Teenage Brain

visit her, and I remember that trip so vividly. The weird chemical taste of the salt liquorice, the crush I developed on a dark haired boy, the way that music moved me almost to the point of physical discomfort. The discovery that the dark haired boy liked me back, which both thrilled and nauseated me. There's a term for our heightened recall of adolescence and early adulthood. It's called the reminiscence bump. The adventures, both innocent and illicit, of our

teenage years make lasting impressions. We're branded with the memories of our first breakup, fierce arguments with parents, the friend who tried to skateboard off the roof, the songs that electrified us, the six sweet smell of Swedish wine cut with fanta. The general intensity of experience in adolescence is due in part to our neuro anatomy. We're going to look inside the teenage brain to find out why the world burns brighter in your teens. Hi, I'm Piper Wilson,

and I'm eighteen years old. I have been eighteen for about a month now. Awesome. Do you think that high school turned out to be what you imagined it would when you were a little kid. I thought like, once I got to be like sixteen seventeen, I would feel just like the top of the world. It's like being

a kid, but with more benefits. So I grew up just like imagining that, like my teenage years are going to be like just the epitome of fun things like staying out too late, or like making bad decisions or like partying. Just like if I don't do this now, then like when will I get to I've never thought about it quite that way, but there can be sort of a romantic burden on adolescents, like it's a New Year's Eve party that lasts for the better part of

a decade. Actual teenager them ended up being a mixed bag for Piper, with its own set of challenges, including some perceived pressure to dress a certain way. There's a lot of just like preppy, like the pink hoodies and the ripped jeans and all that like, and some new social dynamics like talking to people that would like get me in trouble um or yeah, like trying to fit into a group that like didn't like me and like I didn't look like them, but like they were like

the people. So I'm like I should try at least I spent so long like digging around at what I should be and of what I really am. So now I'm still kind of stuck in that weird limbo where like I have an idea, but I'm not sure a lot of adults are all too eager to go on.

When I was your age autopilot instead of really listening to teenagers experiences, I spoke to a youth theater group based in North London called Company three that received a lot of attention for production they did called Brainstorm, a play that investigated the teenage experience through the lens of neuro anatomy. What you say to me your brain is broken.

The play was created in collaboration with Dr Sarah Jane Blakemore, a groundbreaking neuroscientist who specializes in adolescent brain development, and it connected the real life stories of the teens of science that provides some insight into their experiences. I say to you, my brain isn't broken. It's beautiful. I'm in the city have never been to, and I see bright lights and new ideas and fear and opportunity and a thousand million roads all lit up and flashing. I say,

my brain isn't broken. What did you find out about your brain when you're doing the play? So essentially the science goes a little bit like this is that when you're younger, your Olympic system is at the biggest point. And the Olympic system is like the reward system is what we called it. So it's the bit that gives you the high like when you're young, um, and like every time we do some they knew or exciting, it just gets really excited in your reward in your Olympics system.

So you end up doing more and more naughty things or things that are considered naughty and teenage like behavior. That's second now in her early twenties, who talks with big fluid gestures through a wide smile. Her cast mate Jack was only fourteen when he participated in the play. Now he's eighteen, tall and slim with girls that fall almost into his eyes. The Olympics system is the part

of the brain that is involved with taking risks. So when we're younger, there's kind of a lot more connections there and we tend to our proof onto cortex, what kind of manages Our decision making isn't as developed yet, so like we're kind of a lot more prone to taking risks, not doing what we're told to do, um kind of pushing the boundaries to try and find out what is acceptable and what isn't. We learned that when you're young, your synapses are just growing and you're making

so many connections. It's easier for you to pick up things and learn things, and pick up bad habits or good habits, and I guess that's where you can learn new languages and new talents and stuff like that. So

that was really exciting. Synapses are the connection points between our brain cells, and teenagers actually have more brain cells and more synapses than adults do, even though the structures of the adolescent brain may be very similar to an adults, those structures aren't yet wired together in the same way, and the process of connecting our brain regions to one another starts at the back of the head and moves towards the front, which means that the frontal lobe, which

is associated with empathy and judgment and decision making, is actually the last to connect. Okay, time for a deep dive into the science. MH. I'm Francis Jansen. I'm Chair of Neurology at the University of Pennsylvania and I'm also the author of The Teenage Brain. Every function or thought or memory you have is like a relay race through your brain, using probably thousands, if not millions, of synapses at times for a single act or a thought or

a memory. So it's these relay races that get rehearsed over and over again. That's the practice effect. So these synapses can be strengthened by experience. That's the magic of this UM process. And when you repeatedly have a communication going from Cela to sell By, we believe that's the base of learning in memory. And it takes only milliseconds for UM that process to start, and then by about an hour you have a stronger synapse. Well, I don't

what are you going? This is a Billie Eilish track, As pop fans will probably know, we at only seventeen, Billie Eilish swept the Grammys, winning all four of the biggest awards. Mozart was writing opera at fourteen. Mary Shelley started on Frankenstein when she was eighteen. Malala Yusef Psai and Greta Tonberg have both helped shape major geopolitical conversations as teenagers. Teenage years are full of passion and creativity and learning, partly because the adolescent brain isn't just a

