The Teenage Brain

Adolescence and the Brain:
A scientific reason for the madness
“I can’t stand you, Mother!” “Why doesn’t anyone ever listen to me?” “You never see my side” “You just don’t listen or understand anything!” These are just a few of the many phrases that I often hear in my home. If teenaged children live in the home you can be sure that at least one of these statements has been said, yelled or growled in the last week. Are there tactics and ways a parent can use to deal with and keep control of a situation when interacting with a teenager? A helpful tactic in dealing with a teenager and everything that comes along with them is to examine their behaviors and try to understand that their brains, the centers of reasoning and sense, that
In my research, I chose to do an observation of my teen aged daughter whose name is Katie. I wanted to see if there were different techniques and tactics that I could learn to use knowing about the developing teenage brain. Some research done recently at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) has released some fascinating information about the teenaged brain (Begley). The most important research was done through magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Researchers found that the teen brain is not a finished product by any means but is a work in progress. In the past the scientific community and researchers believed that the major “wiring” of the brain was complete and absolute by as early as three years old and that it was fully mature by the time the child reached the age of 10 to 12 years of age. Studies now prove this to be false. “The greatest changes to the parts of the brain that are responsible for functions such as self-control, judgment, emotions and organization occur between puberty and adulthood,” said Dr. D.Yurgelun-Todd in an interview called “Inside the Teen Brain” (Yurgelun). This developmental stage is happening at a rapid rate and it is a time that a teenager is more likely to make poor decisions, act recklessly, and have an increase in
In a study conducted at Boston’s McLean Hospital, psychologist Dr. D Yurgelun-Todd and colleagues placed teenagers inside of an MRI machine. In this study of the Frontal lobes (the seat of goal-oriented rational thinking) some teens (who were in between the ages of 11 and 17) were compared to a group of adults. In the study they were shown pictures of people who displayed the emotion fear on their faces. The younger teens often misread the facial expressions, claiming that the people were feeling sadness, anger or confusion instead of fear. The older the teenagers, the better they were at stating the emotion correctly. This showed that the frontal lobes are less active and the amygdala (a structure in the temporal lobe that is involved in discriminating fear and other emotions) are more active. The results of this study and the previously mentioned research suggests that teenagers are processing information differently from adults and that the frontal cortex of the brain is not being brought to bear on the task as efficiently as in a mature adult. The results mean that in teens, the judgement, insight and reasoning still need to mature and grow. My observances with Katie have shown this information to be true. Sometimes when I would talked to her and my