Perspectives on Psychological Science

Rest Is Not Idleness: Implications of 7(4) 352–364

© The Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permission:
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DOI: 10.1177/1745691612447308

Development and Education http://pps.sagepub.com

Mary Helen Immordino-Yang1,2, Joanna A. Christodoulou3,

and Vanessa Singh1
1
Brain and Creativity Institute, University of Southern California, Los Angeles;
2
Rossier School of Education, University of Southern California, Los Angeles; and
3
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA

Abstract
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.

Keywords
reflection, memory, prosocial emotion

“Rest is not idleness.” on learning and socioemotional development, including, for

example, demands from entertainment media, from the chal-
John Lubbock, The Use of Life (1894) lenges associated with urban settings, or in the classroom?
Emerging conceptions of brain functioning reveal that neu-
Clinicians and teachers often discuss the benefits of “down ral networks responsible for maintaining and focusing atten-
time” and reflection for making sense of one’s experiences and tion into the environment appear to toggle with a so-called
decisions about future behavior. For example, many experien- default mode (DM) of brain function that is spontaneously
tial education programs emphasize the importance of time for induced during rest, daydreaming, and other nonattentive but
introspection, and interventions and therapies that teach skills awake mental states (Smallwood, Obonsawin, & Heim, 2003).
for quiet reflection and mindfulness produce benefits espe- Further evidence from social and affective neuroscience sug-
cially for social and emotional functioning (Cohen, 2006; Col- gests the importance of brain systems implicated in the DM
laborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning for active, internally focused psychosocial mental processing,
Briefs, 2007; Semple, Lee, Rosa, & Miller, 2010) but also for for example, in tasks involving self-awareness and reflection,
academic achievement (Brackett, Rivers, Reyes, & Salovey,
2010). Why should this be, and how can developmental, clini-
Corresponding Author:
cal, and educational psychologists better conceptualize the Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Brain and Creativity Institute and Rossier
role of off-line and reflective processing for human develop- School of Education, University of Southern California, 3641 Watt Way,
ment? Conversely, how might researchers think in new ways Los Angeles, CA 90089-2520
about the impacts of high environmental attentional demands E-mail: [email protected]

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Constructive Internal Reflection and the Brain 353

