January 3, 2013 • 39 mins
The teenage brain is a wonderful thing, full of intense rewiring and rapid shifts in priority. In this episode, Robert and Julie reminisce about the teenagers they were and just what was going on in their brains to fuel all that odd, erratic behavior.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas, and
we're talking about teenagers today. So right off the bat,
Julie introduce us to the teenage Julie Douglas. What does
(00:24):
she look like? What does she believe? What she into? Um?
She likes to try to hypnotize herself. Um, she is
interested in fire and she's learned to silk screen. So
she's making clothes with really odd patterns on it and
wearing them to school. Yeah, and uh, you know, big
(00:47):
blonde hair. Yeah, what's her what's her favorite music? Oh? Um,
the replacements are are big on the roster. Trying to
think of Oh, Robin Hitchcock, I really haven't changed my
What about the teenage Robert? The teenage Robert? He plays
that he has abandoned Benson Dragons in favor of Magic
(01:09):
the Gathering. He has a few favorite T shirts that
he bought at a head shop in Huntsville, Alabama that
have Gustave Dore prints on them, except they're like bright purple.
He is really into HP Lovecraft and he likes to
listen to Tool nine inch Nails and Marilyn Manson. All right,
(01:30):
and is there a particular cloud of angst that hangs
over this version of you? Um? Yeah, I am well.
I am told by my h my mom still mentions
and my sisters that I was certainly a moody teenager.
I was a little glum at times. And I think
the ideas that I got excited about, I got excited
about these about sort of dangerous thinking, you know, because
(01:53):
that was the the the appeal I think of stuff
like Marilyn Manson at the time was so this is
this is dangerous music, even though and and and I
could go back and visit the teenage me like Looper
style and tell him, hey, you're gonna hear Marilyn Manson
music on like in the mall right, yeah, and just
you know, in in you know, ten twenty years time,
(02:14):
you're gonna realize just how non dangerous this this music
really was. But yeah, I feel like there was there
was a gloominess and then but also this rebellion, and
certainly the pride in this rebellion. You know, it's like
I don't really fit in in small town Tennessee. Because
because I'm I'm into I'm into this, this is this
is who I am. Well, I I can tell you
(02:36):
that I was probably the classic sulky teen and I
did some awful things that I can't believe I did
now that I still haven't admitted to my parents, and
I certainly will not begin cataloging here. But um, I
will say that having gone through the research for today's
podcast about the teenage brain, it makes me feel a
(02:57):
lot better about the things that I did, because sometimes
do ever look back at the earlier versions of yourself
and wonder like, who was I then? Or how did
that happen? And this, really, this research on the teenage
brain really explains why that there's a purpose to all
of this marauding teenage behavior. Yeah. I mean to bring
(03:17):
it back to the sci fi movie Looper, where basically
you have an older version of an individual who goes
back and meets the younger version. You know, it's a
it's a Bruce Willis and uh and what's his name?
What's his name? Yeah? The young actor what's his name? Yeah?
I don't remember his name? Anyway, Young Bruce Willis just
like young Joe and old Joe and they and at
one point they have this conversation in a diner and
(03:39):
they end up talking about very plot centric stuff about
like the fate of this individual. But I couldn't help
but think of like all the things I would want
to say to my young stuff, which would be stuff like,
you know, Marilyn Manson, isn't really that dangerous and cool?
Just wait, you'll see and and and then I might say, also,
let's talk about your posture and your diet for the
next several years. You're gonna make it to college and
(04:02):
you're going to need to maybe think a little about
what you're eating. Yeah, but your teenage brain still wouldn't
have been able to absorb that information and to have
that sort of forethought right, right, And it sends it
needed to go through this experience. It needed to go
through these experiences. Another big thing I would say is,
believe it or not, your teenage, your your high school
years are going to end, and you're gonna have to
(04:23):
know what you're gonna do next. And then I would
probably have to say, have the same conversation with my
college self. All of this, you know, came up in
the research, and I really enjoyed some of the quotes
that I was finding about being a teenager and that experience. Uh,
this is a really good one from Stephen King, who
has always had a real gift for for putting readers
in the mindset of younger and teenage characters. He says,
(04:46):
you know, small children take it as a matter of
course that things will change every day, and grown ups
understand that things change sooner or later, and their job
is to keep them from changing as long as possible.
Because it's a adults. You know, we really, we don't
really do well with change. King continues, it's only kids
in high school who are convinced they're never going to change.
(05:08):
There's always going to be a pep rally, and there's
always going to be a spectator bus somewhere out there
in their future. M hmm. Likewise, somebody, here's some other
quotes on on teens. William Shakespeare in The Winter's Tale
said I would there were no age between ten and
three and twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest,
(05:29):
for there is nothing in the between but getting winches
with child, wronging the ancestry, stealing, fighting, wronging the ancestry.
Fran Lebo has set as a teenager you were at
the last stage in your life when you will be
happy to hear the phone is for you, and then
that there are various other everyone's spoken of. Teens have
(05:50):
been a problem forever. They've been a quandary forever. Aristotle
um more than years ago, said that that the young
are heated by nature as drunken men by wine. Eric
Ericsson said that the teen years were the most filled
with turmoil in any person's life. Um Freud said the
adolescence was an expression of tortuous psycho sexual conflict. And
(06:13):
of course you can go to any of the the
you know, the classic horror flicts of of the like
fifties and sixties. I was a teenage werewolf, I was
a teenage Frankenstein, teenagers from outer space. And then later
I was a teenage zombie. I was a teenage mummy.
I was a teenage serial killer. That's those last two
are more recent, but still that you see in those
ridiculous movies, the idea that it's like, what's going on
(06:34):
with teens? Why aren't teens so weird? Why can't we
understand them? Why is is there something wrong with their brains?
In a sense, there is because their brains as well
discussing this podcast are changing their undergoing these changes, a
lot of stuff is coming online that hasn't really been
been been active before, and so their brain is sort
of charging up for the adulthood ahead. Yeah. David Dobbs
(06:56):
wrote a great article in National Geographic. It is called
Beautiful Brains, and he says that these studies help explain
why teens behave with such He says vexing, inconsistency, beguiling
at breakfast, disgusting at dinner, masterful on Monday, sleep walking
on Saturday, along with lacking experience. Generally, they they're still
(07:16):
learning to use their brains new networks. And he says
that stress, fatigue or challenges can cause a misfire. And
now there's someone named Abigail Baird who is a vass
Or psychologists who studies teens, and she calls this neural gawkiness.
