The Teenage Brain

What makes being a teenager so great? I mean, when we were little some of us were so excited to grow up and be 16 or 18, an adolescent. And now that we are all adolescents, we hear things like “Now is the time to make mistakes, you’re only you once.” Parents get warned and prepare for dealing with their teenage children. The mood swings, the impulsive behavior, the lack of sleep, the desire for food constantly, and the endless “What are you doing?” from parents, teacher, and peers are all part of these teenage years. So, why do we (teenagers) act the way that they do?

National Geographic did an article on Teenage Brains to answer the golden question “What are they (teenagers) doing? What is wrong with these kids?” Before brain scanning technology was invented, the explanations for teenage behavior were simply opinions of esteem figures such as Freud and Aristotle. However, a National Institutes of Health (NIH) project started in the 1990s where they studied over 100 teens as they grew up. They scanned their brains and saw that our brains go through a colossal reorganization between the ages of 12 and 25. I’m talking Extreme Makeover: Home Edition type status. During this period of time the brain itself does not physically grow anymore, the skull just thickens. Yet it “undergoes extensive remodeling, resembling a network and wiring upgrade (Dobbs 1).”

What physically happens to the brain is maturation. The brain’s axons get padded by myelin, a fatty substance also known as the brain’s white matter. This boosts the transmission speed of the axon up to a 100x. Also, the dendrites become thinner and the synapses that are used the most become more stable and stronger. Similar to vestigial structures in evolution, the synapses that don’t get used quite often begin to disappear. This is called “synaptic pruning” and causes the brain’s cortex (the gray outer layer where conscious and difficult thinking takes place) to get thinner, yet efficient. All of this happens throughout the adolescent years and starts at the back (home of the basic behavior functions like vision, movement, fundamental processing) of the brain, working its way to the front (home to the “evolutionarily newer” and more intricate thinking areas). The connector of the brain’s left and right hemispheres (corpus callosum) also thickens. The “memory directory” and the area of the brain where we set goals and weigh different agendas form stronger links and because of this we get better at combining memory and experience into the decisions that we make. Also, the front of our brains is able to create and weigh far more variables and agendas than before due to its gain in speed and deeper connections.

“When this development proceeds normally, we get better at balancing impulse, desire, goals, self-interest, rules, ethics, and even altruism, generating behavior that is more complex and, sometimes at least, more sensible. But at times, and especially at first, the brain does this work clumsily. It's hard to get all those new cogs to mesh.” (Dobbs 1)

These drastic changes in our brains that occur throughout our adolescence can explain why we teenagers make some pretty stupid mistakes even when we know we are wrong; yet we still choose to make them anyway. Why we change our minds, and then change them again. Why everything is just so confusing and life is hard but great at the same time. We don’t know what we want or who we are because our brain’s hard drive is rewiring so to speak.

*I recommend giving the article a read, it’s very interesting! Also, take the survey “What’s Your Risk Tolerance?” just for fun, if you like to share your results feel free to leave them in a comment! I am a “moderate risk taker, I like to have fun but usually play it safe,” according to the survey.*