recalling personal memories, imagining the future, feeling Looking out and Looking in: The Discovery
emotions about the psychological impact of social situations of Complementary Brain Networks
on other people, and constructing moral judgments (Buckner,
Andrews-Hanna, & Schacter, 2008; Gilbert & Wilson, 2007; Neuroscience studies over the past several decades have
Spreng & Grady, 2010; Spreng, Mar, & Kim, 2009). Studies revealed that contrary to early theories, attention is not a gen-
examining individual differences in the brain’s DM connectiv- eral property of the whole brain but the product of specific
ity, essentially measures of how coherently the areas of the networks that contribute to various aspects of processing.
network coordinate during rest and decouple during outward Decades of study have differentiated three systems responsi-
attention, find that people with stronger DM connectivity at ble for monitoring and responding to the environment around
rest score higher on measures of cognitive abilities like diver- us and for focusing our mental processing on incoming stim-
gent thinking, reading comprehension, and memory (Li et al., uli: alerting, orienting, and executive control (see Corbetta &
2009; Song et al., 2009; van den Heuvel, Stam, Kahn, & Shulman, 2002; Fan, McCandliss, Sommer, Raz, & Posner,
Hulshoff Pol, 2009; Wig et al., 2008). Taken together, these 2002; Posner & Petersen, 1990). These functions, which rely
findings lead to a new neuroscientific conception of the brain’s heavily on lateral frontal and parietal regions, are important
functioning “at rest,” namely, that neural processing during for cognitive development, and interventions that support chil-
lapses in outward attention may be related to self and social dren in strengthening skills related to these aspects of attention
processing and to thought that transcends concrete, semantic improve cognitive and academic performance in a variety of
representations and that the brain’s efficient monitoring and domains (Posner & Rothbart, 2005; Smallwood et al., 2007;
control of task-directed and non-task-directed states (or of out- Stevens, Lauinger, & Neville, 2009).
wardly and inwardly directed attention) may underlie impor- But what does the brain do when not engaged in a focused,
tant dimensions of psychological functioning. These findings goal-directed task? Newly emerging theories of the brain’s
also suggest the possibility that inadequate opportunity for functional architecture reveal that the attention networks
children to play and for adolescents to quietly reflect and to described above are part of a broader complement of brain
daydream may have negative consequences—both for social- networks that can roughly be conceptualized as supporting
emotional well-being and for their ability to attend well to two alternating systems. One of these networks is “task posi-
tasks. tive”; its recruitment is associated with active engagement in
Despite the potential implications, however, psychological goal-directed tasks involving attention to the world and evalu-
scientists are largely unaware of or have underappreciated the ating the salience of external stimuli (Seeley et al., 2007). This
relevance of this actively growing body of neural findings, and network supports what we will call the “looking out” system.
cognitive neuroscientists interested in development and edu- Another network, known variously as the “task negative” or
cation have largely focused on the immediate, negative effects “resting” network, has been found to be associated with the
of attention lapses on task-directed performance (e.g., Kane brain’s default mode of operation (Buckner & Vincent, 2007;
et al., 2007; McVay & Kane, 2010; Smallwood, Beach, Raichle et al., 2001). This network comprises mainly regions
Schooler, & Handy, 2008; Smallwood, Fishman, & Schooler, along the midline of the brain, in both the parietal and the fron-
2007). Therefore, our goals in this article are (a) to introduce tal lobes, along with more lateral regions in the inferior part of
psychological scientists to recent advances in understanding the parietal lobe and the medial part of the temporal lobe (see
the functioning of the brain and mind during lapses in outward Fig. 1). During neuroimaging experiments, the activity in
attention; (b) to generate an early hypothesis from the neuro- these regions is heightened most reliably during passive rest
