Story Work and Aging in an Era of Artificial Intimacy

 “Intellectual intimacy is the space where two minds meet—where curiosity sparks, ideas deepen, and understanding grows beyond the surface.”

— Lindsey Mackereth

What if the most important infrastructure for aging well isn’t a new device, but a renewed discipline of listening? Not more answers, but better questions. Not a chatbot’s soft glow, but a circle of humans apprenticing themselves to each other’s thinking. That’s the heart of what I want to call intellectual intimacy—and I want to broaden the term beyond one writer or therapy frame and give it back to community practice.

Broadening the term

“Intellectual intimacy” isn’t a boutique love language. It’s a civic muscle. Philosophers have long mapped versions of it—Thomas Kasulis on intimacy as a way of knowing; bell hooks on love as a practice of freedom; Paulo Freire’s dialogic pedagogy; Nel Noddings’ ethics of care. Across those lines runs a simple throughline: understanding is co‑made. We become ourselves by thinking with each other, not just about each other. In this wider sense, intellectual intimacy is the felt experience of being met at the level of ideas—where disagreement is allowed, curiosity is prized, and dignity is protected.

Why embodiment matters

Neuroscience and learning sciences keep pointing to the same door. Mary Helen Immordino‑Yang shows that cognition and emotion are braided; reasons grow out of feelings and social context. Literacy scholars like Jennifer Nash remind us that meaning is multimodal and embodied—gesture, breath, glance, and pace do real cognitive work. The moral isn’t that we need to be sentimental about bodies; it’s that brains are social organs. If we want minds to stay flexible in later life, we have to design for relationships that let thinking breathe.

Turkle’s warning: artificial vs. earned intimacy

I was always a huge fan of Sherry Turkle, her book Alone Together was part of the way I framed my work in Digital Storytelling in the early 2000s.  Her more recent reframing of AI as artificial intimacy is a useful provocation. Machines can simulate empathy, but they can’t be obligated by each other the way people can. They don’t risk being changed by the encounter; we do. That risk—the possibility of revision, of “I was wrong about the last stanza”—is the generator that keeps a life story open. When we outsource companionship to systems optimized for frictionless affirmation, we drift toward pseudo‑intimacy: interaction that feels smooth but costs us our tolerance for difference, our conflict muscles, and our appetite for the slow work of mutual understanding.

I’m not here to litigate all the uses of AI. I simply want to say: when we are talking about connection for elders, substitution is the wrong metaphor. The problem isn’t that chatbots are evil; it’s that they are rearranging our time and attention away from the practices that keep us human. Which brings us back to story work, but I want to drop more deeply into a couple of other framings before we land this back in my world.

Lindsey Mackereth’s Case for Intellectual Intimacy

Oddly, I just this weekend encountered Lindsey Mackereth this weekend in my conversation with Stormy Sweitzer.  Lindsey is a clinician‑writer whose essays and frameworks have given many masked autistic, ADHD, and gifted adults a language for their lived experience.   She has a fabulous Substack, which I immediately subscribed to, and spent some hours chewing on her thinking over the weekend.   

Turns out she coined the term neurocomplexity to name the gestalt interplay of divergent wiring—cognition, sensory processing, cellular response, attention, creativity, intuition—without reducing people to diagnostic silos.

Out of that lens emerged a keystone idea: intellectual intimacy isn’t a rarefied preference; for many, it’s the foundation of safety and love.

Mackereth’s argument begins with a listening posture. In therapy rooms and group work she noticed a recurring ache that ordinary couples‑skills books don’t touch: “I want to be understood—not just emotionally, but intellectually. I want someone to meet me where I live: in how I think.” She tracks how high‑capacity minds—especially those that have over‑functioned to succeed in neurotypical environments—end up lonely inside relationships because the very channel through which they connect (analysis, patterning, idea‑play) is misread as distancing or superiority. When that channel stays starved, burnout accelerates; masking deepens; shame fills the gap.

Rather than psychologizing the ache away, Mackereth treats it as a design requirement for relational health. She sketches the terrain of intellectual intimacy with the precision of a facilitator: the space where two minds meet, curiosity sparks, and understanding deepens beyond the surface. Crucially, she insists it has nothing to do with IQ points. It is not about being the smartest person in the room; it is about finding reciprocity in cognition—the joy of iterative thought with a partner who can stay with your pace, your spirals, your sudden associative leaps, and your need to return to a question until it yields.

