living your awesome life one oops at a time
  • living your aweswome life one oops at a time
  • contact me
  • Contact Us
  • Program video
  • about me and why you should care
  • OUR STORE

Dumb got me to thinking.

2/13/2014

0 Comments

 
Picture
It used to really bother me when I am talking to a young person and I seemed never to be getting through. What I took as direct, concise, simple, linear ideas has often been received as awkward, confusing, complicated and mixed-up by the teenage mind. It has often taken a lot of patience on my part to find a meeting of the minds. Admittedly. I characterized teen "slowedness' as being a lack of application, lack of caring, slothful and undisciplined. Most times I was just trying to get beyond "yes and no" answers to a more applied rationale reasoning in conversational thinking and engagement. Before I completely threw my hands in the air I decided to do some research. I was after why there is such a divide between the teen and adult mind and what implications does this have for adult and teen interactions?

By Molly Edmonds
In adults, various parts of the brain work together to evaluate choices, make decisions and act accordingly in each situation. The teenage brain doesn't appear to work like this. For comparison's sake, think of the teenage brain as an entertainment center that hasn't been fully hooked up. There are loose wires, so that the speaker system isn't working with the DVD player, which in turn hasn't been formatted to work with the television yet. And to top it all off, the remote control hasn't even arrived!

The brain's remote control is the prefrontal cortex, a section of the brain that weighs outcomes, forms judgments and controls impulses and emotions. This section of the brain also helps people understand one another. If you were to walk into a sports bar full of Lakers fans wearing a Celtics jersey, your prefrontal cortex would immediately begin firing in warning; those teams are bitter enemies, and it might serve you to change your behavior (and your clothes). The prefrontal cortex communicates with the other sections of the brain through connections called synapses. These are like the wires of the entertainment system.

What scientists have found is that teenagers experience a wealth of growth in synapses during adolescence. But if you've ever hooked up an entertainment center, you know that more wires means more problems. You tend to keep the components you use the most, while getting rid of something superfluous, like an out-of-date laserdisc player. The brain works the same way, because it starts pruning away the synapses that it doesn't need in order to make the remaining ones much more efficient in communicating. In teenagers, it seems that this process starts in the back of the brain and moves forward, so that the prefrontal cortex, that vital center of control, is the last to be trimmed. As the connections are trimmed down, an insulating substance called myelin coats the synapses to protect them.

As such, the prefrontal cortex is a little immature in teenagers as compared to adults; it may not fully develop until your mid-20s [source: Kotulak]. And if you don't have a remote control to call the shots in the brain, using the other brain structures can become more difficult. Imaging studies have shown that most of the mental energy that teenagers use in making decisions is located in the back of the brain, whereas adults do most of their processing in the frontal lobe [source: Wallis]. When teenagers do use the frontal lobe, it seems they overdo it, calling upon much more of the brain to get the job done than adults would [source: Powell]. And because adults have already refined those communicating synapses, they can make decisions more quickly.

Adult brains are also better wired to notice errors in decision-making. While adults performed tasks that required the quick response of pushing buttons, their brains sent out a signal when a hasty mistake was made. Before 80 milliseconds had passed, adult brains had noticed the blunder, but teenage brains didn't notice any slip-up [source: Monastersky].

An area of the teenager's brain that is fairly well-developed early on, though, is the nucleus accumbens, or the area of the brain that seeks pleasure and reward. In imaging studies that compared brain activity when the subject received a small, medium or large reward, teenagers exhibited exaggerated responses to medium and large rewards compared to children and adults [source: Powell]. When presented with a small reward, the teenagers' brains hardly fired at all in comparison to adults and children.

Molly's article does not explain everything but it does help. She helps me understand that I was sadly mistaken in a lot of cases. Teens aren't by and large dense they are just developing. Just like their shoe size grows, so does their brain. Just because they look grown up does not make them ready for prime time. That's why they have unassuming, patient, willing, smart adults to learn from.

0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    La Detra Joy

    I love being around people. I would rather live falling than break my spirit never trying anything hard. This blog is about trying and retrying life.

    SUBSRIBE TO FEED

    Archives

    June 2021
    January 2021
    October 2018
    September 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013


    Categories

    All
    Family
    Life
    Love
    Marriage
    Mistakes
    Relationships
    The Spirit
    Travel
    Victories

    Booking Inquiries

    RSS Feed

 copyright 2013 Noble Insight, Inc. All Rights Reserved