How teenagers’ brains work
Amy Ruona, a social worker who is employed by Portland Public Schools and in a busy Portland hospital Emergency department, gave a presentation on adolescent brain development and behavior to the Wilson High School PTA in May. The good news is that triple the number of parents attending the previous month’s regular meeting. The bad news is that the total attendance was 17, in a school with close to 1600 students. And as Principal Sue Brent said, “I get the feeling we’re preaching to the choir here tonight. The parents who don’t come to a class like this are the ones we really need to reach.”
For the most part, my kids, Steve and I are having a good time with the transitions of the teenage and early twenties years. When both your parents work in psychiatry, it’s kinda hard to throw a big enough snit to impress them. So while I know from experience at work and in the community, there’s always something more to learn, I wasn’t expecting to hear quite as much interesting information as I did at the PTA meeting. This morning and this afternoon I’m posting some of the highlights from Amy Ruona’s presentation, with permission.
* Adolescents think and act differently from adults or children because of biology. Different parts of their brain dominate, and connections with the cognitive frontal lobes (that help them make good decisions based on logic and experience rather than emotion or hormones) are still developing.
* The connections, and pruning of faulty connections, in the brain aren’t well defined until age 25. Up until about age 12, the brain makes millions of connections. From 13 – 25, the main task for the brain is strengthening the pathways that are used, while the others wither away.
* A baby is born with about 100 million neurons in the brain, only 17% of which are linked. Genetics and experience wire the others together, depending on how much use a certain system/set of connections gets.
* Bad experiences, trauma, and toxic substances change the structure of the brain. It has some capacity for other parts to take over for parts/pathways that are damaged, but often full potential can’t be recovered or reached.
* The brain activity of falling in love is similar to the neural firing pattern of being high on cocaine. And neither is sustainable over a long period of time.
* Teenagers are dealing not only with body hormones but also with changes in brain chemicals, particularly dopamine. Dopamine is a chemical that is released from one nerve cell triggering activation of the next in the brain, causing transmittal of the message. Dopamine release makes us feel good, resulting in the desire to repeat the action that triggered it.
* Dopamine levels peak in early adolescence and fall by age 16 or so – older teens and adults need more stimulus to get the same feeling of pleasure. Abused drugs generally stimulate dopamine levels, masking the feeling of unhappiness that falling dopamine levels would normally be producing.
* Doing new things tends to raise dopamine levels, as the brain works at making the new connections. This can have the positive effect of prodding teenagers to try new things, but because of their brain biology they tend to need ever increasing levels of activity to achieve the same level of satisfaction.
* Females use more areas of their brains to accomplish a task. Their dominant sense is hearing, and they speak an average of 20,000 words per day.
* Males’ dominant sense is vision, and their average daily word count is 7,000.
* Melatonin, the sleep/wake hormone, is released later in the evening in teens. So when they say they aren’t tired, they really aren’t. And it’s normal for them to experience less restful sleep, awaken later, and feel tired a lot. But teenagers need more sleep than adults or children, to give their brains time to reorganize, sort, and make good connections. Exercise during the day, a calming bedtime routine, and trying to stick to a regular sleep-wake cycle even on weekends can help. “No it doesn’t”, says my daughter.
* Studies show teenagers don’t interpret body language or what is said to them, the same way adults do. They tend to overreact and/or assume something else was said/meant – their system is wired more for flight/fight than logic.
Interesting, huh?