science findings concerning the effects of consistently high (Greicius, Krasnow, Reiss, & Menon, 2003), induced by para-
external attention demands in schools and leisure environ- digms such as asking participants to stare for several minutes
ments on socioemotional development in children and adoles- at a plus sign shown in the center of their field of vision or to
cents; (c) to propose preliminary examples of productive relax with their eyes open or closed. We will call this the
connections between this hypothesis and current educational “looking in” system. (Note our nomenclature: We use the term
and developmental psychological research findings, in order network to describe sets of brain regions whose activity is
to demonstrate the utility of the neural findings for psycholo- functionally coordinated. We use the term system to describe
gists; and (d) to advocate educational practices that promote the psychologically relevant capacities that are supported by
more effective balance between children’s needs for external the brain network.)
attention and internal reflection. The overarching premise of The past decade of neuroscience research has revealed that
the article is that although daydreaming and other lapses in as one network is increasingly engaged, the other is decreas-
outward attention lead to poor performance on concentration- ingly engaged (Esposito et al., 2006; Fox et al., 2005). It is
requiring tasks in the moment, skills for reflecting during thought that the toggling of these networks reflects a shift
lapses in outward attention and time for safely indulging mind from a state of external monitoring and focus on goal-directed
wandering may be critical for healthy development and learn- activity (“looking out”) into a more free-form, internally
ing in the longer term. directed, stimulus-independent mental state (“looking in”; see

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354 Immordino-Yang et al.

Fig. 1. Overview of the main brain regions comprising the default mode (DM) network, with brief
descriptions of associated socioemotional functions. The DM regions listed are relatively more active and
show coordinated activity during wakeful “rest.” The regions depicted are also involved in many other
functions, including various cognitive association functions and aspects of homeostatic regulation and
somatosensation, especially for the milieu of the internal body (i.e., the “guts”). The left side of the image
shows the front of the brain; the right and left hemispheres are split apart to show the medial surface. Note
that these brain areas cannot be said to “do” the functions listed. Instead, they are especially “associated”
with these functions and as such are thought to play important roles within the complex networks of
regions underlying the functions. 1. Ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC): Induction of social emotions;
nonconscious induction of somatic responses, such as skin sweating associated with a sense of risk; modulation
of the parasympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system (important for calming of heart rate). 2.
Dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC): Representation of self in relation to others; predicting emotional
outcomes of social interactions for self and close others; judging psychological and emotional qualities
and traits; feeling emotions about others’ mental situations. 3. Anterior middle cingulate cortex (ACC): A
centrally connected “hub” of the cortex, also heavily interconnected with somatosensory regions that feel
the guts and viscera; error monitoring, emotion, and empathy; feeling physical and social pain; modulation of
the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system (important for activation of heart rate, arousal).
4. Posteromedial cortices (PMC): The most centrally connected “hub” of the cortex; high-level integrative
representation of the physiological condition of the visceral “gut” body; construction of a subjective sense of
self-awareness; activated in social emotions, moral decision making, and episodic memory retrieval; contains
dorsal posterior cingulate cortex (dPCC), involved in attention monitoring or switching and integration of
information. 5. Inferior parietal lobule (IPL): involved in successful episodic memory retrieval; empathically
simulating others’ perspectives and the goals of others’ actions. 6. Hippocampus: Formation and recall of
long-term memories (not visible in these views).

