings for educational theory. First, emotion and cognition are intertwined, and involve interplay between the body and mind. Second, social processing and learning happen by internalizing our subjective interpretations of other peoples beliefs, goals, feelings and actions, and vicariously experiencing aspects of these as if they were our own. Together, these two results from neuroscience could have important implications for the design of learning environments; to discover these will require reconciling established educational learning theories with the current neurobiological evidence.

Correlations between social-emotional feelings and anterior insula activity are independent from visceral states but influenced by culture.

The anterior insula (AI) maps visceral states and is active during emotional experiences, a functional confluence that is central to neurobiological accounts of feelings. Yet, it is unclear how AI activity correlates with feelings during social emotions, and whether this correlation may be influenced by culture, as studies correlating real-time AI activity with visceral states and feelings have focused on Western subjects feeling physical pain or basic disgust. Given psychological evidence that social-emotional feelings are cognitively constructed within cultural frames, we asked Chinese and American participants to report their feeling strength to admiration and compassion-inducing narratives during fMRI with simultaneous electrocardiogram recording. Trial-by-trial, cardiac arousal and feeling strength correlated with ventral and dorsal AI activity bilaterally but predicted different variance, suggesting that interoception and social-emotional feeling construction are concurrent but dissociable AI functions. Further, although the variance that correlated with cardiac arousal did not show cultural effects, the variance that correlated with feelings did. Feeling strength was especially associated with ventral AI activity (the autonomic modulatory sector) in the Chinese group but with dorsal AI activity (the visceral-somatosensory/cognitive sector) in an American group not of Asian descent. This cultural group difference held after controlling for posterior insula (PI) activity and was replicated. A bi-cultural East-Asian American group showed intermediate results. The findings help elucidate how the AI supports feelings and suggest that previous reports that dorsal AI activation reflects feeling strength are culture related. More broadly, the results suggest that the brains ability to construct conscious experiences of social emotion is less closely tied to visceral processes than neurobiological models predict and at least partly open to cultural influence and learning.

Modularity and the Cultural Mind Contributions of Cultural Neuroscience to Cognitive Theory

A central question in the study of the mind is how cognitive functions are shaped by a complex interplay of genetic and experiential processes. Recent evidence from cultural neuroscience indicates that cultural values, practices, and beliefs influence brain function across a variety of cognitive processes from vision to social cognition. This evidence extends to low-level perceptual systems comprised of domain-specific mechanisms, suggesting the importance of ecological and cultural variation in the evolutionary and developmental processes that give rise to the human mind and brain. In this article, we argue that investigating the architecture of the human mind will require understanding how the human mind and brain shape and are shaped by culture–gene coevolutionary processes.

Mind, brain, and education in reading disorders

Part I. What is Reading, and What are Reading Disorders? Looking to Neuroscience, Evolution and Genetics: 1. Towards a grounded synthesis of mind, brain and education for reading disorders: an introduction to the field and this book Kurt W. Fischer, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Deborah Waber 2. An evolutionary perspective on reading and reading disorders Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Terrence W. Deacon Essay: brain volume and the acquisition of adaptive capacities Verne S. Caviness 3. The genetics of dyslexia: what is the phenotype? Albert M. Galaburda and Gordon F. Sherman Part II. Reading and the Growing Brain: Methodology and History: 4. A brief history of time, phonology, and other explanations of developmental dyslexia Maryanne Wolf and Jane Ashby 5. Approaches to behavioural and neurological research on learning disabilities: in search of a deeper synthesis Robbie Case 6. Growth cycles of mind and brain: analyzing developmental pathways of learning disorders Kurt W. Fischer, L. Todd Rose and Samuel P. Rose Essay: cycles and gradients in development of the cortex Robert W. Thatcher 7. Brain bases of reading disabilities Francine Benes and Juliana Pare-Blagoev 8. The neural correlates of reading disorder: functional magnetic resonance imaging Juliana Pare-Blagoev 9. Patterns of cortical connection in children with learning problems Frank H. Duffy Essay: the role of experience in brain development: adverse effects of childhood maltreatment Martin H. Teicher Part III. Watching Children Read: 10. Finding common ground to promote dialogue and collaboration: using case material to jointly observe childrens behaviour Jane Holmes Bernstein 11. Analyzing the reading abilities of four boys: educational implications Susan Brady 12. First impressions: what four readers can teach us Benita A. Blachman 13. Analysis of reading disorders from a neuropsychological perspective H. Gerry Taylor 14. An education/psychological perspective on the behaviors of three children with reading disabilities Joseph K. Torgesen Part IV. Reading Skills in the Long Term: 15. The importance of comprehension in reading problems and instruction Joseph C. Campione Essay: bringing reading research to the trenches Sandra Priest Rose 16. What successful adults with dyslexia teach educators about children Rosalie Fink 17. Is a synthesis possible? Making doubly sure in research and application David Rose.

