Brain scans of healthy adolescents reveal for the first time what many parents have long suspected--that teenagers don't think or feel the same way as adults, in part, because their brains actually work differently.
The researchers discovered that teenagers not only process emotions more intensely and more indiscriminately than adults, but also appear to use their brains differently to handle what they are told.
The new findings suggest a possible physiological basis for the emotional turbulence of adolescence and the gulf of misunderstanding that sometimes separates the generations.
"It has implications for how we deal with adolescents and how we think about communicating with them," said Deborah Yurgen-Todd, director of neuro-psychology and cognitive neuro-imaging at McLean Psychiatric Hospital in Belmont, Mass. She recently presented her findings during a conference at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass.
"Instead of assuming that they are young adults and fully formed in terms of their brain function," she said, "it means that we probably need to assume they are not always understanding what we are telling them verbally and they may not appreciate the consequences of their behavior."
These findings may come as some relief to those adults who simply assumed that teenagers were too rebellious or stubborn to pay attention to well-intended warnings about safe driving, study habits, unprotected sex or any other parental prescription for well-being.
Now there is evidence that something structural also is at work in the adolescent brain.
A flood of insights into how the mind works, based in large part on new neural imaging techniques, has given scientists a growing appreciation for how much the brain is physically transformed over a lifetime.
Pioneering research, for example, shows that between the ages of 3 and 8, a child's brain has twice as many neurons, twice as many connections between them and is twice as energetic as an adult brain. As the brain matures, those billions of neural connections are ruthlessly pruned into a mature form. Some synapses are reinforced by the stimulation of experience, while others atrophy through inattention.
At the peak of neural development, unused synapses are eliminated at a rate of thousands per second.
Only now, however, with the aid of noninvasive imaging schemes, are researchers able to analyze how such profound physical changes in brain structure can translate into subtle emotional behavior or affect cognitive development.