Smallwood, Brown, Baird, & Schooler, 2011, for a related neuroscience studies showing that the quality of DM brain
argument). Recent research suggests that these networks’ effi- activity during rest is related to the quality of subsequent neu-
ciency and co-regulation improve as the brain matures through ral and behavioral responses to environmental stimuli and that
childhood (Fair et al., 2008) but that the rudiments of this momentary and longer lasting complementary fluctuations in
functional organization are present in childhood (Supekar these networks are important for perception, attention, and
et al., 2010; Thomason et al., 2008), infancy, and possibly goal-directed cognition (see Northoff, Duncan, & Hayes,
even prenatally (Doria et al., 2010; Fransson et al., 2007; but 2010, for a review; Spreng, Stevens, Chamberlain, Gilmore, &
see Fransson, Åden, Blennow, & Lagercrantz, 2011). Schacter, 2010). For example, in a neuroimaging experiment
In addition, it is likely that the networks that support sys- in which participants alternated blocks of resting with looking
tems for “looking in” and “looking out” are codependent and at images and listening to sounds, the more effectively the DM
co-regulate one another—the functioning of one, both in the regions were activated during rest and deactivated while
moment and over the longer term, has been found to predict attending to the images and sounds, the more brain activation
the functioning of the other. There is a growing body of there was in sensory cortices during the image and sound

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Constructive Internal Reflection and the Brain 355

presentations (Greicius & Menon, 2004). Longitudinal studies than that measured in the brains of people with average IQs (Li
also suggest that there is considerable variability in the strength et al., 2009; Song et al., 2009). The main finding concerns not
of DM connectivity among adults and that although patterns of the amount of activation in DM regions but the functional
activity during rest are relatively stable in adulthood (Beason- coordination or extent of “cross-talk” between DM regions. In
Held, Kraut, & Resnick, 2009), training introspection (e.g., participants with higher IQs, there is more efficient communi-
through meditation) can alter the functioning of DM networks cation and coordination between frontal and parietal DM
as well as improve skills for sustained attention on a task (e.g., regions during “rest,” which is thought to underlie better cog-
Brefczynski-Lewis, Lutz, Schaefer, Levinson, & Davidson, nitive abilities for making connections between disparate
2007; Brewer et al., 2012; Chiesa, Calati, & Serretti, 2010; pieces of information (van den Heuvel et al., 2009).
Hölzel et al., 2007; Jha, Krompinger, & Baime, 2007; Tang With regard to reading and memory ability, findings are
et al., 2007). related to efficient toggling between the complementary net-
works. In reading studies, clearer functional segregation dur-
ing “rest” between DM regions and a key brain region
Relations to individual differences in specialized for reading (the left fusiform gyrus, not part of the
socioemotional functioning DM) is associated with reading skill among adults; this clear
The efficiency with which a brain toggles between activity asso- segregation is not yet mature in children ages 8–14 (Koyama
ciated with DM and outward attention as well as the strength of et al., 2011). In memory studies, better long-term recall is
functional connectivity between DM regions during “rest” seem associated with greater deactivation of DM regions involved
also to be associated with neural and psychological health, espe- in encoding and recall, specifically the hippocampus and its
cially around social and emotional functioning. Atypicalities neighboring parahippocampal gyrus, during simple cognitive
in DM functioning have been found to be related to social- tasks compared with during “rest” (Wig et al., 2008). Failure
emotional symptoms in schizophrenia (Whitfield-Gabrieli to adequately deactivate another DM region, the posterome-
et al., 2009), autism (Cherkassky, Kana, Keller, & Just, 2006; dial cortices, during a task requiring outwardly focused atten-
Kennedy, Redcay, & Courchesne, 2006), attention deficit disor- tion is also associated with memory declines in older adults
der (ADD; Castellanos et al., 2008; Tomasi & Volkow, 2012; (Miller et al., 2008).
Uddin et al., 2008), anxiety disorders (Etkin, Prater, Schatzberg, Finally, measures of efficient down regulation of DM net-
Menon, & Greicius, 2009; Zhao et al., 2007), depression work activity during external attention-demanding tasks have
(Greicius et al., 2007), and other conditions. The differences in been found to predict cognitive performance on these tasks in
DM functioning among these populations seem to relate consis- real time. For example, in an experiment using deep-brain
tently to the hallmark symptoms of the disorder. For instance, electrode recording during simpler and more complex visual
autism is associated with atypically low levels of functional search tasks, magnitude of moment-to-moment suppression in
connectivity between DM regions during rest; these findings are DM networks increased with the complexity of processing
thought to reflect a paucity of social and psychological thought required and predicted subjects’ performance (Ossandon et al.,
and emotion (Kennedy & Courchesne, 2008). People with 2011).
schizophrenia, by contrast, show heightened activation and To summarize, although the main focus in attention research
hyperconnectivity in the DM network that are insufficiently relevant to development and education to date has been on “look-
attenuated during outward attention (Bluhm et al., 2007; Garrity ing out” into the environment, for example, the facility with
et al., 2007; Zhou et al., 2007); this pattern is thought to produce which a child filters out distractions and maintains focus on a
a heightened propensity toward mentalizing and a blurring of task (Posner & Rothbart, 2005; Rueda, Rothbart, McCandliss,
boundaries between one’s own and others’ minds that contrib- Saccomanno, & Posner, 2005), the neuroscience findings re-
utes to disordered thought when coupled with schizophrenics’ viewed here suggest that (a) the quality of neural processing that
excessive alertness to the external environment (Whitfield- supports the system for “looking out” is tied to the quality of
Gabrieli et al., 2009). neural processing that supports the system for “looking in” and
to individuals’ abilities to move between these two modes effi-
ciently; (b) the quality of neural processing during “looking in”
Relations to individual differences in cognitive is related to socioemotional functioning as well as to other
functioning dimensions of thought that transcend the “here and now.” Yet
Tantalizing new evidence suggests that certain aspects of DM the implications of these neural findings for psychological
functioning during “rest” and during tasks are related to intel- development in naturalistic environments like schools have not
ligence in adults as indexed by standardized IQ scores, to read- been studied. The next section provides an overview of the psy-
ing and memory abilities, and to performance ability on chological operations that have been related to activity in DM
attention-demanding cognitive tasks. For example, studies brain regions in adults, in order to begin a conversation among
have found that when people with higher IQ scores “rest” in psychological scientists about the dimensions of thought associ-
the functional MRI (fMRI) scanner, the DM connectivity in ated with lapses in outward attention and developmental impli-
their brains, especially for long-range connections, is stronger cations. We focus on socioemotional functioning to highlight