Me, My “Self” and You: Neuropsychological Relations between Social Emotion, Self-Awareness, and Morality

Social emotions about others’ mind states, for example, compassion for psychological pain or admiration for virtue, are an important foundation for morality because they help us decide how to treat other people. Although these emotions are ostensibly concerned with the mental qualities and situations of others, they can precipitate intimately subjective reflections on the quality of one’s own social life and mind, and via these reflections incite a desire to engage in meaningful moral actions. Our interview and neural data suggest that the shift from social emotion to introspection may be facilitated by conscious mental evaluation of emotion-related visceral sensations.

The Brainstem in Emotion: A Review

Emotions depend upon the integrated activity of neural networks that modulate arousal, autonomic function, motor control, and somatosensation. Brainstem nodes play critical roles in each of these networks, but prior studies of the neuroanatomic basis of emotion, particularly in the human neuropsychological literature, have mostly focused on the contributions of cortical rather than subcortical structures. Given the size and complexity of brainstem circuits, elucidating their structural and functional properties involves technical challenges. However, recent advances in neuroimaging have begun to accelerate research into the brainstem’s role in emotion. In this review, we provide a conceptual framework for neuroscience, psychology and behavioral science researchers to study brainstem involvement in human emotions. The “emotional brainstem” is comprised of three major networks – Ascending, Descending and Modulatory. The Ascending network is composed chiefly of the spinothalamic tracts and their projections to brainstem nuclei, which transmit sensory information from the body to rostral structures. The Descending motor network is subdivided into medial projections from the reticular formation that modulate the gain of inputs impacting emotional salience, and lateral projections from the periaqueductal gray, hypothalamus and amygdala that activate characteristic emotional behaviors. Finally, the brainstem is home to a group of modulatory neurotransmitter pathways, such as those arising from the raphe nuclei (serotonergic), ventral tegmental area (dopaminergic) and locus coeruleus (noradrenergic), which form a Modulatory network that coordinates interactions between the Ascending and Descending networks. Integration of signaling within these three networks occurs at all levels of the brainstem, with progressively more complex forms of integration occurring in the hypothalamus and thalamus. These intermediary structures, in turn, provide input for the most complex integrations, which occur in the frontal, insular, cingulate and other regions of the cerebral cortex. Phylogenetically older brainstem networks inform the functioning of evolutionarily newer rostral regions, which in turn regulate and modulate the older structures. Via these bidirectional interactions, the human brainstem contributes to the evaluation of sensory information and triggers fixed-action pattern responses that together constitute the finely differentiated spectrum of possible emotions.

Intrinsic Default Mode Network Connectivity Predicts Spontaneous Verbal Descriptions of Autobiographical Memories during Social Processing

Neural systems activated in a coordinated way during rest, known as the default mode network (DMN), also support autobiographical memory (AM) retrieval and social processing/mentalizing. However, little is known about how individual variability in reliance on personal memories during social processing relates to individual differences in DMN functioning during rest (intrinsic functional connectivity). Here we examined 18 participants’ spontaneous descriptions of autobiographical memories during a 2 h, private, open-ended interview in which they reacted to a series of true stories about real people’s social situations and responded to the prompt, “how does this person’s story make you feel?” We classified these descriptions as either containing factual information (“semantic” AMs) or more elaborate descriptions of emotionally meaningful events (“episodic” AMs). We also collected resting state fMRI scans from the participants and related individual differences in frequency of described AMs to participants’ intrinsic functional connectivity within regions of the DMN. We found that producing more descriptions of either memory type correlated with stronger intrinsic connectivity in the parahippocampal and middle temporal gyri. Additionally, episodic AM descriptions correlated with connectivity in the bilateral hippocampi and medial prefrontal cortex, and semantic memory descriptions correlated with connectivity in right inferior lateral parietal cortex. These findings suggest that in individuals who naturally invoke more memories during social processing, brain regions involved in memory retrieval and self/social processing are more strongly coupled to the DMN during rest.

Toward a Microdevelopmental, Interdisciplinary Approach to Social Emotion:

Social emotions about others’ minds, for example, admiration for virtue and compassion for social pain, play a critical role in interpersonal relationships, motivation, and morality. However, historical biases toward studying emotions as automatic reactions generated within a solitary individual limit our ability to study emotions about others’ minds, which are inherently complex, social, and subjective. Here, I argue that a microdevelopmental approach, that is, considering these emotions as dynamic, context-dependent mental constructions actively organized from simpler cognitive and affective psychological components, may help to overcome the difficulties of studying these emotions by providing new perspectives on: reliably inducing these emotions; parsing the ensuing experiences into component psychological processes organizing over time; and relating these component processes to patterns of brain activation.

Neuroscience Bases of Learning

Recent research on neuroscientific foundations of learning has created major changes in both methods and theories about the study of learning and the brain, leading to better applicability of brain findings to educational issues and questions, and to new insights into how learning happens in schools. This article focuses on the prominent role of neuroimaging in this transition, describing how learning involves the construction of distributed neural networks to support skills, such as for reading, math, or managing social relationships. General brain processes including emotion, attention, and social processing modulate and facilitate the development and recruitment of these neural networks.