brand new adults brain. The creativity of teenagers is not to be taken lightly. But it's only in recent decades that imaging technology like m r S and fm r S has allowed us to look inside the living teenage brain to see how it's built and watch it at work. So it sounds like the brain doesn't. It doesn't finish itself like a like a biscuit rising in the oven. Evenly, it's like a building going up part by part. And

that's what's so fascinating about human development. We are so customized to our environments that we believe that scientists, we believe that nature intended this so that your brain can be sculpted to be customized to the environment in which you will live the rest of your life. Right, So, all the way through your childhood, skill sets you're learning are strengthening certain parts of your brain in one person, and then a different skill set and another person, so

we all end up quite different. The brain is the human organ that takes longest to develop, and this long window of maturation can actually be an advantage. It allows our brains to adapt and optimize themselves to the exact demands of the particular lives we lead. In adolescence, our brain is being tailor made by the circumstances of our lives. It's a period of becoming self aware and creating an identity for yourself. I like being outside of my friends,

I think. So we just liked riding around on bikes and you just cycle around, Um, you just get that sense of freedom. My friend she had like people who she really liked him, who would like to talk about And if we didn't know anyone, we didn't want anyone to know. I'd be like, so, how's twenty eighteen, how's ten? And I'm like, here's your twenty and yeah, it's kind of an inside joke. No one else has it. Man, teenagers are natural cryptographers, folded notes, code words, fresh lang.

It takes real inventiveness to have a private conversation. I can still remember learning how to say do you think he's cute? In Swedish Hannard's Sneak. Maybe years from now, Kessie I will be drinking tea with friends, referring to her partner as her two teenage conversations with parents, Well, there is not so much subtext, maybe not even that much text text. We were like we really talk about in depth, like things. It's usually just like, how is your day fine? And if not, I'd be about school.

And if it's not school, it's just on what's on TV. We're in different generations, like we just don't really understand each other, and it's just a really restricting conversation. I think as a teenager, my relationship with my parents had essentially collapsed. It had none of the sweetness and intimacy it had in childhood or that it would have in my adulthood. At fourteen, I'd cut off my long hair and dyed it pink. In the Mississippi River. I've done

my own piercing in a bathroom mirror. And I was writing tortured poetry late at night in the basement, and I remember thinking I won't always feel this way, But I didn't know anything about the neuroscience that underlied my experience. Learning about how teenage brains work doesn't only help adults understand teenage behavior. It can also help teens understand themselves.

Here are brothers Arda and bergon fifteen and thirteen. I get sometimes angry for some stuff, and I need free space and I don't get that space, which gets me more angry. And then and you some parts of yourself is hidden because there's like some stuff that you you still have to find out about yourself. Could you feel yourself like, could you feel your personality changing when you talk about like being shy at twelve and thirteen, where

you like, I am becoming a slightly different person. Yeah, because I think when I got to fifteen is when

I got loads of it. I started to get a lot of attention from Mayo um, and like that's when you know your crushes start to message you and stuff like that, or even just girls always comment in on how pretty you look, and everyone's just like the trends is appearance, and everyone's focusing on, oh, you have really nice hair, your eyes, your smile, and those just compliments just made me kind of get more and more confident in myself and gave me that freedom to just find

friends who are because everyone was trying to be friends with everyone if you well, if you were pretty, but you just have that connection, like we've got the same hair, let's be friends. Do you know what I mean? There are serious changes in the social terrain. Your own temperament changes, and is our neurologist Francis explains, even the clock in your body changes. Teenagers and sleep, why do they keep schedules of like miniature bartenders. Yes, to make our our

brains want to go to sleep. We release a protein called melotonein. It's a transmitter and it helps make the rest of your brain get sleepy. We put it out, you know, in the mid evening, eight or nine o'clock at night. And teenagers are programmed, as are all animals mammalian species, as they go through to this this window of juvenile development. It comes out later, so it's not even getting released until closer to midnight eleven o'clock at night. It takes about an hour and a half for this

to work. So you can imagine then they don't even have the sort of soporific hormone or protein to to help them go to sleep, and they're also stimulating themselves with all kinds of social media and all kinds of things, so it is kind of like the perfect storm. This is very, very challenging in high school especially, and so a lot of schools have actually adapted to doing something

a bit softer and gentler earlier mindfulness or sports. Several studies even link early high school start times with increased rates of teenage driver car accidents. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine has called for communities to adopt start times of eight thirty or lay leader for middle school and high school students. The world wasn't really designed with the teenage brain and mind, and maybe we should rethink the school day and a lot of our public policies in

light of what we now know about teen development. Some of those policies have life or death consequences. Should courts punish teens, for example, in the same way as adults when they commit serious violent crime. Dr Francis Ginson had an opportunity to submit her opinion on that issue to the Supreme Court of the United States. She contributed to what's called an amicus brief, a document meant to provide perspective or advise the justices, even though the authors aren't