And I like this idea because it reminds me of
a puppy dog with you know, huge pause that has
(07:38):
already those those adult paws, but is very um, very
sort of sloppy in its attempt to try to walk
around with these giant adult paws. I think about teens
the same way, because they're still trying to use this
neural circuitry and there's a lot of remodeling going on
in that brain. Right to your point, the idea that
(07:59):
the puppy already has sort of an adult dog pause
right into a certain extent, you can you can see
the same thing with with the brain itself. By the
time we hit the age of six, our brain has
already hit nine of its its overall size. Most of
the brain is it's already The rest of the growth
is mostly skull with and whatnot, But the brain itself,
(08:21):
most of the construction is done. If you think of
it as a house, which is a metaphor that comes
up again and again in the research materials we looked at,
the house has already been built, the framework, the roof,
the walls, etcetera. All the changes to come are more redecorating, rewiring, uh,
and get anything everything ready for the guests to come over. Yeah,
(08:43):
and this is really important because the brain does form
from back to front, and so like a yeah, like
a wave, it kind of the It's really important obviously
to have the brain stem and all these very primal
parts of the brain fully formed by age right, like,
think of it as the house. You gotta have those
bathrooms working. Yeah, exactly, the plumbing has got to be
(09:04):
in um. So, I mean it's it's not a huge
surprise that the brain has reached of it's full sized
by the time a person is six. Um. What has
been a surprise to neuroscientists and is the different ways
that it's incomplete or still being worked on. And this
is what we see in the teenage brain. Um. Now
we should probably talk about the merits of this, because
(09:26):
it seems, you know, I guess you could look at
and say, well, why is the prefrontal cortex, which is
so important and reasoning and so on and so forth,
Why isn't that completely developed by age six? Why does
it take you know, all the way to a That
makes an important thing to mention to some the studies
we're looking at here we say teen and teens tends
to you tend to think like thirteen to nineteen, But
(09:48):
basically we're looking at anywhere between twelve and twenty five,
which really makes sense to me and makes me feel
a little better about about my own SEP because I
felt like teenage Robert Lamb or rob or Robbie Lamb
depending on who knew him. Um, he, I feel like he,
but not Bob, never Bob, not yet Bob is like
later years, end of life faith. But but I feel
(10:09):
like teenage Robert Lamb was definitely hanging around until twenty five,
if not twenty six. So well. And I think there's
a reason why insurance companies will drop your rate when
you turn twenty five. Right. Part of it is because
of this risk taking behavior which is associated with teens
doesn't really taper off until again, your brain is fully
formed in those uh seats of judgment and reasoning in
(10:32):
your brain. Um. Now there there are merits again to this,
because an extended childhood of sorts which we're seeing here
is essential to being able to operate in the world
at large. And we see this in nature and we've
seen this before in New Caledonian crows versus say a
hen or a chicken. A crow great tool user, but
(10:53):
has an extended childhood and um in terms of nature.
But a chicken it is fast mature and it doesn't
have an extended good to go, but it's not good.
It's not gonna do any of the feats that are
croak can do. You can't train a chicken to pick
up coins and put them in a receptacle, whereas we
have seen that happen with crows. It's a great ted
talk about that. Yeah, they're very intelligent. So again there's
(11:15):
a big payoff here and have any extended uh childhood.
So one of the big things has changed that certainly
separates us from Shakespeare's time, in Aristotle's time, and and
even earlier Stephen king time, is that we have the
ability to scan the brain, to to look at the
brain in real time and see how it's behaving, what
areas are lighting up, where the blood's flowing, etcetera. So
(11:37):
we have a better understanding about what exactly is going
on inside the team's brain, what kind of rewiring as
the word is taking place. Uh, And there's a there's
a whole list of things that are going on. Yeah.
Science writer David Dobbs says that there is a much
more flattering version of teens in their brains these days.
He says that you used to we used to look
(11:59):
at them as more of a rough draft, but that
we should start thinking them as an exquisitively sensitive, highly
adaptable creature, wire wired almost perfectly for the job of
moving from the safety of home into the complicated world outside. Yeah,
I mean, because we think of anyone's teenage or late
teenage stories, and again that can arrange any more from twelve.
(12:21):
The part of that rebellion, part of that idea that
you're gonna you're more apt to take risks, your rebellion
against the establishment. You you think differently than your than
your parents, and you feel like you can change the
world and that you have a really important place in
the world. It part of this is also that that
breaking away from home. Right, So there's this view that
all of these things, this wiring of the brain is
(12:44):
perfect for someone who needs to leave the house because
the things that seem important at this point are not
the safety of the home. And it's spending as much
time as possible with your with your parents while they're around,
that kind of thing. No, it's about I need to
get out and make a name for myself. I need
to why or I need to get out and meet girls.
I need to to get out and uh and be
(13:05):
myself and find this culture or subculture that I connect
with and makes me feel whole well. And one of
the most important things about human development, is this ability
to leave home whatever that is this separation because really
this this is the the portal into adulthood. And so
it would make sense that teens brains are wired for
(13:28):
riskier behavior because it allows them to imagine themselves as adults,
to separate themselves from the parental unit, and to strike
out on their own. So of course this is the
place where you see a lot of clashing between parents
and kids because, uh, parents, although they want their kids
to be independent, don't want them to be speeding at
(13:48):
crazy speeds through the streets right of their town. Um,
not realizing that this speeding is actually the team trying
to take control of some aspect of their lives and
testing the boundaries and really is sort of they're trying
to bolster themselves to make that separation, even if it
(14:11):
just seems like they're doing something stupid. Yeah, and a
lot of times that when we're talking about the risk,
it's it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking, oh,
they can't really perceive risks that well, they don't understand
the driving fast can kill you, or that you know,
hanging out at this party where there's underage drinking is
you know, potentially screw screw up your life in the
(14:31):
short term anyway, if the police show up, you know. Uh,
but it's not that they don't realize those risks, but
that they there's more emphasis on the potential rewards of say, um,
feeling the thrill of driving really fast or just or
going to this party where they are cool people and
whom associating with has a vital impact on who I
am and my identity and making myself who I'm going
(14:54):
to be. Yeah, it is really interesting that, um, this
novelty seeking, this risk taking is something that is not
because they they as you say, can't sense it or
realize that there is a risk in it. Laurence Steinberg,
who is a developmental psychologist specializing in analyst It's a
Temple University, says that teens actually overestimate risk and it
(15:18):
is as you say, um, it's not. It's it's that
they're coming at the weighing of the risk differently than adults,
and researchers like Steinberg and Casey believe this risk friendly
weighing of cost versus reward has been selected for because
over the course of human evolution. This is according to
Dave David Dobbs, the willingness to take risk during this
(15:40):
period of life has ranted an adaptive edge, and so,
like as you were saying, they see a different reward
and this is because their olympics systems UM are actually
hyper sensitive. Now keep into keep in mind that their
prefrontal cortex the undergoes a great many changes during this
(16:01):
time too. In the prefrontal cortex, again, the seed of
reason actually sees a reduction in gray matter. So what
you're seeing here is not great reasoning skills, but then
heightened limbic system, they're going to be a lot more
sensitive to the reward prospect, and of course this creates
the condition for risky behavior. All right, we're gonna take
(16:22):
a quick break, and when we come back, we'll dive
even deeper into the mind of the teenage you. And
one of the things we'll get to, which I found
most exciting, is why do teenagers feel they're the center
of the universe and why do they think they can
change everything in it? All right, we're back, So the
(16:45):
teen brain. UM. We've talked a little bit already about
about the riskiness the risk taking of teens, about how
the teenage brain is that way because the adult brain
is developing, and how there's also an ever evolutionary advantage
to thinking this way, because it'll get you out of
the house and away from home and out starting this
(17:06):
new life. In a way, it's kind of like the
the wings that a creature might develop just so it
can leave the nest and uh and find his home.
I'm thinking of termites. I guess the queen and king
termite develop these wings. They fly far away, and then
they start life anew and they burl underground and you're
never seen again. So you've got the toolkit. It's hanging
out there. Um. I wanted to point out that again,
(17:30):
the brain is undergoing a lot of remodeling at this time,
in particular in that prefrontal cortex and cognitive neuroscientists Sarah
Jane Blakemore compares the prefrontal cortex and adults and adults
and teens and shows us how typical teenage behavior is
caused by the growing and developing brain. And she does
(17:52):
this by pointing out that gray matter volume in prefrontal
cortex peaks and early adolescents around ten for girls and
twelve for boys, and then later in the adolescence you
see a significant decline in gray matter volume in the
prefrontal cortex. So what's amazing about this is it's not
just that this is an undeveloped part of the brain.
(18:13):
It's that it is changing. And the only thing that
I can equated to is something like the pregnancy brain
or the pregnant brainer. You've probably heard that term before,
wherein of females brain will change during pregnancy, kind of
undergo some different wiring and as a result you get
(18:33):
sort of a fogginess and come out on the other
end with an upgraded brain, particularly for trying to um
deal with multitasking and memory. But in the interim we
have a lot of static and that's what we see
with teens um as Job had Dobs had said before,
and that quote about you've got this kid who is
(18:55):
sleepwalking on Saturday, but is dazzling at breakfast on Monday.
