I’d like to call the attention of parents, grandparents, teachers, Church leaders, police, youth leaders, teenagers themselves, and just about everybody else to an extraordinarily interesting article in the June 2015 issue of Scientific American. (Unfortunately, so far as I’m aware, it’s not completely accessible online without a purchase. But there are libraries and other ways of gaining access to it.) It’s by Jay N. Giedd, who’s not only the editor in chief of the journal Mind, Brain, and Education but who somehow both chairs the division of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of California at San Diego and serves as a professor on the other side of the United States at the Bloomberg School of Public Health of The Johns Hopkins University.
Herewith, a brief summary:
Recent MRI studies have shown that the teenage brain cannot adequately be described either as “an old child brain” or as “a half-baked adult brain.” Rather, it’s something unique and is characterized by both changeability and a marked increase in networking among brain regions.
One part of the human brain is the limbic system, which is associated with emotions. It’s activity intensifies at puberty.
Another section of the brain is the prefrontal cortex, which controls impulses. It doesn’t mature until sometime in the twenties.
This mismatch or imbalance — which is actually growing, worldwide, because of an ever earlier onset of puberty — makes teens exceptionally prone to poor judgment and risk taking. But, on the plus side, it also allows them unusual adaptability and enables them to loosen ties with parents and move out into wider society.
On the principle that “moving parts get broken,” though, it’s the period between the maturation of the hormone-fueled limbic system and the later maturation of the impulse-controlling and long-range planning capacities of the pre-frontal cortex that is the peak time for the emergence of psychopathologies such as anxiety disorders, depression, bipolar disorder, psychosis, eating disorders, and substance abuse. Fully 50 percent of the mental illnesses that people experience emerge by age 14, and 75 percent have started by age 24.
It seems to me that understanding such things a bit better could be very helpful to everybody who interacts with teenagers. And, fortunately, the article is very lucid.
I highly recommend it as both potentially useful and extremely interesting. Fascinating, really.
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