teenagers who’d happens well I did three
of them so I’ve experienced how the
sweetness of I love you daddy can turn
into the bitterness of I hate you dad
less than a decade later but it’s
nothing new in Shakespeare’s The
Winter’s Tale a shepherd complains that
a couple of teenagers have frightened
his sheep away he says I were there were
no age between 10 and 3 and 20 or that
youth would sleep out the rest for there
is nothing in the between but getting
wench’s with child
wronging the ancient tree stealing
fighting and we can go back even further
than 400 years listen to this children
now have bad manners contempt for
authority they show disrespect to their
elders they contradict their parents
they gobble up dainty’s from the table
they cross their legs and they tantalize
their teachers now that is Socrates over
2,000 years ago but to my generation the
archetypal teenager has to be that of
Kevin
cariann fields wonderful creation who
took the best part of a day to clean his
father’s car and whose idea of tidying
his bedroom was kicking the dirty
clothes under the bed but it all passes
doesn’t it my NAR all fine now it’s just
a phase isn’t it maybe but at the turn
of the last century and following it a
lot has gone on in the area of brain
science which informs us about teenagers
and what goes on up here
a lot of behaviors can now be explained
and scientists are still very much
learning today I want to share three
aspects of this neuroscience with you
and finish with a suggestion to parents
like myself and to teachers like you the
first of these concerns the prefrontal
cortex the PFC this part at the front of
the brain that’s like a decision-making
Center I like Robert Winston’s
description of it he describes its role
as the part of the brain that stops us
stealing a chip from somebody’s plate as
we walk through a restaurant despite the
fact that we’re feeling hungry now in
the actual TV episode where Kevin
morphed into a teenager his father
observed he’s losing the power of
rational thought now Harry Enfield
probably didn’t realize just how close
to the truth he was I’m going to tell
you the story of Phineas Gage railway
worker now back in the 1840s when the US
was extending its communication routes
westward this twenty-something young
man’s job was to place explosives to
blast through mountains now in order to
do this he put dynamite into a drilled
hole had an assistant come along and
cover it with sand and then compressed
the sand into the hole to ensure a
mind blast and in order to do this he
used something called a tamping iron
okay about four foot high about an inch
in diameter sharp at the end he held it
flat at the other end in order to
compress it into the hole thus and now
one September afternoon
his assistant forgot to place the sand
in the hole a mistake that Phineas
needed like a hole in the head because
what happened was the tamping iron blew
back entered his left cheek and exited
his head out of the top taking a piece
of skull and quite a bit of brain matter
with it
Phineas was blown back and the tamping
iron flew javelin like and landed about
20 meters behind him but Phineas got up
walked to a nearby cart after speaking
rationally to his men and then got
driven home where he waited about half
an hour until a doctor came and patched
him up now he recovered enough to
exhibit himself and his tamping iron all
around the country including a PT
Barnum’s New York Museum and then he
started looking after horses he moved
down to Chile where he worked in the
livery stables and eventually he died in
California some eleven years later but
in the interim his personality changed
from a likable young man to somebody who
was untrustworthy and had fits of temper
when he didn’t get his own way
sound familiar our understanding of the
human brain and particularly of the PFC
came on leaps and bounds that we could
lose a substantial amount of brain
matter and continue to be a walking
talking human being became apparent and
that this frontal section of the brain
is responsible for Kari
and personality also became apparent and
this was no more horrific Lee
Illustrated and in the middle of the
last century when some scientists used
this knowledge to deliberately disable
the frontal lobes in order to cure
mental illness in the US alone between
1936 and 1978 some 35,000 lobotomies
were conducted thankfully we don’t do
that anymore what we do have is MRI
scanning now when it was first invented
back in the 70s a scan would take
several hours now they take several
minutes and a chap called jadeed set the
neurosis in Euro scientific ball rolling
when he conducted a study using MRI
scanners with with children he
discovered against all knowledge that
around the time of puberty we get an
extra set of neurons this completely
wasn’t understood until he discovered
this now what then happens is through a
process called myelination pathways that
are used are reinforced a bit like
lagging pipes
okay now jakey calls this the
use-it-or-lose-it stage so myelination
starts at the back of the brain and
works its way forward so the last area
to mature is this are PFC the
decision-making center which is why you
are as well asking your teenager why
they left the gas hob on as asking your
teenagers are bad at making decisions
and now we know why the second aspect
introduces us to another scientist
Deborah Yoga land Todd
now she conducted an experiment using
MRI scanners she put adults and
teenagers into them and showed them
pictures in order to see which parts of
their brains they used to interpret what
they saw here’s one of the pictures now
all adults shown this picture
interpreted it as fear half the
teenagers who saw it interpreted it as
sadness shock confusion or anger why
well what Juergen Todd discovered was
that adults used the prefrontal cortex
to interpret what they saw whereas
teenagers use their amygdalas obviously
avoiding using the PFC because it’s
still a work in progress
what’s the amygdala for mostly for
providing emotional rather than rational
responses so not only our teenagers
avoiding making decisions when they do
make them they’re often using the wrong
parts of their brains the third aspect
of this that I want to share with you
involves the cerebellum now although
it’s at the back of the brain it too
doesn’t mature until our early twenties
because it continues to grow during the
teenage years jadeed links the
cerebellum to what he calls higher
thought maths music philosophy so it’s
entirely possible that taking part in
sport or maybe even just running around
can stimulate learning at this higher
level it’s interesting to hear this link
between physical activity and learning
something many of us have felt
intuitively to be true and Socrates was
right to complain that children were
chatter
rather than exercising so what can we do
with all this knowledge firstly I’d
suggest don’t ask
teenagers questions that begin with the
word why rather get them to recount
their behavior to you get them to tell
you what they did you’ll arrive at the
same place in the end but perhaps
without challenging what may have
appeared as an irrational action
secondly avoid questions that contain
more than one concept in them there’s
enough going on in the teenage brain
already without adding more confusion to
it
remember the team brain when faced with
something new will often offer an
emotional rather than a rational
response keeping things simple reduces
the likelihood of the teenager
defaulting into fight-or-flight mode and
in terms of reinforcing the pathways the
advice would be to give rests allow the
teen brain time to take in and retain so
here’s the thing I promised a suggestion
and it’s this why don’t we tell them why
don’t we share some of this knowledge to
give them maybe some understanding and
maybe even control of their own
development there’s a lot talked these
days about motivation and its impact on
learning and obviously motivation is now
known to be closely linked to identity a
greater openness to understanding
ourselves leads to a greater openness to
improving ourselves maybe if we gave
them a little bit more information about
what was going on it could help them it certainly couldn’t hurt thank you