But this is really important, right, because gray matter contains
cell bodies and connections between cells. These are called the synapsis,
and the decline in gray matter is a result of
synaptic pruning. So the less important SYNAPTVIT connections are pruned
away while the more important ones are strengthened. And again
(19:17):
this is that trade that you make before the team
brain because you're getting greater flexibility in this brain that
is developing the hardware UM that permanent stuff. But you
want that permanent stuff to really set in, you know,
by age twenty five, because there's no changing some of
that UM, particularly the miling coding that gets solidified by
(19:42):
and when I talk about the miling coding, this is
what helps UM deliver those transmissions in your brains as
quick as it does. So there's definitely a trade off,
but this is why you get sort of Dr Jekyll
and Mr. Hide effect in teenagers. Okay, So one of
the big things about teens that that that everyone either
(20:03):
notices or and certainly experiences is the idea that the
teenagers are the centers of the world, like they're they
just like that in a typical family setting, the teen
is only concerned with themselves. They're kind of blind to
what mom and dad are feeling, what their sisters are feeling.
Everything is about them, all right. So that's that's one
(20:23):
sort of slice of the typical teenage experience, and the
other slices this feeling of importance, this this youthful optimism
that you'll find where someone believes, Hey, I can go
out there and I can change the world. I can
take up I can take up journalism and make a difference.
I'll cut even though I'm just published in the school paper.
I'm gonna change this town for good. Or or if
(20:44):
you're like the teenage may you think, oh, I'm gonna
write this great novel and you end up working on
that despite well really lacking the experiences and training that
it's going to take to actually do anything with it.
But still teenagers think that they can they can change
the world, and they and they that the whole world
is about them. And so it was interesting in this
research to to read some of the scientific basis for that.
(21:06):
And it comes down to an old friend of ours, oxytocin,
which we've talked about before, this bonding hormone. So that
may seem weird at first because you're thinking, well, they,
how's how's ox oxytocin factoring into this, because there it's
all about them. They're not bonding with with with their
family as well anymore because it's their their self centered right. Uh.
But as it is, it turns out the hormones that
(21:27):
the change of puberty, Uh, they do up. First of all,
they spur the production of more receptors of oxytocin, so
they have so there's more of this going on, and
they're effectively beginning to bond with the world for the
first time. And that ends up taking the form of
questions like who am I? You know? Am I? Am
I this kid who just believed whatever his dad did
(21:50):
or went along with mom? Or am I maybe uh
an insane clown posse fan and I'm I'm part of
that vibe? Or am or am I you know? Am
I a child of whatever MTV show I'm really into?
Am I? Am I going to mold myself after this
band or this comic book or this writer? Um ends
up this quest for identity? How do I fit into
(22:11):
the world? And uh? And then when you start trying
to figure out your your role in the world, you're
You're like, well, what can I change about this? My
The world is this complex uh mechanism? But I'm important,
so surely I can play a role in either making
it better or continuing to uh to strengthen this cause
or that cause. And it all comes down to oxytocin. Well,
(22:32):
and what's so interesting about that is that this increased
oxytocin then leads to increased sensitivity to its effects in
the limbic system, and that's been linked to these feelings
of self consciousness, making m a teenager feel like everyone
is watching her. And it turns out that this oxytocin
this production peaks around fifteen years of age, so that
(22:56):
correlates beautifully with this, Uh, this marauding, angsty teen who
can't help but not be able to think about herself
constantly or feel like other other people might be thinking
about her. Because what you're really seeing here, too, is
that a self awareness is beginning to emerge. As you say,
(23:16):
this question of who am I in this world? And
how do I define myself? Um? What I think is
also interesting at this time in a teenager's life is that, uh,
there seems to be the inability to fully occupy another
person's point of view. Okay, so this comes down to empathy.
This is like the the test to see of replicants,
(23:38):
to see if a person's a human or a human replicant,
and Blade Runner can they right? Right? Can they figure
that out? Um? In Uh. Sarah Jane Blakemore's TED talk
on Teens, she talked about this inability to fully inhabit
the perspective of another person. And she said that the
medial prefrontal cortex, the midline area of the prefrontal cortex,
(24:00):
is associated with social decisions, and she thinks that adolescence
are using this part of their brain in a different
way when making social decisions um and perhaps using other
parts of the brain. Her lab conducted a large developmental
study of people ranging from seven years of age to
their twenties, and they had a task in which people
(24:22):
were shown a set of objects on a shelf. Now
they stood on one side of the shelf and there
was a person on the other side and the shelving system.
Most of the blocks in the shelving system were open
so that you could see the person on either side,
but there was a backing on some of them. So
what they asked all of these participants of this age
range um it to do was to take cute from
(24:46):
what they called the director, the person on the other side.
So the director might say, hey, move the truck that's
on the highest shelf to the very top. Now what
you don't see is that or what the director doesn't
see is that there is a truck on the highest shelf,
he or she just can't see it, but the person
the teenager can. So there was a huge error rate
(25:07):
in teams when it came to this because they know.
The theory is is that they couldn't or they didn't
take into account that there was another person on the
other side looking and couldn't see that object. Now they
did the same thing, and um, instead of having a
person on the other side, they just had a set
of rules that said, if you know there's a backing
(25:30):
on this one cube on the shelf, then you know
do the following thing. So once they removed the person
from the situation, this is what they found. They found
that adults and teenagers really squared off at the at
the non director task, in other words, the one that
didn't involve the person. They began to stabilize their scores
(25:52):
and have the same air margin when they were asked
to do this task, but when it involved the person
on the other side that they had to imagine themselves
as looking at those objects, teens were still making a
huge amount of mistakes. Their error margin was much different,
which leads Blake Moore to this theory that change really
(26:15):
can't like their brains actually aren't handling data in the
same way and interpreting it in a way that they
can put themselves outside of the center of attention or
assume another person's um vision or perspective. There's another study
that backs it up to and this is one from
Robert mcgiven. A team of the neuroscience is at San
(26:37):
Diego State University, and this involved nearly three people ages
ten to twenty two, and they showed them images containing
faces or words, or a combination of the two, and
then the team asked them to describe the emotion express
such as angry, happy, sadder, neutral. The results of this
are pretty remarkable. They said that the speed at which
people could identify emotions dropped by up to at the
(27:00):
age of eleven. All right, so there suddenly at you
hit at age eleven and there's a deep dive in
your ability to identify emotions. Then your reaction time gradually
improves for each subsequent year, but it only reaches back
to normal levels at age eighteen. So so again you
see there's this This is the period in which you
can think of it like that. The houses is again
the house is getting a lot of work done to it. Uh,
(27:22):
there are a lot of guys in there doing construction, rewiring,
changing the ways that rooms are laid out. Uh, and
this is the the dive in um in in in
the brain's ability to actually register other people's emotions during
that time. You know what's so interesting about this is
we we just came off those podcasts about hallucinogens and
consciousness and um In that podcast we talked about the
(27:45):
seat of consciousness in our brains and how there may
not be as coherent of a consciousness sense of self
as we really think. And I think this bears out
in the teen brain and why it's so confounding to
parents who again way up with you know, have a
dazzling child at breakfast and then maybe that night have
a completely different child on their hands because of the
(28:07):
various things that are going on in the construction of
the house. And along those lines, really you should think
of of of one's teenage years as a change in consciousness.
There is a you know, there's no there's no drugs
involved in this. It's just part of the the growth
of the brain and and the way that they experienced
the world takes goes through some substantial changes in this time. Yeah,
(28:30):
and um in the way they are perceiving things, in
particular something like social rejection, because I think that this
happens a lot where a parent can see a child
who are teenager, i should say, who seems to be
completely um, just mortified, terrorized, completely depressed about their social situation.
