International Neuropsychiatric Disease Journal

Descriptions of the “great teacher” as an inspiring figure are abundant in professional discourse, yet the biological and psychological processes that might underpin inspirational teaching, and sustain it across a working life, remain loosely specified. Interest in educational neuroscience has grown quickly, and claims about brain-based explanations of teaching quality now circulate well ahead of the evidence that would justify them. This review examines what is currently defensible about the neurobiopsychology of inspirational teaching, organised around four constructs that recur in the professional and empirical literature: empowerment, meaningfulness, agility and sustainability. Literature was identified through structured searching of open scholarly databases and indexes covering January 1995 to 12 July 2026, supplemented by backward and forward citation tracking and by targeted searches of institutional sources. Evidence was appraised for design adequacy, measurement validity, replication status and translational distance rather than aggregated quantitatively. Four conclusions emerge. Controllability and choice have well-characterised neural substrates, and the animal and human work on stressor controllability provides the strongest mechanistic anchor for teacher empowerment, although almost no study has measured empowerment and its putative neural mediators in the same teachers. Self-relevance and value affirmation engage ventromedial prefrontal and ventral striatal circuitry, giving meaningfulness a plausible reward-related basis, but the peripheral biological signature of eudaimonic well-being remains contested after a documented failure to replicate. Agility, as used in educational and organisational writing, conflates a measurable neurocognitive capacity for set-shifting with an aspirational professional disposition whose measures show weak discriminant validity. Sustainability is the best-evidenced pillar at the level of occupational outcomes and the least secure at the level of biomarkers, since burnout lacks a reproducible endocrine signature and overlaps substantially with depression. Interpersonal neural synchrony is an informative marker of joint attentional engagement in classrooms but has not been shown to cause learning. Priorities for future work include longitudinal designs linking instructional experience to allostatic indices in the same individuals, adequately powered classroom hyperscanning with preregistered analyses, and intervention trials that report physiological and occupational outcomes together.