In Defence of the Teenage Brain
Navigating a path through adolescence can be a risky business. The decisions! The peer pressure! The hormones!
In fact it’s our not-yet-fully-developed brains during our teenage years that are hard-wired for risky behaviour.
It was once thought the brain was fully developed by age 12. However, with the emergence of MRI technology and the ability to scan the brain without causing harm through radiation, it was discovered the brain goes through a stage of maturation that doesn’t conclude until well into our mid twenties.
In other words, the prefrontal lobe, the brains centre for reasoning and impulse control, may not fully develop until 25 years old.
This discovery has, over the last few years, often been linked to the distinctly adolescent knack for getting into trouble. Drinking. Speeding, Teenage pregnancy. It’s their brains!
And this link may be somewhat accurate. A propensity to take risks coupled with a lack of knowledge, lack of experience, boredom and surging hormones might get you in to trouble. But in a recent article for National Geographic, journalist David Dobbs explains that science is now taking a kinder, more evolutionary reading of the teenage brain.
“Researchers believe this risk-friendly weighing of cost versus reward has been selected because, over the course of human evolution, the willingness to take risks during this period of life has granted an adaptive edge.”
In other words, risk is what makes young people want to leave the nest, go to university, travel and start their careers.
According to adolescent psychologist at Australia’s Queensland University, Professor Mary Sheehan, risk is just a part of growing up.
“Trying something new, pushing the boundaries, it’s all within normative development,” she said.
It’s when that risk-taking behaviour is un-metered and unsupervised that it can go off the rails.
“They (adolescents) get a sense of achievement from the risk taking behaviour and they don’t throw it off. It doesn’t help that, teenagers might move away from home, to the city to go to university and lose any sense of community or connectedness that they may have had.“
Adolescence is not only a time when we’re most at risk, but a time when we’re at the peak of health, creativity and experimentation, and risk taking in adolescence is often championed by adults when it succeeds. It’s what drives adolescents to broaden their social circles, make major life decisions and venture out into the big, bad world. It’s their brains!
Jamie Farshchi is ES Journal’s Canadian Correspondent