Across her essays she names types or flavors of intellectual intimacy that many readers recognize instantly. There is the recursive dialogue that loops through an idea over days; the info‑share that is not a monologue but an offering (“let me hand you this well of knowledge because it’s how I show care”); the shared systems build—two people co‑designing routines, spreadsheets, or taxonomies as a love language; the co‑investigation that treats a problem (a kid’s school challenge, a career pivot, a moral dilemma) as a joint inquiry rather than a debate to be won. She also notes the asynchronous thread, where voice notes, margins, and late‑night message chains create a braided conversation that accommodates sensory load and uneven energy.

Two other strands make her contribution more than a relationship tip sheet. First, Mackereth is explicit about pace. Many neurocomplex people live in a body‑mind tempo that is either fast (hyperfocus, rapid semantic networks) or slow (deliberate processing, recovery after overstimulation), often both at different times. Intellectual intimacy requires calibration—partners learning how to downshift or upshift together, leaving enough silence for the image or the argument to resolve, and enough stretch to keep curiosity awake. Second, she centers dignity. The work is not to perform cleverness but to be known. When a partner says, “Show me how you got there,” the method of thinking becomes relational tissue. That recognition heals the minor humiliations of a lifetime of “too much” and “too intense.”

Mackereth’s clinical vantage point gives the concept developmental depth. She offers a lifespan model of neurocomplex experience—early gifted labeling, adolescent overachievement, the crash of adult masking—where many finally confront the limits of doing relationships on the wrong fuel. Romantic pairings, friendships, creative collaborations—all falter when the primary channel of aliveness is exiled from daily life. The antidote is not constant debate club; it’s structured permission to build a shared world of thought. In that world, “info‑dumping” is reframed as care; the long digression becomes hospitality; the spreadsheet turns into shared sense‑making.

To keep this from drifting into elitism, Mackereth is careful to strip status from the term. She writes about intellectual intimacy as practice, not personality trait: it can be cultivated between any two people willing to ask real questions and sit with incomplete answers. She offers pragmatic habits—daily curiosity prompts, agenda‑less walks, choosing one shared problem to “hold” together for a week, building a commonplace book of quotes and images that both partners annotate. None of this requires graduate seminars; it requires attention organized by love.

She also names the harms that arise when the need goes unmet. Without a place to bring one’s thinking online with another, people turn inward or to frictionless digital loops. The result is a brittling of the self: either the mind atrophies—or it becomes a blade turned outward, cutting others down to avoid the shame of not being met. In Mackereth’s frame, intellectual intimacy functions like a relational buffer: it metabolizes intensity into play, converts isolation into collaboration, and renders difference something to be worked with rather than defended against.

Finally, what’s most generative in her project is that it’s portable. Though rooted in neurodivergent counseling, her readers include artists, engineers, clergy, teachers, and—crucially for our purposes—older adults reacquainting themselves with their own pace and powers after decades of performing normal. Mackereth gives them permission to ask for, and build, the kind of thinking companionship that keeps purpose lit. That alone makes “intellectual intimacy” too valuable to leave to couples therapy. It belongs in our civic toolkit.

I am guessing you understand why I thought that was all very relevant to story work. This also took me in another direction. 

“I Feel, I Listen, I Tell Stories, Therefore I Learn”: Mapping Immordino‑Yang onto Story Work

One new name/expert was introduced to me while I was digging around Mackereth’s work.  Mary Helen Immordino‑Yang.  From a similar consideration as Mackereth, she declares “We feel, therefore we learn,” she provides the neuroscientific foundation for what digital storytelling practitioners have understood experientially for decades. The story work tradition operationalizes in practice what Immordino‑Yang describes in the laboratory: that learning happens through the integration of emotion, embodied experience, social connection, and meaning‑making. Story work, viewed through Immordino‑Yang’s lens, emerges not as a pedagogical technique but as a learning architecture that honors the neurobiological reality of how humans actually develop understanding.

From embodied experience to abstract understanding

Immordino‑Yang demonstrates that abstract thinking develops from and remains connected to concrete, bodily experience. Her example of the two‑year‑old who expresses love by pressing her face against her mother’s arm, then two years later can conceptualize that same feeling through the metaphor of sunshine and daylight, reveals how we build cognitive scaffolding from physical sensation to symbolic thought.

