Beautiful Brains

In biology we were required to read Beautiful Brains , otherwise known as an article on the teens brain. I enjoyed it so much I thought that I would share with you all the highlights of the article!

When people hear the word "teenager", they usually tend to think of someone that has reached the age of 13 or higher and is now sassy, reckless, and irresponsible. the truth is that their brains going through a very complicated process, that has some side effects... "For starters, the brain's axons—the long nerve fibers that neurons use to send signals to other neurons—become gradually more insulated with a fatty substance called myelin (the brain's white matter), eventually boosting the axons' transmission speed up to a hundred times. Meanwhile, dendrites, the branchlike extensions that neurons use to receive signals from nearby axons, grow twiggier, and the most heavily used synapses—the little chemical junctures across which axons and dendrites pass notes—grow richer and stronger. At the same time, synapses that see little use begin to wither. This synaptic pruning, as it is called, causes the brain's cortex—the outer layer of gray matter where we do much of our conscious and complicated thinking—to become thinner but more efficient." 

I know, a lot of really complicated words that are somehow supposed to convince us that we understand the process. Basically, they are saying that the brain is extremely busy during the ages of 12-25, the brain is maturing and becoming faster. In the mean time, the teens become very distracted, and learn to shut things out. For example a scientist decided to conduct an experiment, "Beatriz Luna, a University of Pittsburgh professor of psychiatry who uses neuroimaging to study the teen brain, used a simple test that illustrates this learning curve. Luna scanned the brains of children, teens, and twenty somethings while they performed an antisaccade task, a sort of eyes-only video game where you have to stop yourself from looking at a suddenly appearing light. You view a screen on which the red crosshairs at the center occasionally disappear just as a light flickers elsewhere on the screen. Your instructions are to not look at the light and instead to look in the opposite direction. A sensor detects any eye movement. It's a tough assignment, since flickering lights naturally draw our attention. To succeed, you must override both a normal impulse to attend to new information and curiosity about something forbidden. Brain geeks call this response inhibition."  As a result, the younger kids bombed the test, they just could keep their eyes off of the light. However, teens do much better. In fact, by age 15 they can score as well as adults if they have the motivation, they were resisting temptation about 70 to 80 percent of the time. What Luna found most interesting was not those scores but it was the brain scans she took while people took the test. When compared with adults, teens tended to make less use of brain regions that monitor performance, spot errors, plan, and stay focused. However these areas are the ones adults seemed to bring online automatically. "This let the adults use a variety of brain resources and better resist temptation, while the teens used those areas less often and more readily gave in to the impulse to look at the flickering light—just as they're more likely to look away from the road to read a text message."

Photo: Google images

I found this to be very interesting because majority of parents think it is just because their children have reached a reckless and hormone filled stage in their life, but actually their kids are developing their brains at a very fast rate. Teenagers have a reputation for getting into trouble, but we are just clueless and unaware of our surroundings. I was able to relate directly to the article, for instance I am always procrastinating and very distracted by my iPhone. My parents are always complaining because they miss the "old me" or the younger version... But I am 15, so approximately 10 years away till my brain has completely developed... I was able to share this article with them, my parents also found this very interesting and said that it explained much of my behavioral issues. Overall, I think it was very important for people to read, many who are confused by their reckless teens.