How Mentors Can Promote “Transcendent Thinking”

By Jean Rhodes

“Kids’ well-being and life satisfaction in their early 20s is predicted by their tendency to engage in transcendent thinking.” Helen Immordino-Yang, Ph.D.

The adolescent brain has long been misunderstood as an immature version of the adult mind, characterized primarily by deficits in executive control and a propensity for risky behavior. To counter this narrative, Professor Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and her colleagus at the University of Southern California’s Center for Affective Neuroscience, Development, Learning and Education offer powerful findings and advice about how adolescents learn and develop. Their work reveals that the teenage years represent a unique period of neural plasticity, marked by extraordinary capacities for what they term “transcendent thinking” (Gotlieb, Yang, & Immordino-Yang, 2024). This research has important implications for how we approach mentoring relationships with young people, suggesting how effective mentors can both recognize and nurture adolescents’ natural drive to make meaning from their experiencese.

As Immordino-Yang notes, emotionally charged observations, challenges, and decisions can become openings for young people to connect with their own values, hopes, and dreams, revealing something profound about how adolescents learn and grow (Immordino-Yang, 2024). Immordino-Yang calls this “transcendent thinking,” the capacity to move beyond the concrete details of a situation to consider broader ethical, systemic, and personal implications. Crucially for those who work with youth, this kind of thinking appears to foster brain development in ways that predict identity formation, life satisfaction, and later achievement (Gotlieb et al., 2024).

The neuroscience is compelling. When teenagers engage in transcendent thinking, multiple brain networks coordinate in complex, dynamic patterns. The executive control network, involved in focused thinking, works in concert with the default mode network, which supports internal reflection and free-form thinking. This coordination, driven by strong emotional engagement, appears to strengthen connections between these networks over time (Immordino-Yang et al., 2024). Brain scans reveal that teenagers who engage in more transcendent thinking show increased growth in networks associated with executive functioning, internal reflection, and emotion, regardless of IQ or socioeconomic status. This brain development predicts identity formation in late adolescence and life satisfaction as young adults enter their twenties.

This has implications for mentoring relationships, particularly during this period of unprecedented divisiveness and uncertainty.  Digital technology has fundamentally altered how adolescents interact with information and each other, often fragmenting attention and encouraging surface-level engagement (Kaufman et al., 2024). Social media platforms can trap teenagers in cycles of comparison and external validation, while the constant stream of information can overwhelm developing cognitive systems. In this context, the mentor’s role becomes not just supportive but neurologically protective.

For example, in Immordino-Yang’s research on urban teenagers who witnessed community violence, crime was associated with thinning in brain regions involved in vigilance, emotion, motivation, and learning, similar to patterns seen in soldiers with combat exposure and individuals with post-traumatic stress disorder (Yang et al., 2024). However, teenagers who reflected transcendently about the violence, thinking about broader historical and social contexts rather than simply blaming individual behavior, showed thickening in these same critical brain regions. Transcendent thinking appeared to counteract the negative neurological effects of trauma exposure. This finding has implications for how approach mentoring relationships and our conversations with young people. Instead of focusing solely on immediate problems or surface-level coping strategies, mentors could create space for deeper reflection and meaning-making. When a teenager experiences academic failure, family conflict, or peer rejection, the mentor’s task could be to help that young person step back and consider: What larger patterns might be at play? How does this experience connect to broader themes in their life? What values and beliefs are being challenged or affirmed? What possibilities might emerge from this difficulty?

The research also reveals something crucial about the conditions that foster transcendent thinking. It does not emerge from passive instruction around predetermined outcomes. Instead, it arises from emotionally compelling stories and experiences, combined with supportive relationships that encourage reflection. Mentors can share compelling stories, pose open-ended questions, and most importantly, listen with curiosity as teenagers work to make meaning of their experiences. Effective mentors understand that adolescents are hungry for big ideas and meaningful connections. They want to wrestle with questions of justice, purpose, and identity. They need safe relationships where they can explore these questions without judgment. This aligns with decades of research on mentoring effectiveness. The most successful mentoring relationships are characterized by emotional warmth, consistency over time, and mentee-driven goals rather than adult-imposed agendas (Raposa et al., 2019). What the transcendent thinking research adds to this work is a deeper understanding of why these relational factors matter: they create the conditions necessary for the kind of deep reflection that promotes healthy brain development.

The research suggests specific practices that can foster transcendent thinking in mentoring relationships. Rather than rushing to provide solutions or advice, mentors can encourage young people to pause and reflect on the deeper implications of their experiences. This might involve acknowledging the emotional reality of the situation first and then invite systems-level thinking about broader patterns and structures. The key is to connect personal experience and emotions to universal themes and larger questions and to encourage values-based reflection about what matters most, and how their present experience to future identity and purpose and helping young people move from “What happened to me?” to “What does this reveal about how the world works and who I want to become within it?”

“The secret is this: Whatever you’re having emotions about is what you’re thinking about and what you’re going to remember” Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

The goal is not to have them reach particular conclusions, but to support their capacity to think beyond the immediate situation toward broader patterns, principles, and possibilities. This type of reflection, when supported by caring relationships, appears to strengthen the brain networks that support lifelong learning, resilience, and well-being.

Here’s a great video on transcendent thinking