Story work follows this exact trajectory. When someone crafts a personal story, they begin with concrete, sensory memory—the smell of grandmother’s kitchen, the weight of a hospital door, the sound of a voice now gone. These aren’t decorative details but the embodied foundation from which meaning emerges. As the storyteller works to shape these memories into narrative, they necessarily move from the particular to the general, from “this happened to me” to “this means something about loss, resilience, identity, belonging.”

The digital storytelling process—selecting images, crafting voice‑over, making aesthetic choices—requires sustained engagement with both the sensory particulars of experience and their abstract significance. This mirrors precisely the developmental path Immordino‑Yang describes: from body to metaphor, from concrete to abstract, while maintaining the connection between them. The story remains grounded in lived experience even as it reaches toward larger meanings.

Story circles as emotionally safe relational contexts

Immordino‑Yang’s research shows that learning requires emotional safety and social connection—that student‑teacher relationships are not merely conducive to learning but constitutive of it. She emphasizes that when students feel emotionally safe and intellectually valued, their brains are better able to engage with challenging material.

The story circle—the foundational structure of digital storytelling practice—creates precisely this neurobiologically optimal environment. In a well‑facilitated circle, participants experience what Immordino‑Yang would recognize as the conditions necessary for deep learning:

Relational trust: The circle establishes that everyone’s story matters, that all experiences deserve witness, that vulnerability will be met with respect rather than judgment.

Emotional engagement: Unlike traditional educational settings that ask students to bracket their feelings, story circles center emotional experience as the ground from which understanding grows.

Cultural responsiveness: Story circles honor that different cultural contexts produce different ways of knowing and expressing. They don’t impose a single “correct” narrative form but allow storytellers to draw on their own cultural resources.

Shared vulnerability: When facilitators and participants alike bring their stories, the power dynamics that often inhibit learning flatten. Everyone is both teacher and learner, expert and novice.

Immordino‑Yang notes that teachers who take “emotional ownership of their work” tend to be more effective. Story work extends this insight: all participants take emotional ownership not just of their own learning but of the collective learning environment. The circle becomes what Immordino‑Yang describes as essential—a social context that organizes the development of mind.

Witnessing as active cognitive‑emotional engagement

One of story work’s most distinctive contributions is its emphasis on witnessing—the active, engaged listening that participants offer each other’s stories. This isn’t passive reception but what Lambert and others describe as a sacred, transformative act. Through Immordino‑Yang’s framework, we can understand why.

Her research on social emotions—compassion, admiration, gratitude—shows that these experiences activate neural networks involved in abstract thinking, self‑reflection, and meaning‑making. When we witness another’s story with genuine emotional engagement, we’re not just being nice; we’re activating the same cognitive‑emotional integration that the storyteller experiences in crafting the narrative.

The witness doesn’t merely receive information. They must:

Integrate what they’ve heard into their evolving understanding of human experience

Hold the story’s meaning while maintaining awareness of difference

Engage emotionally with another’s vulnerability and truth

Connect the storyteller’s experience to their own embodied understanding

This is precisely the kind of “high level of both intellectual and social function” that research shows protects cognitive capacity and builds resilience. Witnessing, in this light, is not altruism—it’s mutual cognitive‑emotional development.

Narrative construction as reflective processing

Immordino‑Yang’s work on the default mode network reveals that the brain’s “rest” state—when we’re not focused on external tasks—is actually when crucial learning happens. During internal reflection, the brain consolidates experiences, connects them to prior knowledge, builds narrative structures, and constructs meaning.

The digital storytelling process is essentially structured reflection time—days or weeks when participants deliberately step back from the rush of experience to process, integrate, and make meaning. When someone spends hours selecting which images to include, crafting and re‑crafting their voice‑over script, deciding on music and pacing, they are engaging in exactly the kind of reflective processing Immordino‑Yang identifies as essential for learning.

This is why story work can’t be rushed. The time spent wrestling with which moments to include, how to sequence events, what to emphasize and what to leave in shadow—this isn’t inefficiency but rather the necessary space for the brain to do the integrative work that transforms experience into understanding. The story that emerges isn’t a product but a record of this neural integration, a trace of meaning‑making in process.

Cultural meaning‑making and collective narrative

Immordino‑Yang demonstrates that culture organizes neural processing—that even basic emotional experiences are shaped by social and cultural participation. Story work takes this insight seriously by recognizing that personal narratives always exist in relationship to collective narratives, that individual meaning‑making happens within cultural contexts.

