Name: Why Your Teenager Isn’t Crazy … Really
Uploaded: 2018-03-20
Duration: 4 min 54 s
Description: Parents, we may finally have the answer you’ve been looking for.

Brains are developing. Teenagers are not adults with fewer miles on them. They are actually moving through this period of development where they're uneven, it's like an unevenness. And so, what's happening? Well, two things. One is they have More activity, more brain cells called neurons making more connections called synapses than adults. And we have a 100 billion neurons in our brains and they make a 100 trillion synapses so they're much more active in adults. We prune down to adulthood. But with this strength, which is a super power, they're actually able to learn at higher rates. And it's coupled with a weakness, which is that their brains are not connected with it entirely. And this is a process that begins from the back of the brain to the front. So the back of the brain, your brain is organized, your vision is in the back, your motor systems are over the bridge here, you've got sexuality, emotionality, risk taking behavior here. And then last in the frontal lobe is executive function. Judgement. Impulse control, empathy, organizational skills, well the brain develops from the back to the front and it's not at the front yet do you get where I'm going. So here's a beautiful research that's Done with functional MRI looking at the connectivity of the brain and you can see here there's a brain that's going up and down. And the blue it means connected. And what you can see, early in life, children's brains are not internally as connected And it takes about two decades to get the frontal lobe completely connected. And it takes actually over two decades and a little longer in males than females. And what's happening is these long tracts which you can see in that the tracts that go from brain cells to brain cells. There are miles of them in your brains. And they need to be insulated like an electrical wire, with something called Myelin. That process of Myelination takes two decades. Little cells are wrapping these bundles of fibers from the back to the front. So the last place to connect is the frontal lobes. And that means that if you're in your mid twenties, when you go to college, it's not connected, and when you finish college you're not fully adult yet either. What do we know about the brain? What's going on with these two factors? So lets go back to the synapses, remember I said brain cells neurons connect with synapses. Synapses is when you're learning anything, if you're learning anything here today you're synapses are getting stronger. You have more synapses early in life so you can show that you have more synapses you're learning at a higher rate two times or times times as high a rate as you can see there during your teen years in childhood. So children can learn two and three languages flawlessly, right? This is this plasticity, the environment affecting how our brains connect and makes synapses. When we learn we create better synapses over the period of seconds to minutes. So, it's happening in this room I hope. And the teenagers are still on this window, but this is coupled with the fact that their connectivity isn't there yet. So they're kind of like Ferraris with weak brakes. Because their frontal lobe isn't there to say Bad idea, don't do it, don't do it, bad idea. There's a double edged sword to this plasticity, I said their learning machines this is amazing. But there's also a double edged sword in that addiction is a form of learning. They can imprint to good things and imprint to bad things. So they can suffer much more with stress, they can get addicted to opioids, nicotine faster than adults So there's this kinda double edged sword there. Lets look a little bit more at the good side of this synaptic plasticity. This is an incredible fact I learned while I was doing this research. Your IQ can change in your teen years. This is extraordinary, and really important message for kids because it's telling you that you can strengthen your weaknesses, and work on other aspects through your teen years. This is a brain image showing that we can actually measure that yellowish area The thickness of parts of your brain. And it turns out, the thicker the parts of the brain, the higher the IQ. What you see there is, the change in IQ that happens between a two year time period in adolescence. In any two year time period, your IQ can change. A third of the people have no change. A third go up, and a third go down. So we have no, we now know that about the ones that go up, there's studies to show that enrichment increases it. But there are things that we know that decrease IQ, such as cannabis, stress. Especially chronic daily cannabis. There's been quite a bit of work done on that now. So you can see this is a very plastic time and one that actually our education system is well suited, compared to those in other countries. And that we do allow people, the late bloomers can bloom. And you can see now the biology behind that. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

Why Your Teenager Isn’t Crazy … Really

Parents, we may finally have the answer you’ve been looking for.