(28:55):
Maybe it was a best friend that wrote them off
or something happened, and it seems so I are, to
the teenager, but to the adult it seems like, well, yeah,
these things happen, of course. Um. But Dobbs makes this
point that there's a reason for this. It's not just
high drama. He says that our brains react to peer
at that age pere exclusion, much as they respond to
(29:18):
threats to physical health or food supply. He says this
is shown in brain scans and that at the neural level,
we perceive social rejection as a threat to existence. He
says this knowing this might be somewhat helpful to parents
to know that the hysteria of a thirteen year old
who's deceived by his or her best friend really does
(29:38):
feel like, you know, a kick in the stomach to
that person. Yeah. I mean, if you take it out
of our modern day life, then you put that into
a you know, this sort of imaginary, half imaginary, primordial
caveman age. It makes a lot more sense. You're you're
leaving home, you're becoming rebellious, and you're about to set
off on your own in this wild and dangerous world.
(30:00):
It becomes really important who you're going to hang out
with and whether you're gonna be accepted by that group
right right, and and to have experiences like physical mental
pain because of it. UM it makes sense of it
in the light of how it's being perceived. Uh So,
you know, it's a different skew on the teenage brain,
(30:20):
and I think that it helps to explain why there
are so many inconsistencies and personality. But not only that,
I think that there's a part of this that we
can celebrate, this risk taking, which you know, obviously, when
my daughter becomes a teenager, I hope that she doesn't
drive thirteen miles per hour, as David Dobbs has Son
did in his article that he talks about UM. But
(30:41):
I think that there's an element of risk taking that is,
you know, present in the team life that we look
at and we admire because it's that team saying this
is who I am Um, I'm attempting to stake a
claim in this world and express myself and I'm leaving home. Ps. Yeah.
Well the crazy thing too is that is that by
(31:03):
the time your your daughter reaches uh her teen years, like,
what will rebellion be at that point? Like? What kind
of music will be rebellion? You know what? What kind
of what switch speed will she have to go in
her hover car to you upset you? Um? Okay. So
here's the thing though, that makes this really relevant to
(31:24):
UH the world at large is that forty of the
world's adolescents do not have access to secondary education. And
this is really important because secondary education is where minds
are molded. Um. It's another place for social scenarios to
play out in a more nuanced grasp of the world,
(31:46):
and another set of UH tools to deal with. So
we've talked about the year and the fact that there's
going to be something like nine point five billion people,
and part of those nine point five billion people will
be something UM in a youth bulge or something we've
called a youth bulge, the large percentage of those people,
(32:07):
which can be a potentially dangerous time or at least
a changing time for any culture. Yeah, so it would
make sense that you would want kids teenagers at a
lessons to all have access to things that could help
them with impulse control, UM and social skills. So just
something to think about. It's not just um something that
(32:30):
we think about in Western terms of crazy teen years
and driving fast and listening to crazy music. There are
other ramifications about what it means to be a teenager
in the world. Yeah. Bottom line that to the teenager
is a strange winged creature um, at times beautiful, at
times grotesque. But in due time those wings will fall
(32:52):
off and then the the wing holes will heal over
as well, generally usually Yeah, so I I really wanted
to carry that metaphor out. I would say that the
wing holes leave a certain about of scarage on any individual. Yeah,
and sometimes maybe to carry out the metaphor even more,
they're like a little nubs where the wings fell off,
so they still have kind of like wing nubs back there,
(33:12):
you know. But I'll stop at that point. All right, Well,
let's let's call over the robe at here and do
one quick piece of listener mail. All right, here's a
little something from that we heard on Facebook from Isabel
von Finkelstein. Um, I'm pretty sure that's not a real name,
so I hope it is. I feel confident using the
(33:34):
whole thing here. I know. I love seeing that. There's
a comment from Isabel von Finkelstein, and she says, Hey,
just listen to the podcast about Killer Laughter. I love
Monty Python and the Goodies. I grew up on them.
I'm not sure what the kids of this generation think
of it, though, ha ha as an aussee, I would
say that it is more are kind of humor, probably
(33:55):
due to our English roots. I am first generation Australian.
My parents are English. I queer, perhaps a very silly race.
If you're interested in perceptions of humor, I would say
that myself and for a lot of people I know,
we tend to find American sitcom and movie humor very obvious, bland,
and well not funny or clever. Um. She says. An example,
everyone loves Raymond God. That show is boring. However, Seinfeld
(34:17):
in the Simpsons were are pretty big here. Well, you know,
I would I would think there are a lot of
Americans who agree exactly what she's saying. Um, she continues, though,
I think Assie's tend to appreciate the silly they're sarcastic
and the clever underlying, dirty adult kind of humor. I
think a good example of humor not translating well between
cultures would be the Kath and Kim movie. Although not
(34:39):
all Aussie's like Kath and Kim. It really is a
good laugh at ourselves and our suburban culture, which is
very daggie, um daggie. I guess it's like I don't
like it. It's I like it, but I think it's
maybe an Australian thing. She continues. They are the epitome
of the Aussie bogan class. I know that the show
was a big success, but the movie was a complete
flot Because it was the American translation of the show,
(35:01):
the humor didn't translate at all. I wouldn't say that
Kath and Kim is particularly clever humor, but we do
love a good laugh at ourselves. Anyway, I'm deviating. I
was messaging you to tell you that my mom's adopted
father died laughing. He had an aneurysm. He and his
nana were going to go out on a holiday to
Singapore in nine nine, and he was joking about all
the girls he was going to pick up he just
(35:24):
dropped dead and my Nana thought he was having her on.
I think it would be a really great way to
go personally, as always love the show. So there's a
lot of great stuff in that listener. Yeah, she touches
on a good many things. Um. First, I want to
bring up the American humor thing, and I'm not going
back to that for the American Humor, but I do
(35:46):
want to point out, as you had in the podcast,
that sometimes when you're trying to serve up something for
the masses, particularly when they were trying to find the
world's funniest joke the scientists, that you're gonna have a
kind of a milk toast for of what is funny,
because you're trying to appeal to everyone. And I think
that because in the US, entertainment is one of our
(36:06):
biggest exports, that we try to do that, although we're
not necessarily exporting it to other parts of the world,
but we are trying to make it something that is
consumable for everybody. Yeah, I say, we are not involved
in Everybody Loves Raymond, but I can see how that
was a show that was maybe formulated to try to
appeal to a wide swath of people. Well, either it's
(36:27):
like that sitcom format right of the ugly or overweight
husband and the beautiful wife, and then the the troublesome
team and maybe the younger child as well. There's like
that the crazy neighbor and the crazy neighbor, and it's
just you see it time and time again, and but
you see it time and time again because it works.
It's a proven formula. It's a business, and a business
is always going to go with a formula that works,
(36:49):
so you know it is what it is. And then
inevitably there's always that comedy that you really in tune.
You're like, oh, this is the best show ever. Why
why are these guys not millionaires? Like this should be
this should be the most popular show in the world.
And of course it isn't. Because a show like say
Garth Marenghi's Dark Place, which is one of my favorite
comedies of all time, British show, brilliant show, look Around
(37:11):
You as another one, just brilliant show, brilliant hum I
love them to death, but these are not things that
a wide audience is going to find the humor in well,
and I have to realize that that it's more of
a you know, it's it's it's a smaller thing. And
I was thinking about Louis and there's no doubt that,
like I would say, like ninety eight percent of the
audience will be turned off at some point because they'll
(37:31):
be insulted by something that he says. And yet it's
brilliant comedy. Yeah, something that show alienates everybody at one
point or another. So anyway, thanks, it's about for the
wonderful insight and also the personal bit about your family.
