Are Teenage Brains Really Different?

Any parent who has lived through the adolescent years of their children has often wondered and some are convinced that the brains of their teenage offspring are different than those of children and adults.

In a recent publication, there is new data that confirms this is the case.

The article published in the April 2008 issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health describes how brain changes in the adolescent brain impact cognition, emotion and behavior.

This study as well as others show that the gray matter of the brain increases in volume until approximately the early teens and then decreases until old age.

Adolescence appears to be a time of substantial neurobiological and behavioral changes (no big surprise to us parents).

So the things we see in our teens like their mood fluctuations, selective denial of reality, lack of awareness of consequences, the accompanying behaviors of separation from family, increased risk taking, and increased sensation seeking have been highly adaptive in our past and may be so in our future.

These changes and the enormous plasticity of the teen brain make adolescence a time of great risk and great opportunity.

Ongoing studies and greater abilities to image and study the brain non-invasively will continue to give us more insight into the adolescent condition.

One goal would be to better understand the cognitive and behavioral changes taking place during adolescence and try to understand from the perspective of increased “executive” functioning how their brain works related to response inhibition, regulation of emotion, organization and long-range planning.

Until then, the adolescent brain remains a mystery.