Things I Wish I Learned Sooner: The Flexibility Of Young Brains & Interesting Studies
During the transition from childhood to adolescence, the brain shows an increasing response to rewards in areas related to pleasure-seeking. One such area is the nucleus accumbens.
In teenagers, activity here is just as high as in adults.
An important point, however, is that activity in the orbitofrontal cortex, which is involved in decision making, attention, and simulation of future consequences, is still about the same in teens as in children.
A mature pleasure-seeking system combined with an immature orbitofrontal cortex means that teenagers are not only emotionally oversensitive but also less able to control their emotions than adults.
On the other hand, it is extremely easy for them to put themselves in the shoes of other people and their emotional world. It’s easy to distinguish between “Us” and “Thems” at an instant although these estimates may be flawed most of the time.
If you compare us with chimpanzees, you can see that in a human group there are 500 times fewer conflicts than in an ape group.
But if you look at conflicts and violence between several groups of humans, it is almost 1:1 with the chimpanzees.
Areas involved in social reasoning, like the Medial Prefrontal Cortex, are more connected to other brain regions that translate motivations into actions (the striatum and its network of connections).
This could explain why teens are more likely to take risks when their friends are around. We are also more likely to be optimistic than realistic about our individual futures.
There are plenty of experiments and studies in which people were asked to answer questions and their brain activity was scanned.
In children, a correct answer led to roughly the same increase in activity regardless of the amount of reward.
In adults, small, medium, and large rewards led to small, medium, and large increases in the accumbens activity.
And in adolescents? After a medium reward, it looked the same as in children and adults. A large reward led to a huge increase, much larger than in adults. And the small reward? Accumbens activity decreased.
With increasing maturity, adolescents also increasingly distinguish between harming people and harming objects (with the former being considered worse); harming people increasingly activates the amygdala, whereas the opposite is true for harming objects.
Interestingly, as adolescents age, there is less distinction between the recommended punishment for intentional and unintentional harm to objects.
In other words, the point about damage is that the damn thing needs to be fixed — even if there is less crying over spilled milk, there is no less cleaning required.
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