An Ode to the Teenage Mind!!!

There comes that day in everyone's life (at least if they have survived long enough :P) that they say "Is it me? Am I getting old or are teenagers getting dumber?" To that person, I must say CONGRATULATIONS!!!!! You have survived the teen and young adult years to become a "Grown Up"!!!

I truly do not mean to say this lightly. I have too many friends that did not live long to become a Grown Up.

That is because during the teenage and young adult years (I'd say between the ages of 12 to 25 on average for both males and females and YES I am making a generalization) we really truly believed that we were invincible. That we knew EVERYTHING! And that "Grown Ups" were beyond stupid. It is when we "grow up" that we discover we aren't near as smart as we think we are, that there is a whole hell of a lot out there in the world that we don't know. It is when we have learned that we are not invincible and neither is the person next to you. It of course is all about perspective and life experience. I can tell you right now, I NEVER really knew what fear was, until the day I took my oldest child home for the first time. The reality of the fact that from that day forward, I was completely and utterly responsible for the life and well being of another human being changed me forever.

I'm pretty sure I'm going to have knew insights, understanding, realizations, fears, and other lessons I cannot imagine right now in the future. Just like my children have grown up so far with vastly different experiences than I had growing up. I don't even want to think about what kind of experiences my possible future grandchildren will have. Anyway, back to that very very special time in our lives when we transform from child to grown up. There has been a great deal of research lately on understanding the teenage brain, and I would like to share some of that with you. As I now have TWO teen-aged daughters that are changing before my eyes, both physically and mentally, it's been something relevant for me to actively go out and research.

The first is a National Geographic Feature Article called Beautiful Brains.

Beautiful Brains

Moody. Impulsive. Maddening. Why do teenagers act the way they do? Viewed through the eyes of evolution, their most exasperating traits may be the key to success as adults.

One part of the article briefly covers some of the National Institutes of Health project where they did the first full series of brain scans of over a 100 teenagers in the 1990s that showed that the human brain goes through massive reorganization between the ages of, you guessed it, the 12th to 25th years of development. The article is pretty fascinating and I like the way they frame the question away from "what's wrong with teenagers" to "what a unique, highly functional, even adaptive period of life."

Another Article from NPR about Teenage Brains  describes a study where teens and adults play a game, getting points for correctly answering questions about the motions of dots on a screen. When there were a lot of points at stake, teens actually spent more time studying the dots and showed more brain activity in areas involved in making decisions than the adults. According to the researchers "Instead of acting impulsively, the teens are making sure they get i right." 

Furthermore, there is research going on in Cambridge University to understand brain and mental development. "The subjects undergo tests that assess their propensity toward impulsive and risk-taking behavior. The expectation is that the emergence of more sensible behavior will correlate with changes in the wiring of the brain's white matter. This comparison will enable researchers to directly associate the shape of the wiring with behavior patterns that all adults have gone through."

There is actually a Frontline episode "Inside the Teenage Brian"  The episode website has the full program available to view online, as well as advice and online activities for parents, more overviews of recent research including an interactive illustration of the brain, and a very interesting discussion on the challenges of applying brain research to parenting and public policy. A very cool and interesting interactive website about the brain! How awesome is that!? I'm going to go play around there some more now. (That's another thing about getting older, the more "grown up" you get, the more distracted you get. Go figure.)

Addendum:

How Happiness Changes With Age

"Social psychologists describe this change as a consequence of a gradual shifting from promotion motivation -- seeing our goals in terms of what we can gain, or how we can end up better off, to prevention motivation -- seeing our goals in terms of avoiding loss and keeping things running smoothly. Everyone, of course, has both motivations. But the relative amounts of each differ from person to person, and can shift with experience as we age."

2nd Addendum:

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore: The mysterious workings of the adolescent brain

Why do teenagers seem so much more impulsive, so much less self-aware than grown-ups? Cognitive neuroscientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore compares the prefrontal cortex in adolescents to that of adults, to show us how typically “teenage” behavior is caused by the growing and developing brain.
Sarah-Jayne Blakemore studies the social brain -- the network of brain regions involved in understanding other people -- and how it develops in adolescents.