Teenagers have always complained that they are not understood. Parents can only shake their heads and agree. Adolescent behaviour so often defies safety and common sense. And yet these kids are often smart, much more adept with technology than their elders and quick to grasp the knowledge now at their fingertips. Why, then, are they so susceptible to silly suggestions and thoughtless risks?
Our Sunday Insight in the paper today features a book that offers answers from neuroscience. The physical and chemical patterns in the human brain are a fairly new frontier of science. If its findings are right, the mind is not fully developed until somewhat later than the ages at which young people are granted the rights to drive, drink, vote and make mature decisions in matters of sex, marriage and much else.
Neuroscience has identified the region of the brain that seeks and responds to pleasure, and the different region that assesses risk and consequences. That region, the prefrontal lobes in the frontal cortex, is not fully connected to the rest of the brain until people are some way into their 20s. Meanwhile, the pleasure centre in the anterior cortex is fully functioning and highly active. The mind is well attuned to rewards and hardly aware of costs. Sound familiar?
The author of The Teenage Brain, Frances E Jensen, says the adolescent mind is so highly attuned to rewards that it is much more prone to addictions. Alcohol, drugs, sex and pleasures of all sorts are more potent for young people before their brain is fully wired to its warning centre.
The implications of neuroscience for public policy are fairly obvious, but before we start bumping up the drinking and driving ages, it is worth waiting to see whether the knowledge itself is a corrective. When teenagers complain they are not understood, they are struggling to understand their own impulses and obsessions. They may find some answers in this science.