And I wasn't laughing at I kind of choked up
a little bit and laughed. There was not laughing into death,
but just the idea just that I could just easily
imagine this older gentleman cracking some joke and then just
(37:54):
you know, just losing it and you can't help but
think of someone laughing without sort of la think yourself
so well, and as she had noted, it seems like
a nice way to exit all go, it's like uncontrollable
laughter seems like a pretty good way to kick it.
So if the rest of you would like to share
anything with us, particularly about today's topic about teenagers, some
(38:17):
of you are teenagers and then the rest of you
probably were teenagers or in some rare cases, will become teenagers.
So it would be interesting to get perspectives from everybody
on this point. Let us know what your teenage experience
was like and how it matches up with some of
the science we discussed here. If you are a teenager, uh,
you know, turn it on yourself and tell us how
does how does this make you feel? Do you see
(38:40):
this stuff happening in yourself and how how you're processing it?
And if you are not yet a teenager, or better yet,
if you're a parent you have a not yet a teenager,
maybe quiz them a little bit, find out what the
pter they think about the teenagers in their life and
what's what's about to change in them. We'd we'd love
to hear about any of that. You can find us
on Facebook and you can find us on Twitter. We're
we are Stuffed to blow your mind on Facebook as
(39:02):
well as tumbler and on Twitter we are blow the
Mind and you can drop us a line at blow
the Mind at discovery dot com for more on this
and thousands of other topics. Is It how Stuff Works
dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas, and
we're talking about teenagers today. So right off the bat,
Julie introduce us to the teenage Julie Douglas. What does
(00:24):
she look like? What does she believe? What she into? Um?
She likes to try to hypnotize herself. Um, she is
interested in fire and she's learned to silk screen. So
she's making clothes with really odd patterns on it and
wearing them to school. Yeah, and uh, you know, big
(00:47):
blonde hair. Yeah, what's her what's her favorite music? Oh? Um,
the replacements are are big on the roster. Trying to
think of Oh, Robin Hitchcock, I really haven't changed my
What about the teenage Robert? The teenage Robert? He plays
that he has abandoned Benson Dragons in favor of Magic
(01:09):
the Gathering. He has a few favorite T shirts that
he bought at a head shop in Huntsville, Alabama that
have Gustave Dore prints on them, except they're like bright purple.
He is really into HP Lovecraft and he likes to
listen to Tool nine inch Nails and Marilyn Manson. All right,
(01:30):
and is there a particular cloud of angst that hangs
over this version of you? Um? Yeah, I am well.
I am told by my h my mom still mentions
and my sisters that I was certainly a moody teenager.
I was a little glum at times. And I think
the ideas that I got excited about, I got excited
about these about sort of dangerous thinking, you know, because
(01:53):
that was the the the appeal I think of stuff
like Marilyn Manson at the time was so this is
this is dangerous music, even though and and and I
could go back and visit the teenage me like Looper
style and tell him, hey, you're gonna hear Marilyn Manson
music on like in the mall right, yeah, and just
you know, in in you know, ten twenty years time,
(02:14):
you're gonna realize just how non dangerous this this music
really was. But yeah, I feel like there was there
was a gloominess and then but also this rebellion, and
certainly the pride in this rebellion. You know, it's like
I don't really fit in in small town Tennessee. Because
because I'm I'm into I'm into this, this is this
is who I am. Well, I I can tell you
(02:36):
that I was probably the classic sulky teen and I
did some awful things that I can't believe I did
now that I still haven't admitted to my parents, and
I certainly will not begin cataloging here. But um, I
will say that having gone through the research for today's
podcast about the teenage brain, it makes me feel a
(02:57):
lot better about the things that I did, because sometimes
do ever look back at the earlier versions of yourself
and wonder like, who was I then? Or how did
that happen? And this, really, this research on the teenage
brain really explains why that there's a purpose to all
of this marauding teenage behavior. Yeah. I mean to bring
(03:17):
it back to the sci fi movie Looper, where basically
you have an older version of an individual who goes
back and meets the younger version. You know, it's a
it's a Bruce Willis and uh and what's his name?
What's his name? Yeah? The young actor what's his name? Yeah?
I don't remember his name? Anyway, Young Bruce Willis just
like young Joe and old Joe and they and at
one point they have this conversation in a diner and
(03:39):
they end up talking about very plot centric stuff about
like the fate of this individual. But I couldn't help
but think of like all the things I would want
to say to my young stuff, which would be stuff like,
you know, Marilyn Manson, isn't really that dangerous and cool?
Just wait, you'll see and and and then I might say, also,
let's talk about your posture and your diet for the
next several years. You're gonna make it to college and
(04:02):
you're going to need to maybe think a little about
what you're eating. Yeah, but your teenage brain still wouldn't
have been able to absorb that information and to have
that sort of forethought right, right, And it sends it
needed to go through this experience. It needed to go
through these experiences. Another big thing I would say is,
believe it or not, your teenage, your your high school
years are going to end, and you're gonna have to
(04:23):
know what you're gonna do next. And then I would
probably have to say, have the same conversation with my
college self. All of this, you know, came up in
the research, and I really enjoyed some of the quotes
that I was finding about being a teenager and that experience. Uh,
this is a really good one from Stephen King, who
has always had a real gift for for putting readers
in the mindset of younger and teenage characters. He says,
(04:46):
you know, small children take it as a matter of
course that things will change every day, and grown ups
understand that things change sooner or later, and their job
is to keep them from changing as long as possible.
Because it's a adults. You know, we really, we don't
really do well with change. King continues, it's only kids
in high school who are convinced they're never going to change.
(05:08):
There's always going to be a pep rally, and there's
always going to be a spectator bus somewhere out there
in their future. M hmm. Likewise, somebody, here's some other
quotes on on teens. William Shakespeare in The Winter's Tale
said I would there were no age between ten and
three and twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest,
(05:29):
for there is nothing in the between but getting winches
with child, wronging the ancestry, stealing, fighting, wronging the ancestry.
Fran Lebo has set as a teenager you were at
the last stage in your life when you will be
happy to hear the phone is for you, and then
that there are various other everyone's spoken of. Teens have
(05:50):
been a problem forever. They've been a quandary forever. Aristotle
um more than years ago, said that that the young
are heated by nature as drunken men by wine. Eric
Ericsson said that the teen years were the most filled
with turmoil in any person's life. Um Freud said the
adolescence was an expression of tortuous psycho sexual conflict. And
(06:13):
of course you can go to any of the the
you know, the classic horror flicts of of the like
fifties and sixties. I was a teenage werewolf, I was
a teenage Frankenstein, teenagers from outer space. And then later
I was a teenage zombie. I was a teenage mummy.
I was a teenage serial killer. That's those last two
are more recent, but still that you see in those
ridiculous movies, the idea that it's like, what's going on
(06:34):
with teens? Why aren't teens so weird? Why can't we
understand them? Why is is there something wrong with their brains?
In a sense, there is because their brains as well
discussing this podcast are changing their undergoing these changes, a
lot of stuff is coming online that hasn't really been
been been active before, and so their brain is sort
of charging up for the adulthood ahead. Yeah. David Dobbs
(06:56):
wrote a great article in National Geographic. It is called
Beautiful Brains, and he says that these studies help explain
why teens behave with such He says vexing, inconsistency, beguiling
at breakfast, disgusting at dinner, masterful on Monday, sleep walking
on Saturday, along with lacking experience. Generally, they they're still
(07:16):
learning to use their brains new networks. And he says
that stress, fatigue or challenges can cause a misfire. And
now there's someone named Abigail Baird who is a vass
Or psychologists who studies teens, and she calls this neural gawkiness.