directly involved in the case. So I was one of many people on amicus briefs about trying to overturn that what had been the law of the land, which was mandatory life without parole for capital crimes. So this is people under the age of eighteen that have been bystanders or evolved or you know, under the influence of an older person to do a cry our murder. And we argued that they are so susceptible to peer pressure. I mean,

isis knows this right. I mean, they can take young boys and make them do heinous things and that's not what that child would have been like most likely if they'd been in a better environment. They're very easily susceptible to suggestion in that window because they don't have a frontal lobe to say bad idea. But also the peer gratification piece is big. In the end, the U S Supreme Court did overturn the law of the land. It abolished the mandatory sentencing of life without parole for juveniles.

Now every case must be considered individually. Francis also recommended that people who had already received mandatory sentences for juvenile crimes should have their cases reviewed to see if the punishment was fair. That suggestion was accepted to they look like an adult. They you know, walk like an adult, They dressed like an adult. That their brain is not adult like we as adults. We do have our front

lobes present and attached. So when I talked to parents and community leaders, I say we should give them a frontal lobe assist being there to support them through this rather rocky part of development, which is magical at the same time as a little bit treacherous for some of them. My friend Maria told me that Swedish has a term to convey the particular sort of trashiness that comes with

being exactly fourteen years old. People might use it, she said, to describe a group of girls loitering in a parking lot smoking cigarettes. For example. Culture isn't always very generous with teens. They're dismissed as vapid hormonal. We call it loitering when they stand around talking as if they had anywhere private to go. My brain isn't broken. It's like

this full reason. I'm like this full reason. I'm becoming who I am, and I'm scared, and you're scared because who I am it might not be who you want me to be, well who you are, And I don't know why, but I don't say it's all going to be okay. There are so many things I don't say to you. I don't know why I want to say them, but I can't. I pick up my plate, put in the kitchen and go upstairs. I think as you get older, you think that you you remember your teenage life, but

you don't. You think that you can say to your child, I know why you're doing this. I used to do that too. But the world is always changing. Everything's always developing. So when you sit there and tell me I used to do that too, you're not. You're just telling me that instead of action in okay, I'm gonna let you have the space to make those mistakes so that you understand and then we can talk about it. The memories of adolescents feel so vivid. I remember the ribbing of

my favorite pair of ripped tights. I remember the beat up Raiders cap I wore with the brim pulled low. But maybe second is right. Maybe I can't recall what it was really like to experience the world with the brain that was in that Raiders cap. Do you ever think about now you're eighteen? Do you think about what it's going to be like when you get older? Is there an age that you think that you're excited to be in the same way that you might have been

excited to be a teenager. I want to say I'm excited to be like twenty four because that's when I'll be done with like my bachelor's degree in college. And I think that by then I'll be married. So I really want to do that. I really want to get there. Do you know who you'll be married too? Yeah? Do you my girlfriend? They do? Yeah? Yeah, I want to. She's a little younger than me, so I want to propose to her on her eighteenth birthday and that's like a little over a year. So, M and how long

have you guys been dating? Like nine months? Um? And I know that doesn't sound like a lot, but like I've literally never felt this way about anybody at all before, like not even close. I don't want to say I believe in destiny, but I feel like she's definitely my person. Our culture does presume that teenage love is hyper intense and fleeting and isn't to be considered as seriously as adult love. Do you think that it's definitely perceived as that?

And I feel like a lot of the time it is like that, but because of that, a few times where it's not usually overlooked, like I want her to be my endgame, and I tell it to people and they're like, oh, hi, that's so cute, Like no, I'm serious, Like I want to marry her. It's strangely acceptable to mock and even demonized teenagers, and we would never get away with treating other people that way. Do you plan when you're an adult on treating teenagers differently than you've

been treated by the adults in your life? Definitely? Yeah, how so, like both teenagers and children are treated as a very homogeneous group. Isn't like they're young and they don't know what they're doing and like they're not wise or anything, when really, like you don't know everyone's story. Um, So I feel like I would definitely treat like children and teenagers when I'm an adult, with the same respect that I would give an adult that I had just met.

Like they're younger than me, sure, but they're not like a different breed of thing. They're a human being with a brain and a heart. There shouldn't be that big of a difference. Adolescents are the way they are for a reason. We are teenagers by design. The neurological development that can make the teenagers challenging also lends the adventure and passion and the thrill of those years. It's part of what makes us feel so fully, almost unbearably alive.

It's what makes the world burn brighter through our teenage years. Next on Deeply Human, we're talking deja vu? Why do you get it? And what could it reveal about the mechanics of memory. I remember driving four hours to meet with a patient we've not met before, and I turn up and she opens the door and she greets me

like she knows me. Deeply Human is hosted by Me Tessa and as a co production of the BBC World Service and American Public Media with I Heartmedia Special Thanks this time around to company three Theater Group in London,