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356 Immordino-Yang et al.

the interdependence of the neural networks that support atten- Frith, 2004; Jenkins & Mitchell, 2011; Kelley et al., 2002;
tive mental states and states that may promote meaning making Kitayama & Park, 2010; Mitchell, Banaji, & Macrae, 2005;
and socioemotional well-being. Northoff et al., 2006), an effect that can be modulated by in-
group/out-group racial comparisons (Mathur, Harada, &
Chiao, 2011) and by cultural conceptions of interdependent
What Does the Mind Do When the Brain versus independent self (Harada, Li, & Chiao, 2010; Markus
Is “at Rest”? Memories, Prospections, & Kitayama, 1991). Involvement of the inferior–posterior sec-
Emotions, and the Mental “Self ” tor of the posteromedial cortices, the most centrally connected
“hub” of the DM network (Hagmann et al., 2008), has been
As almost any human being can attest, when a person disen- found to be related to self-awareness (Buckner et al., 2008)
gages from externally oriented goal-directed behavior, his or and autobiographical self (Damasio & Meyer, 2009) and has
her mind is not idle—instead, it can become absorbed in a been consistently implicated in episodic and personal memory
dynamic stream of free-form thought that is associated with retrieval (Immordino-Yang & Singh, 2011; Wagner et al.,
mind wandering, spontaneous recollection of previous memo- 2005), daydreaming (Christoff, Gordon, Smallwood, Smith, &
ries, production of hypothetical scenarios and future plans, and Schooler, 2009), moral judgment tasks (Greene, Sommerville,
other personal and social thoughts and imaginings (Andreasen Nystrom, Darley, & Cohen, 2001), and social emotions about
et al., 1995; Smallwood & Schooler, 2006). When considered others’ mental qualities and circumstances, such as admiring
this way, it is no wonder that some sectors of the brain are another’s virtuous commitment to those less fortunate or feel-
highly active during neuroimaging paradigms meant to induce ing compassion for someone who has lost a loved one
“rest.” The mind is not idle in the absence of externally focused, (Immordino-Yang et al., 2009). By contrast, tasks that require
goal-directed tasks—instead, the relative lapse in perceptual simply recognizing and labeling an emotional facial expres-
vigilance provides an opportunity to mentally wander far from sion from a picture or emotionally reacting to a person’s skill-
the current physical context, maintaining just enough attention ful performance or physical injury do not recruit this network
to engage automatic behaviors and to monitor the environment (and in fact may suppress its activation because such tasks
for interruptions, while indulging thoughts, fantasies, and require outward attention; Immordino-Yang et al., 2009;
memories about the social world and the psychological self. Sreenivas, Boehm, & Linden, 2012).
It is interesting to note that in addition to studies reporting Taking this evidence together, we find that brain regions
signature DM activations during non-goal-directed activities involved in the DM appear to be specifically recruited and
such as “rest” in the fMRI scanner, there is now a growing list specialized for processing abstract information relevant to the
of neuroimaging studies that report activations in DM regions psychological, affective, and subjective aspects of the self and
during goal-directed tasks involving introspective, socioemo- other people, both in everyday contexts and for more complex
tional, and self-referential processing or simulation. For moral, socioemotional, prospective, and retrospective func-
instance, activation in DM regions has been found when indi- tions (Buckner & Carroll, 2007). This description is necessar-
viduals engage in such activities as feeling compassion for a ily broad—after all, DM activation could be said to underlie
young mother with cancer or feeling inspired by her determi- half of what the mind does. Our aim in providing this descrip-
nation (Immordino-Yang, McColl, Damasio, & Damasio, tion is to give psychological scientists a sense of the dimen-
2009); imagining how their opinions would change if they sions of thought associated with lapses in outward attention,
awoke one day as a member of the opposite sex (Tamir & for comparison with those associated with heightened outward
Mitchell, 2011); evaluating moral scenarios, for example, sce- attention (e.g., sensory perception and vigilance to the physi-
narios depicting treatment of wartime prisoners (Harrison cal context, cognitive processing of situationally relevant
et al., 2008); and recalling memories for personal experiences tasks, motor control and coordination of actions, perception of
(see Wagner, Shannon, Kahn, & Buckner, 2005, for a review). social and emotional stimuli [but not deep reflection on their
Notably, processing related to cognitive perspective taking meaning], and recalling semantic or factual information). This
or traditional theory of mind functions or to evaluating the comparison is important because, judging from what is being
more concrete and immediate physical and cognitive aspects learned of brain functioning, activating the neural platform
of social situations is not especially associated with DM that supports mental processes associated with DM regions
regions (see Waytz & Mitchell, 2011, for a related argument). may be relatively incompatible with externally focused atten-
Instead, DM regions seem to be recruited for processing that tion or vigilance into the environment, especially while
pertains less to factual knowledge from one’s memory or control systems for monitoring and alternately engaging
deduction about another’s knowledge state and more to simu- inward focus and outward attention are immature. Our hope is
lation and evaluation of abstract social, emotional, and moral that in distilling the neural findings, we have provided a start-
implications of one’s own or others’ knowledge states. For ing point for appreciating the breadth of their applicability.
example, several studies have implicated the dorsomedial pre- The next section grounds these ideas with a naturalistic exam-
frontal cortex in judgments about psychological traits and ple, in order to narrow the focus onto a new hypothesis for
emotional qualities of the self and close others (Blakemore & development.

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Constructive Internal Reflection and the Brain 357