And I like this idea because it reminds me of
a puppy dog with you know, huge pause that has
(07:38):
already those those adult paws, but is very um, very
sort of sloppy in its attempt to try to walk
around with these giant adult paws. I think about teens
the same way, because they're still trying to use this
neural circuitry and there's a lot of remodeling going on
in that brain. Right to your point, the idea that
(07:59):
the puppy already has sort of an adult dog pause
right into a certain extent, you can you can see
the same thing with with the brain itself. By the
time we hit the age of six, our brain has
already hit nine of its its overall size. Most of
the brain is it's already The rest of the growth
is mostly skull with and whatnot, But the brain itself,
(08:21):
most of the construction is done. If you think of
it as a house, which is a metaphor that comes
up again and again in the research materials we looked at,
the house has already been built, the framework, the roof,
the walls, etcetera. All the changes to come are more redecorating, rewiring, uh,
and get anything everything ready for the guests to come over. Yeah,
(08:43):
and this is really important because the brain does form
from back to front, and so like a yeah, like
a wave, it kind of the It's really important obviously
to have the brain stem and all these very primal
parts of the brain fully formed by age right, like,
think of it as the house. You gotta have those
bathrooms working. Yeah, exactly, the plumbing has got to be
(09:04):
in um. So, I mean it's it's not a huge
surprise that the brain has reached of it's full sized
by the time a person is six. Um. What has
been a surprise to neuroscientists and is the different ways
that it's incomplete or still being worked on. And this
is what we see in the teenage brain. Um. Now
we should probably talk about the merits of this, because
(09:26):
it seems, you know, I guess you could look at
and say, well, why is the prefrontal cortex, which is
so important and reasoning and so on and so forth,
Why isn't that completely developed by age six? Why does
it take you know, all the way to a That
makes an important thing to mention to some the studies
we're looking at here we say teen and teens tends
to you tend to think like thirteen to nineteen, But
(09:48):
basically we're looking at anywhere between twelve and twenty five,
which really makes sense to me and makes me feel
a little better about about my own SEP because I
felt like teenage Robert Lamb or rob or Robbie Lamb
depending on who knew him. Um, he, I feel like he,
but not Bob, never Bob, not yet Bob is like
later years, end of life faith. But but I feel
(10:09):
like teenage Robert Lamb was definitely hanging around until twenty five,
if not twenty six. So well. And I think there's
a reason why insurance companies will drop your rate when
you turn twenty five. Right. Part of it is because
of this risk taking behavior which is associated with teens
doesn't really taper off until again, your brain is fully
formed in those uh seats of judgment and reasoning in
(10:32):
your brain. Um. Now there there are merits again to this,
because an extended childhood of sorts which we're seeing here
is essential to being able to operate in the world
at large. And we see this in nature and we've
seen this before in New Caledonian crows versus say a
hen or a chicken. A crow great tool user, but
(10:53):
has an extended childhood and um in terms of nature.
But a chicken it is fast mature and it doesn't
have an extended good to go, but it's not good.
It's not gonna do any of the feats that are
croak can do. You can't train a chicken to pick
up coins and put them in a receptacle, whereas we
have seen that happen with crows. It's a great ted
talk about that. Yeah, they're very intelligent. So again there's
(11:15):
a big payoff here and have any extended uh childhood.
So one of the big things has changed that certainly
separates us from Shakespeare's time, in Aristotle's time, and and
even earlier Stephen king time, is that we have the
ability to scan the brain, to to look at the
brain in real time and see how it's behaving, what
areas are lighting up, where the blood's flowing, etcetera. So
(11:37):
we have a better understanding about what exactly is going
on inside the team's brain, what kind of rewiring as
the word is taking place. Uh, And there's a there's
a whole list of things that are going on. Yeah.
Science writer David Dobbs says that there is a much
more flattering version of teens in their brains these days.
He says that you used to we used to look
(11:59):
at them as more of a rough draft, but that
we should start thinking them as an exquisitively sensitive, highly
adaptable creature, wire wired almost perfectly for the job of
moving from the safety of home into the complicated world outside. Yeah,
I mean, because we think of anyone's teenage or late
teenage stories, and again that can arrange any more from twelve.
(12:21):
The part of that rebellion, part of that idea that
you're gonna you're more apt to take risks, your rebellion
against the establishment. You you think differently than your than
your parents, and you feel like you can change the
world and that you have a really important place in
the world. It part of this is also that that
breaking away from home. Right, So there's this view that
all of these things, this wiring of the brain is
(12:44):
perfect for someone who needs to leave the house because
the things that seem important at this point are not
the safety of the home. And it's spending as much
time as possible with your with your parents while they're around,
that kind of thing. No, it's about I need to
get out and make a name for myself. I need
to why or I need to get out and meet girls.
I need to to get out and uh and be
(13:05):
myself and find this culture or subculture that I connect
with and makes me feel whole well. And one of
the most important things about human development, is this ability
to leave home whatever that is this separation because really
this this is the the portal into adulthood. And so
it would make sense that teens brains are wired for
(13:28):
riskier behavior because it allows them to imagine themselves as adults,
to separate themselves from the parental unit, and to strike
out on their own. So of course this is the
place where you see a lot of clashing between parents
and kids because, uh, parents, although they want their kids
to be independent, don't want them to be speeding at
(13:48):
crazy speeds through the streets right of their town. Um,
not realizing that this speeding is actually the team trying
to take control of some aspect of their lives and
testing the boundaries and really is sort of they're trying
to bolster themselves to make that separation, even if it
(14:11):
just seems like they're doing something stupid. Yeah, and a
lot of times that when we're talking about the risk,
it's it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking, oh,
they can't really perceive risks that well, they don't understand
the driving fast can kill you, or that you know,
hanging out at this party where there's underage drinking is
you know, potentially screw screw up your life in the
(14:31):
short term anyway, if the police show up, you know. Uh,
but it's not that they don't realize those risks, but
that they there's more emphasis on the potential rewards of say, um,
feeling the thrill of driving really fast or just or
going to this party where they are cool people and
whom associating with has a vital impact on who I
am and my identity and making myself who I'm going
(14:54):
to be. Yeah, it is really interesting that, um, this
novelty seeking, this risk taking is something that is not
because they they as you say, can't sense it or
realize that there is a risk in it. Laurence Steinberg,
who is a developmental psychologist specializing in analyst It's a
Temple University, says that teens actually overestimate risk and it
(15:18):
is as you say, um, it's not. It's it's that
they're coming at the weighing of the risk differently than adults,
and researchers like Steinberg and Casey believe this risk friendly
weighing of cost versus reward has been selected for because
over the course of human evolution. This is according to
Dave David Dobbs, the willingness to take risk during this
(15:40):
period of life has ranted an adaptive edge, and so,
like as you were saying, they see a different reward
and this is because their olympics systems UM are actually
hyper sensitive. Now keep into keep in mind that their
prefrontal cortex the undergoes a great many changes during this
(16:01):
time too. In the prefrontal cortex, again, the seed of
reason actually sees a reduction in gray matter. So what
you're seeing here is not great reasoning skills, but then
heightened limbic system, they're going to be a lot more
sensitive to the reward prospect, and of course this creates
the condition for risky behavior. All right, we're gonna take
(16:22):
a quick break, and when we come back, we'll dive
even deeper into the mind of the teenage you. And
one of the things we'll get to, which I found
most exciting, is why do teenagers feel they're the center
of the universe and why do they think they can
change everything in it? All right, we're back, So the
(16:45):
teen brain. UM. We've talked a little bit already about
about the riskiness the risk taking of teens, about how
the teenage brain is that way because the adult brain
is developing, and how there's also an ever evolutionary advantage
to thinking this way, because it'll get you out of
the house and away from home and out starting this
(17:06):
new life. In a way, it's kind of like the
the wings that a creature might develop just so it
can leave the nest and uh and find his home.
