The Teenage Brain

As often happens after we view an excerpt of this documentary in class, I got requests from my students to post this for parents. Today in class we watched the first few segments of Frontline's Inside the Teenage Brain, a great program highlighting recent neuroscience research that suggest explanations for many typical teenage behaviors (e.g., staying up late at night and sleeping in mornings, taking risks that make their parents uncomfortable, miscommunicating with adults...etc.)

The entire program is available for viewing online (Windows Media and RealPlayer users, try here) and its companion site has numerous links to more information that may be helpful for both parents and teenagers.

The short version of the program's message is that the adolescent brain is still developing, and parents may be able to respond with more empathy to the sometimes frustrating behaviors of their teens if they know some things about this process. While we have to exercise caution when attempting to translate neuroscience research into prescriptions for parenting or teaching, the conversation about teen brain development is an important one, and parents may actually find it quite uplifting.

Those looking for additional resources might want to try these links:

• A Work in Progress: The Teen Brain (2008) in Harvard Magazine
• Teenage Brains (2011) in National Geographic Magazine
• Inside the Teenage Brain (2010) in Parade Magazine
• The Teen Brain: It's Just Not Grown Up Yet (2010) NPR

The Teenage Brain

Dr. Jay Giedd (U of M) studies teen brain development using MRI

Today in class we viewed a selected portion of a Frontline documentary entitled "Inside the Teenage Brain". The program provides an introduction to what recent advances in neuroscience have revealed about the biological causes behind well-documented differences between adult and teenage thinking.

As often happens when we view and discuss the program, I received a lot of requests to communicate this information to parents (e.g. "Could you please come talk to my dad about this?"). Since it seems a little presumptuous to phone my students' parents out-of-the-blue for a nice talk about neuroscience, I'll post the links here and let students start the conversations themselves. Students may want to watch the full version (we only watched a portion in class) and parents may find this extremely interesting as well.

The website to accompany the program also has numerous resources for the parents of teenagers, which some may find helpful.

Another helpful video resource can be found in another PBS series from a few years ago, "The Secret Life of the Brain." Episode Three is focused entirely on the unique developmental features of the teenage brain.

While this program is quite good, I would note that there are some remaining controversies about using the "underdeveloped prefrontal cortex" explanation to explain teen decision-making (this is one of the concepts presented in the Frontline video). These were highlighted in a recent article from National Geographic on the brains of teenagers.