An Example of Spontaneous “Looking in” How does this example pertain to the argument at hand?
During Social Learning John’s reaction to the compassion-inducing story nicely dem-
onstrates how new insights and understandings are actively,
Consider the reaction of one college-age participant, “John,” dynamically constructed (Fischer & Bidell, 2006; Fischer &
during a one-on-one social emotion-induction interview in Immordino-Yang, 2002)—learners build from prior knowl-
which he was told a true story meant to induce compassion. edge and work to actively accommodate new information to
The story is about a young boy who grew up in a small indus- make sense of the current situation. It also demonstrates the
trial city in China during an economic depression that often value of a reflective pause in moving from considering the
left him hungry. The boy’s father had died just after the boy’s concrete, action-oriented, context-specific details of this situa-
birth, leaving his mother to work long hours as a laborer. John tion (knowing what happened and why) to constructing an
was shown a video clip in which the boy’s mother describes understanding of the broader and longer term emotional impli-
how, one winter afternoon, she found a coin on the ground and cations for one’s own or any situation (in John’s case, what the
used it to buy warm cakes for her son, who had been all day at actions mean for the protagonists’ psychological qualities and
school with nothing to eat. The mother recounts how her son how recognizing these qualities leads him to express greater
had been so hungry, yet he had offered her the last cake, which appreciation of his own parents’ sacrifices for him). What is
she declined by lying that she had eaten already. After the interesting is that our neural data support the interpretation
video, the experimenter asked John how this situation made that John’s pauses are a behavioral manifestation of DM neu-
him feel, to which John responded: ral activity. Our current analyses reveal that the more a partici-
pant reflectively pauses in the social emotions interview, the
This is the one [true story from the experiment] that’s hit more cognitively abstract and complex his or her answers (i.e.,
me the most, I suppose. And I’m not very good at ver- the higher the construal level; Pavarini, Schnall, & Immordino-
balizing emotions. But . . . um . . . I can almost feel the Yang, 2012), the more DM activity the participant will later
physical sensations. It’s like there’s a balloon or some- show when feeling emotions with moral connotations in the
thing just under my sternum, inflating and moving up MRI scanner, and the stronger the participant’s DM connectiv-
and out. Which, I don’t know, is my sign of something ity during rest (Immordino-Yang, Pavarini, Schnall, & Yang,
really touching. . . . [pause] And, so, the selflessness of 2012).
the mother . . . and then also of the little boy. You know, In the next section, we focus on two developmental impli-
having these wonderful cakes that he never gets to have, cations of the findings: (a) that time and skills for constructive
and still offering them to her . . . and then her turning internal reflection are beneficial for emotional learning and
them down, is . . . uh . . . [long pause] It makes me think well-being; and (b) that inordinately biasing children’s and
about my parents, because they provide me with so adolescents’ attention to the external world may undermine the
much and I don’t thank them enough, I don’t think. . . . development of abilities to think about the abstract, moral, and
I know I don’t. So, I should do that. (adapted from social-emotional aspects of situations, information, memories,
Immordino-Yang, 2011) and self. Put another way, we hypothesize that consistently
imposing high attention demands on children, either in school,
In answering the straightforward question of how this through entertainment, or through living conditions, may rob
story made him feel, John revealed a common pattern in them of opportunities to advance from thinking about “what
which deliberations leading to a complex reaction to a social happened” or “how to do this” to constructing knowledge
situation begin with a general report of feeling emotionally about “what this means for the world and for the way I live my
touched or moved (“hit”), which is sometimes accompanied life.” For instance, it could lead teenagers to admire a skillful
by visceral sensations (“a balloon . . . under my sternum”). sports player but not the mental fortitude of, say, a courageous
Even though John did not seem to really know yet what emo- civil rights leader.
tion he was having (“I’m not very good at verbalizing”), he
noticed the emotional power of the story based on the physi-
ological “signs” he felt. But he did not stop there. Instead, What Does This Mean for Children? Toward
after briefly reviewing the relevant actions from the story the Hypothesis That Healthy Psychological
(who gave whom what to eat) and their meaning based on Development Requires Opportunities and
what he knew about the situation (there is a shortage of food, Skills for “Looking in”
so sharing food implies “selflessness”), John paused. He
appeared to briefly withdraw from the interaction with the One implication of the DM findings is that the brain seems to
experimenter and blankly gazed into his lap. Then he emerged honor a distinction between the processing of information
with a report of having spontaneously evaluated his own about concrete, physical, and immediate circumstances, facts
relationship with his parents. By evaluating the emotional and procedures, and abstract information about mental, hypo-
implications of another boy’s situation, John learned to better thetical, and longer term circumstances and implications.
appreciate his own. Given that deliberating on abstract social-emotional and

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358 Immordino-Yang et al.

hypothetical circumstances seems to be associated with the opportunities for high-quality knowledge consolidation. Con-
“looking in” system, we hypothesize that these kinds of think- sidering the neural and psychological evidence together sug-
ing may be particularly vulnerable to disruption by external gests that adequate developmental opportunity for appropriate
distraction, especially while attentional monitoring and con- lapses in outwardly directed attention, and potentially even for
trol are immature. Had the experimenter above interrupted high-quality introspective states, may be important for well-
John during his reflective pause, would he have made the con- being and for optimal performance on focused tasks, as the
ceptual leap from considering the story to evaluating his own quality of thought during “looking in” and “looking out” may
relationship with his parents? If John had grown up under con- be interdependent. Because of this, it may be that educational
ditions that did not support time for safe internal reflection, experiences and settings crafted to promote balance between
would he have failed to fully develop this skill? We do not “looking out” and “looking in,” in which children are guided
know the answers to these questions. But given the accumulat- to navigate between and leverage the brain’s complementary
ing neural evidence, it seems reasonable to conjecture that networks skillfully and in which teachers work to distinguish
important skills for reflection and for building personal mean- between loss of attentive focus and engaging a mindful, reflec-
ing may depend heavily on psychological functions associated tive focus, will prove optimal for development. Put another
with activity in DM brain networks and may therefore be cur- way, leaving room for self-relevant processing in school may
tailed if environmental attention demands and distractions are help students to own their learning, both the process and the
consistently overly high. outcomes.