I'm thinking of termites. I guess the queen and king
termite develop these wings. They fly far away, and then
they start life anew and they burl underground and you're
never seen again. So you've got the toolkit. It's hanging
out there. Um. I wanted to point out that again,
(17:30):
the brain is undergoing a lot of remodeling at this time,
in particular in that prefrontal cortex and cognitive neuroscientists Sarah
Jane Blakemore compares the prefrontal cortex and adults and adults
and teens and shows us how typical teenage behavior is
caused by the growing and developing brain. And she does
(17:52):
this by pointing out that gray matter volume in prefrontal
cortex peaks and early adolescents around ten for girls and
twelve for boys, and then later in the adolescence you
see a significant decline in gray matter volume in the
prefrontal cortex. So what's amazing about this is it's not
just that this is an undeveloped part of the brain.
(18:13):
It's that it is changing. And the only thing that
I can equated to is something like the pregnancy brain
or the pregnant brainer. You've probably heard that term before,
wherein of females brain will change during pregnancy, kind of
undergo some different wiring and as a result you get
(18:33):
sort of a fogginess and come out on the other
end with an upgraded brain, particularly for trying to um
deal with multitasking and memory. But in the interim we
have a lot of static and that's what we see
with teens um as Job had Dobs had said before,
and that quote about you've got this kid who is
(18:55):
sleepwalking on Saturday, but is dazzling at breakfast on Monday.
But this is really important, right, because gray matter contains
cell bodies and connections between cells. These are called the synapsis,
and the decline in gray matter is a result of
synaptic pruning. So the less important SYNAPTVIT connections are pruned
away while the more important ones are strengthened. And again
(19:17):
this is that trade that you make before the team
brain because you're getting greater flexibility in this brain that
is developing the hardware UM that permanent stuff. But you
want that permanent stuff to really set in, you know,
by age twenty five, because there's no changing some of
that UM, particularly the miling coding that gets solidified by
(19:42):
and when I talk about the miling coding, this is
what helps UM deliver those transmissions in your brains as
quick as it does. So there's definitely a trade off,
but this is why you get sort of Dr Jekyll
and Mr. Hide effect in teenagers. Okay, So one of
the big things about teens that that that everyone either
(20:03):
notices or and certainly experiences is the idea that the
teenagers are the centers of the world, like they're they
just like that in a typical family setting, the teen
is only concerned with themselves. They're kind of blind to
what mom and dad are feeling, what their sisters are feeling.
Everything is about them, all right. So that's that's one
(20:23):
sort of slice of the typical teenage experience, and the
other slices this feeling of importance, this this youthful optimism
that you'll find where someone believes, Hey, I can go
out there and I can change the world. I can
take up I can take up journalism and make a difference.
I'll cut even though I'm just published in the school paper.
I'm gonna change this town for good. Or or if
(20:44):
you're like the teenage may you think, oh, I'm gonna
write this great novel and you end up working on
that despite well really lacking the experiences and training that
it's going to take to actually do anything with it.
But still teenagers think that they can they can change
the world, and they and they that the whole world
is about them. And so it was interesting in this
research to to read some of the scientific basis for that.
(21:06):
And it comes down to an old friend of ours, oxytocin,
which we've talked about before, this bonding hormone. So that
may seem weird at first because you're thinking, well, they,
how's how's ox oxytocin factoring into this, because there it's
all about them. They're not bonding with with with their
family as well anymore because it's their their self centered right. Uh.
But as it is, it turns out the hormones that
(21:27):
the change of puberty, Uh, they do up. First of all,
they spur the production of more receptors of oxytocin, so
they have so there's more of this going on, and
they're effectively beginning to bond with the world for the
first time. And that ends up taking the form of
questions like who am I? You know? Am I? Am
I this kid who just believed whatever his dad did
(21:50):
or went along with mom? Or am I maybe uh
an insane clown posse fan and I'm I'm part of
that vibe? Or am or am I you know? Am
I a child of whatever MTV show I'm really into?
Am I? Am I going to mold myself after this
band or this comic book or this writer? Um ends
up this quest for identity? How do I fit into
(22:11):
the world? And uh? And then when you start trying
to figure out your your role in the world, you're
You're like, well, what can I change about this? My
The world is this complex uh mechanism? But I'm important,
so surely I can play a role in either making
it better or continuing to uh to strengthen this cause
or that cause. And it all comes down to oxytocin. Well,
(22:32):
and what's so interesting about that is that this increased
oxytocin then leads to increased sensitivity to its effects in
the limbic system, and that's been linked to these feelings
of self consciousness, making m a teenager feel like everyone
is watching her. And it turns out that this oxytocin
this production peaks around fifteen years of age, so that
(22:56):
correlates beautifully with this, Uh, this marauding, angsty teen who
can't help but not be able to think about herself
constantly or feel like other other people might be thinking
about her. Because what you're really seeing here, too, is
that a self awareness is beginning to emerge. As you say,
(23:16):
this question of who am I in this world? And
how do I define myself? Um? What I think is
also interesting at this time in a teenager's life is that, uh,
there seems to be the inability to fully occupy another
person's point of view. Okay, so this comes down to empathy.
This is like the the test to see of replicants,
(23:38):
to see if a person's a human or a human replicant,
and Blade Runner can they right? Right? Can they figure
that out? Um? In Uh. Sarah Jane Blakemore's TED talk
on Teens, she talked about this inability to fully inhabit
the perspective of another person. And she said that the
medial prefrontal cortex, the midline area of the prefrontal cortex,
(24:00):
is associated with social decisions, and she thinks that adolescence
are using this part of their brain in a different
way when making social decisions um and perhaps using other
parts of the brain. Her lab conducted a large developmental
study of people ranging from seven years of age to
their twenties, and they had a task in which people
(24:22):
were shown a set of objects on a shelf. Now
they stood on one side of the shelf and there
was a person on the other side and the shelving system.
Most of the blocks in the shelving system were open
so that you could see the person on either side,
but there was a backing on some of them. So
what they asked all of these participants of this age
range um it to do was to take cute from
(24:46):
what they called the director, the person on the other side.
So the director might say, hey, move the truck that's
on the highest shelf to the very top. Now what
you don't see is that or what the director doesn't
see is that there is a truck on the highest shelf,
he or she just can't see it, but the person
the teenager can. So there was a huge error rate
(25:07):
in teams when it came to this because they know.
The theory is is that they couldn't or they didn't
take into account that there was another person on the
other side looking and couldn't see that object. Now they
did the same thing, and um, instead of having a
person on the other side, they just had a set
of rules that said, if you know there's a backing
(25:30):
on this one cube on the shelf, then you know
do the following thing. So once they removed the person
from the situation, this is what they found. They found
that adults and teenagers really squared off at the at
the non director task, in other words, the one that
didn't involve the person. They began to stabilize their scores
(25:52):
and have the same air margin when they were asked
to do this task, but when it involved the person
on the other side that they had to imagine themselves
as looking at those objects, teens were still making a
huge amount of mistakes. Their error margin was much different,
which leads Blake Moore to this theory that change really
(26:15):
can't like their brains actually aren't handling data in the
same way and interpreting it in a way that they
can put themselves outside of the center of attention or
assume another person's um vision or perspective. There's another study
that backs it up to and this is one from
Robert mcgiven. A team of the neuroscience is at San
(26:37):
Diego State University, and this involved nearly three people ages
ten to twenty two, and they showed them images containing
faces or words, or a combination of the two, and
then the team asked them to describe the emotion express
such as angry, happy, sadder, neutral. The results of this
are pretty remarkable. They said that the speed at which
people could identify emotions dropped by up to at the
(27:00):
age of eleven. All right, so there suddenly at you
hit at age eleven and there's a deep dive in
your ability to identify emotions. Then your reaction time gradually
improves for each subsequent year, but it only reaches back
to normal levels at age eighteen. So so again you
see there's this This is the period in which you
can think of it like that. The houses is again
the house is getting a lot of work done to it. Uh,
(27:22):
there are a lot of guys in there doing construction, rewiring,
changing the ways that rooms are laid out. Uh, and
this is the the dive in um in in in
the brain's ability to actually register other people's emotions during
that time. You know what's so interesting about this is
we we just came off those podcasts about hallucinogens and
consciousness and um In that podcast we talked about the
(27:45):
seat of consciousness in our brains and how there may
not be as coherent of a consciousness sense of self
as we really think. And I think this bears out
in the teen brain and why it's so confounding to
parents who again way up with you know, have a
dazzling child at breakfast and then maybe that night have
a completely different child on their hands because of the
(28:07):
various things that are going on in the construction of
the house. And along those lines, really you should think
of of of one's teenage years as a change in consciousness.