When someone tells a story about immigration, about coming out, about loss or resilience, they’re not just sharing private experience. They’re engaging with larger cultural narratives about belonging, identity, justice, and possibility. They’re both drawing on cultural resources—metaphors, narrative structures, shared reference points—and potentially reshaping them.

The story circle becomes a space where cultural meanings are negotiated, where dominant narratives can be challenged, where marginalized experiences can be centered. This is learning in Immordino‑Yang’s sense: not the acquisition of neutral information but the socially embedded construction of meaning that shapes how we understand ourselves and our world.

Agency and emotional ownership

Perhaps the most profound connection between Immordino‑Yang’s neuroscience and story work lies in the concept of agency. She argues that meaningful learning requires what she calls “emotional ownership”—the sense that this knowledge matters to me, connects to my concerns, reflects my values and questions.

Story work places agency at its center. The storyteller:

Determines who sees it and in what contexts

Controls how it’s represented

Decides what it means

Chooses which experience to explore

This isn’t merely empowering in some vague motivational sense. It creates the neurobiological conditions for deep learning. When students have agency over their learning—when they’re not just receiving information but actively constructing meaning that matters to them—their brains engage differently. The emotional investment activates the very neural networks that allow knowledge to become usable, flexible, and generative.

The integration: “I feel, I listen, I tell stories, therefore I learn”

What emerges from this mapping is a recognition that story work isn’t just one pedagogical approach among many—it’s a practice that aligns with the fundamental neurobiology of human learning. When we:

Tell stories — crafting narrative meaning from embodied experience
Listen — witnessing others with cognitive‑emotional presence
Feel — engaging emotionally with experience
In community — within relationally safe, culturally responsive contexts

…we create the conditions that Immordino‑Yang’s research shows are necessary for learning that goes beyond memorization to genuine understanding, that integrates cognition and emotion, that honors embodiment and culture, that builds both individual agency and collective meaning.

Story work, in this light, isn’t about teaching storytelling skills. It’s about creating learning environments that honor what Immordino‑Yang has revealed about how human minds actually develop—through feeling, through relationship, through the embodied construction of narrative meaning. It’s pedagogy that takes neuroscience seriously, and neuroscience that validates what storytellers have always known: that stories are how we think, how we feel, how we connect, and ultimately, how we learn.

Story work as the engine of intellectual intimacy

For thirty years, I’ve watched story circles do what no app can do: restore the conditions for thinking together. Here’s how that looks in practice—and how it maps to the scholarship above.

1) Listening as design, not accident. A circle isn’t a loose gabfest; it’s an engineered encounter. The rules—time limits, no cross‑talk during a tell, reflective paraphrase, consent before critique—build safety with friction. This is Turkle’s “earned intimacy”: people feel held enough to risk revision.

2) Embodied cues as cognition. We coach breath, pace, gesture, eye contact, and silence. Those aren’t theatrics; they’re cognitive scaffolds. Immordino‑Yang would say we’re aligning the social‑emotional system with the reasoning system so stories can reorganize memory and purpose.

3) Recursion over retrieval. A good circle loops. We tell, hear back, retell, re‑sequence images, and draw new meaning. That recursive pass is where insight lives. You can’t brute‑force it with search; it emerges in relation.

4) Intellectual hospitality. Nash’s point about multimodality matters here. We invite artifacts (photos, recipes, maps), we storyboard, we use the body to mark beats. The variety of inputs lets different cognitive styles enter the commons without apology.

5) Dignity as the metric. Our goal isn’t catharsis for its own sake; it’s agency. The question after a tell is not “Was that moving?” but “What did you learn about how you make meaning? What do you want us to understand or do?” Elders leave not only with a crafted piece, but with sharpened terms for their own life.

What elders need (and what the rest of us need, too)

Older adults do not need infantilizing delight machines. They need partners in curiosity, structures that welcome slowness, and communities that treat their questions as public goods. Story work supplies exactly that: a repeatable, teachable practice that converts attention into dignity. When we run the process, we don’t just record memories; we renovate the mind’s commons—together.

If there’s a policy takeaway, it’s this: fund story circles like you fund fall‑prevention classes. Pay facilitators. Equip clinics and libraries with small grants for intergenerational salons. Build program dashboards that track questions asked, revisions made, relationships formed, not just attendance.

AI will be in the room—sorting calendars, fetching photos, maybe even drafting prompts. Fine. But the heat of transformation will still come from us, face to face, voice to voice. The work is old and urgent: listen well, argue kindly, revise bravely. That’s intellectual intimacy. That’s how we age into each other.