Preliminary connections to education Emerging evidence on the effects of heavy

Although education research on learning and achievement have social media use
not been framed to highlight transitions to internally focused The prevalence of digitally mediated communication and enter-
attention, there are hints that teaching skills for productive inter- tainment among youths has dramatically increased in recent
nal, self-directed processing in schools may be beneficial both years, and texting is reputedly superseding all other forms of
for socioemotional well-being and for academic skills (see also friendship interaction among teens in developed nations (Pew
Immordino-Yang & Sylvan, 2010; Yeager & Walton, 2011). For Research Center, 2010, 2011). This shift in technology use has
example, high school students encouraged before a test to write caused widespread concern about how heavy reliance on digi-
in a journal about their beliefs about the implications of their tally mediated communication may affect development. Are
test performance for their life more broadly overcame anxiety children losing skills for face-to-face social interaction, and
and performed better (Ramirez & Beilock, 2011). Similarly, how would this loss of skill manifest psychologically?
envisioning advantageous possibilities for one’s future identity Although there is very little published research to date
and connecting these possibilities to current behavioral choices addressing these questions, cumulative evidence on DM func-
have been found to powerfully improve school performance and tioning would suggest a relatively straightforward implication.
motivation (Oyserman, Terry, & Bybee, 2002), but the efficacy If youths overuse social media, if they spend very little waking
of these activities is heavily dependent on students’ subjective time free from the possibility that a text will interrupt them, we
interpretation of their experiences (Destin & Oyserman, 2009; would expect that these conditions might predispose youths
Hatcher & Bringle, 1997). In elementary school-age children, toward focusing on the concrete, physical, and immediate
emotional well-being, self-confidence, and academic achieve- aspects of situations and self, with less inclination toward con-
ment are bolstered for students taught to take a “meta-moment” sidering the abstract, longer term, moral, and emotional impli-
in which they remove themselves from distracting circum- cations of their and others’ actions. One recent study of more
stances, reflectively evaluate their memories and feelings, envi- than 2,300 young adults (Canadian college students ages 18–
sion an ideal “self,” and then make an appropriate plan (Brackett 22) tested related hypotheses and found results that accord
et al., 2010). remarkably with these predictions (Trapnell & Sinclair, 2012).
Together, these interventions may improve academic per- The study found that higher levels of social texting among
formance, compared with various control interventions with- research participants were weakly but consistently positively
out a socioemotional focus, in part because they set up associated with out-group prejudice and materialism, for
neuropsychological circumstances optimally conducive to example, with reporting lower positivity toward indigenous
extracting the emotional meaning of situations, to connecting Canadians, and with believing that physical attractiveness is
this meaning to personal memories, and to imagining a better an important personal value. Conversely, higher levels of tex-
future course of action. Of course, students should not be ting were consistently negatively associated with measures of
encouraged to waste time or to dwell on inconsequential or moral reflectiveness, for example, with motivation to promote
irrelevant private musings during work time. Doing so clearly social equality or justice in the community, and with perceived
decreases productivity (Smallwood et al., 2007). Still, the DM importance of living with integrity.
research reviewed here suggests that for students to optimally Although it is not clear in this study whether texting caused
engage attentively to tasks, they may also require skills and the moral changes or whether youths with particular social

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Constructive Internal Reflection and the Brain 359

