Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: Professor of Education, Psychology, and Neuroscience at the University of Southern California whose lab studies how emotions and social interactions shape learning and brain development. A former cabinet-maker turned middle-school science teacher turned Harvard-trained developmental neuroscientist.
What this episode covers
Andrew Huberman and Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang explore how emotions are not a side effect of thinking but the fundamental driver of what we attend to, learn, and remember. She explains how basic survival-level bodily states get elaborated into complex feelings, beliefs, and identity, and how high-level emotions like inspiration and compassion recruit the brain's default mode network. The conversation turns to education, arguing that traditional schooling trains kids to be rote, performance-driven 'computers' and shuts down their natural drive to construct meaning, especially in adolescence. They discuss civic discourse, why people must feel psychologically safe to deconstruct beliefs, social-media siloing, and dehumanization. Immordino-Yang also recounts her unconventional path into science and education and addresses mirror neurons and cold exposure.
The guest's own work
Emotions, Learning, and the Brain
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
“Dr amordino Yang authored an incredible book called emotions learning in the brain it's a book designed for the general public it's incredibly informative”— Andrew Huberman
Also referenced (named, not recommended)
Where the Red Fern Grows
Wilson Rawls
“I liked the book Where the Red Fern Grows I liked um books and stories about it generally was boys for me”— Andrew Huberman
Curious George
H. A. Rey
“so when I was a kid I loved stories of all kinds like I think like most kids yeah I love my Curious George books”— Andrew Huberman
Babar
Jean de Brunhoff
“I'm told I like the Babar books but then quickly didn't like the Babar books”— Andrew Huberman
How People Learn II
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
“which ended up being published in the National Academy of Science engineering and Matt's book how people learn volume two because I was on the committee”— Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
Big reveals from this episode
- Brain-imaging surprise: for complex story-based emotions, valence (pain vs. pleasure) stops mattering and the same systems, including the hypothalamus and anterior insula, activate.
- Her findings were among the first to show the default mode network increasing in activation during an effortful task: feeling about a story.
- They can predict trial-by-trial which stories will activate a person's transcendent neural systems based on their reaction in a pre-scan interview.
- Argues genocide becomes possible when people shift their narrative to dehumanize others, inhibiting empathy circuits.
- Claims that for almost everyone except a privileged few, intrinsic curiosity-driven learning 'falls off' by adolescence, right when kids most need it.
- Reveals she barely finished high school, dropped out of sixth grade for a few months, and only later became an academic.
- States the default mode network needed for perspective-taking is fundamentally incompatible with feeling physically or socially unsafe.
- Says it is now clear there are no mirror neurons as a special cell type; they were predicted but never found.
Worth remembering
- She credits the idea that the brain exists to control the body and map bodily states to her postdoctoral mentor Antonio Damasio.
- Cultural framing changes perception itself: Japanese viewers describe an underwater scene as 'rocks and plants,' while Western viewers say 'a fish swimming through a scene.'
- A Sudanese immigrant student who had never passed math became fascinated by fractions through Zeno's Paradox ('walking to the door').
- Adolescent mental-health crises are framed as partly caused by schools stunting kids' natural drive to make meaning.
- Her South Boston school had roughly 81 languages spoken among about 1,100 students, with refugees from Rwanda, Kosovo, Haiti and more.
- In Japan it is common to maintain multiple social-media handles to safely embody different versions of oneself, like pretend play.
- A cab driver insisting Schwarzenegger would fight terrorists with a machine gun illustrates how the brain efficiently collapses identities.
- Her teenage son stopped getting colds after starting daily cold showers; Huberman attributes it to short adrenaline spikes being neuroprotective.
- If you are already sick, Huberman recommends hot showers, baths and sauna over cold exposure to reduce stress on an ill system.