Blame Teenage Decisions on their Undeveloped Prefrontal Cortexes
Both Scientific American Mind and Nature Magazine covered recent research into stress, the prefrontal cortex and adolescence. Simply put, the theory is this: adolescents have less developed connections within their brain and under stress, the adolescent prefrontal cortex is overloaded. In adults, brain activity under stress is distributed out to several sections of the brain for faster processing.
We are quick to blame adolescents for getting themselves into predicaments that adults believe could be easily avoided. But recent research indicates that simple irresponsibility may not be the full explanation. When teenagers perform certain tasks, their prefrontal cortex, which handles decision making, is working much harder than the same region in adults facing the same circumstances. The teen brain also makes less use of other regions that could help out. Under challenging conditions, adolescents may assess and react less efficiently than adults.
-- Leslie Sabbagh, Scientific American, August 2006.
Neuroscientists probing the teen brain have found that it undergoes a major remodelling that may be responsible for the teenager's propensity to take risks, seek out new experiences and fail to restrain inappropriate responses. Their work suggests that, even before you add raging hormones and peer-group-driven rebelliousness-without-a-cause to the mixture, teenagers may simply be unable consistently to make decisions the same way adults do. This could well be one of the reasons that, although most people are healthier during their adolescence than at any other time in their lives, adolescents are three or four times more likely to die than children past infancy2: they take risks, have accidents and pay the prices.
-- Kendall Powell, Nature 442, 865-867(24 August 2006)