dispositions gravitate toward heavy use of texting, there are experiences and beliefs with students from different cultural
hints that the effects might be causal. Trapnell and Sinclair backgrounds (Süssmuth, 2007; see also http://www.iearn.org).
(2012) also found that an increase in texting over the 5 years In the end, the question will not be as much about what the tech-
of the study (2007–2011) paralleled a decrease in reported nology does to people as it will be about how best to use the
reflectivity. A separate experimental manipulation study by technology in a responsible, beneficial way that promotes rather
Abraham, Pocheptsova, and Ferraro (2012) found that after than hinders social development.
being asked to draw and describe their cell phone, participants
showed temporary decreases in prosocial behavior (as mea-
sured by willingness to donate time or resources to a charity Meaning Making and the Brain: Forging
for the homeless) but increases in perceived social connected- an Interdisciplinary Research Focus on
ness. Another small-scale study reported that among youths, Constructive Internal Reflection
higher texting frequency was associated with finding friend-
ships less “fulfilling” (Angstermichael & Lester, 2010). The Taken together, the neurobiological research suggests a need to
somewhat alarming implication, still not directly tested, is that conceptualize and study processes of knowledge building that
if youths are habitually pulled into the outside world by dis- may be supported during internally focused thought and vulner-
tracting media snippets, or if their primary mode of socially able to disruption by external input. The findings suggest that
interacting is via brief, digitally transmitted communications, these processes may span from relaxed mind wandering and
they may be systematically undermining opportunities to daydreaming to intense and effortful internal focus. Relaxed
reflect on the moral, social, emotional, and longer term impli- daydreaming is potentially important for deriving and sifting
cations of social situations and personal values. This situation through the social and emotional implications of everyday situ-
could potentially alter the perceived quality of their social ations and relationships and connecting them to personal expe-
relationships and over time might bias identity development riences and future goals (see also Baird, Smallwood, & Schooler,
toward focusing on concrete or physical abilities, traits, and 2011); effortful internal focus is potentially important for mak-
accomplishments. ing meaning of new information and for distilling creative,
Of note, in our opinion, the preliminary findings described emotionally relevant connections between complex ideas. We
here should not be taken as de facto evidence that access to use the term constructive internal reflection to describe this
technology is necessarily bad for development or weakens range of skills and behaviors in the hope that future research
morality. After all, texting is another (digital) tool that is only will flesh out and validate the dimensions of internally focused
as good as the user’s purposes or goals. If texting is used to thought and their relation to psychological constructs such as
change momentary, context-specific behavior, for example, to attention, memory, abstract concepts, identity formation, critical
remind individuals with health problems to engage in particu- thinking, and socioemotional development.
lar health-related behaviors, evidence suggests that it can be Future research could also address the possibility of indi-
remarkably effective (Cole-Lewis & Kershaw, 2010). Instead, vidual differences in thinking during “rest” in the scanner, to
these data should be taken as an early warning of the possibil- explore the naturalistic thought patterns that individuals call
ity that overusing technologies that reduce social communica- up as they daydream idly or reflect purposefully, and relations
tion to short snippets that continually interrupt the receiver, to social behavior and other developmental outcomes. For a
and that restrict communication to less reflective content, classic example, work by Mischel and others on self-control in
could be harmful. “High texting” youths in the Trapnell and children demonstrates the beneficial effects of strategic
Sinclair (2012) study sometimes reported receiving or sending abstraction on the ability to delay immediate gratification
upward of 300 non-work-related texts per day, which is more (Mischel, Ebbesen, & Zeiss, 1972; Mischel, Shoda, & Rodri-
than twice the average reported by the Pew Research Center guez, 1989). Famously, 4-year-old children who were able to
(2011). distract themselves from eating a marshmallow when left
Of course, the flip side of the coin might also be true: If used alone with it, in order to successfully wait 15 min to obtain a
well, access to these same technologies could promote social promised additional marshmallow (or other treat), later grew
reflectiveness and moral responsibility by facilitating communi- into more academically and socioemotionally competent ado-
cation between people who are far from each other and who lescents and more successful adults than children who were
would not otherwise have opportunities to interact, in order to unable to delay their gratification for a later reward (Mischel,
foster empathic understanding of world situations and cross- Shoda, & Peake, 1988; Moffitt et al., 2011). It is interesting to
cultural perspectives. For example, in the Iranian election pro- note, though, that differences in the thought strategies pre-
tests of 2009–2010, rapid-fire social media are thought to have school children used to avoid eating the treat were associated
been instrumental both for the organization of the political with how long they were able to wait: Children who distracted
movement and for garnering international empathy for protest- themselves and avoided looking at the marshmallow did rela-
ers (Kamalipour, 2010). As another example, primary schools tively well. But children who instead imagined future and
with a global curricular focus by necessity use digital media to hypothetical possibilities, for example, focusing on how deli-
connect classrooms oceans apart, so that students can share cious the second marshmallow would taste or imagining that

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360 Immordino-Yang et al.

the marshmallow in front of them was a cloud, delayed the Vanessa Singh were also supported by National Institutes of Health
longest (for reviews, see Mischel et al., 2011; Mischel et al., Grant P01 NS19632 to A. Damasio and H. Damasio.
1989).
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