There is a you know, there's no there's no drugs
involved in this. It's just part of the the growth
of the brain and and the way that they experienced
the world takes goes through some substantial changes in this time. Yeah,
(28:30):
and um in the way they are perceiving things, in
particular something like social rejection, because I think that this
happens a lot where a parent can see a child
who are teenager, i should say, who seems to be
completely um, just mortified, terrorized, completely depressed about their social situation.
(28:55):
Maybe it was a best friend that wrote them off
or something happened, and it seems so I are, to
the teenager, but to the adult it seems like, well, yeah,
these things happen, of course. Um. But Dobbs makes this
point that there's a reason for this. It's not just
high drama. He says that our brains react to peer
at that age pere exclusion, much as they respond to
(29:18):
threats to physical health or food supply. He says this
is shown in brain scans and that at the neural level,
we perceive social rejection as a threat to existence. He
says this knowing this might be somewhat helpful to parents
to know that the hysteria of a thirteen year old
who's deceived by his or her best friend really does
(29:38):
feel like, you know, a kick in the stomach to
that person. Yeah. I mean, if you take it out
of our modern day life, then you put that into
a you know, this sort of imaginary, half imaginary, primordial
caveman age. It makes a lot more sense. You're you're
leaving home, you're becoming rebellious, and you're about to set
off on your own in this wild and dangerous world.
(30:00):
It becomes really important who you're going to hang out
with and whether you're gonna be accepted by that group
right right, and and to have experiences like physical mental
pain because of it. UM it makes sense of it
in the light of how it's being perceived. Uh So,
you know, it's a different skew on the teenage brain,
(30:20):
and I think that it helps to explain why there
are so many inconsistencies and personality. But not only that,
I think that there's a part of this that we
can celebrate, this risk taking, which you know, obviously, when
my daughter becomes a teenager, I hope that she doesn't
drive thirteen miles per hour, as David Dobbs has Son
did in his article that he talks about UM. But
(30:41):
I think that there's an element of risk taking that is,
you know, present in the team life that we look
at and we admire because it's that team saying this
is who I am Um, I'm attempting to stake a
claim in this world and express myself and I'm leaving home. Ps. Yeah.
Well the crazy thing too is that is that by
(31:03):
the time your your daughter reaches uh her teen years, like,
what will rebellion be at that point? Like? What kind
of music will be rebellion? You know what? What kind
of what switch speed will she have to go in
her hover car to you upset you? Um? Okay. So
here's the thing though, that makes this really relevant to
(31:24):
UH the world at large is that forty of the
world's adolescents do not have access to secondary education. And
this is really important because secondary education is where minds
are molded. Um. It's another place for social scenarios to
play out in a more nuanced grasp of the world,
(31:46):
and another set of UH tools to deal with. So
we've talked about the year and the fact that there's
going to be something like nine point five billion people,
and part of those nine point five billion people will
be something UM in a youth bulge or something we've
called a youth bulge, the large percentage of those people,
(32:07):
which can be a potentially dangerous time or at least
a changing time for any culture. Yeah, so it would
make sense that you would want kids teenagers at a
lessons to all have access to things that could help
them with impulse control, UM and social skills. So just
something to think about. It's not just um something that
(32:30):
we think about in Western terms of crazy teen years
and driving fast and listening to crazy music. There are
other ramifications about what it means to be a teenager
in the world. Yeah. Bottom line that to the teenager
is a strange winged creature um, at times beautiful, at
times grotesque. But in due time those wings will fall
(32:52):
off and then the the wing holes will heal over
as well, generally usually Yeah, so I I really wanted
to carry that metaphor out. I would say that the
wing holes leave a certain about of scarage on any individual. Yeah,
and sometimes maybe to carry out the metaphor even more,
they're like a little nubs where the wings fell off,
so they still have kind of like wing nubs back there,
(33:12):
you know. But I'll stop at that point. All right, Well,
let's let's call over the robe at here and do
one quick piece of listener mail. All right, here's a
little something from that we heard on Facebook from Isabel
von Finkelstein. Um, I'm pretty sure that's not a real name,
so I hope it is. I feel confident using the
(33:34):
whole thing here. I know. I love seeing that. There's
a comment from Isabel von Finkelstein, and she says, Hey,
just listen to the podcast about Killer Laughter. I love
Monty Python and the Goodies. I grew up on them.
I'm not sure what the kids of this generation think
of it, though, ha ha as an aussee, I would
say that it is more are kind of humor, probably
(33:55):
due to our English roots. I am first generation Australian.
My parents are English. I queer, perhaps a very silly race.
If you're interested in perceptions of humor, I would say
that myself and for a lot of people I know,
we tend to find American sitcom and movie humor very obvious, bland,
and well not funny or clever. Um. She says. An example,
everyone loves Raymond God. That show is boring. However, Seinfeld
(34:17):
in the Simpsons were are pretty big here. Well, you know,
I would I would think there are a lot of
Americans who agree exactly what she's saying. Um, she continues, though,
I think Assie's tend to appreciate the silly they're sarcastic
and the clever underlying, dirty adult kind of humor. I
think a good example of humor not translating well between
cultures would be the Kath and Kim movie. Although not
(34:39):
all Aussie's like Kath and Kim. It really is a
good laugh at ourselves and our suburban culture, which is
very daggie, um daggie. I guess it's like I don't
like it. It's I like it, but I think it's
maybe an Australian thing. She continues. They are the epitome
of the Aussie bogan class. I know that the show
was a big success, but the movie was a complete
flot Because it was the American translation of the show,
(35:01):
the humor didn't translate at all. I wouldn't say that
Kath and Kim is particularly clever humor, but we do
love a good laugh at ourselves. Anyway, I'm deviating. I
was messaging you to tell you that my mom's adopted
father died laughing. He had an aneurysm. He and his
nana were going to go out on a holiday to
Singapore in nine nine, and he was joking about all
the girls he was going to pick up he just
(35:24):
dropped dead and my Nana thought he was having her on.
I think it would be a really great way to
go personally, as always love the show. So there's a
lot of great stuff in that listener. Yeah, she touches
on a good many things. Um. First, I want to
bring up the American humor thing, and I'm not going
back to that for the American Humor, but I do
(35:46):
want to point out, as you had in the podcast,
that sometimes when you're trying to serve up something for
the masses, particularly when they were trying to find the
world's funniest joke the scientists, that you're gonna have a
kind of a milk toast for of what is funny,
because you're trying to appeal to everyone. And I think
that because in the US, entertainment is one of our
(36:06):
biggest exports, that we try to do that, although we're
not necessarily exporting it to other parts of the world,
but we are trying to make it something that is
consumable for everybody. Yeah, I say, we are not involved
in Everybody Loves Raymond, but I can see how that
was a show that was maybe formulated to try to
appeal to a wide swath of people. Well, either it's
(36:27):
like that sitcom format right of the ugly or overweight
husband and the beautiful wife, and then the the troublesome
team and maybe the younger child as well. There's like
that the crazy neighbor and the crazy neighbor, and it's
just you see it time and time again, and but
you see it time and time again because it works.
It's a proven formula. It's a business, and a business
is always going to go with a formula that works,
(36:49):
so you know it is what it is. And then
inevitably there's always that comedy that you really in tune.
You're like, oh, this is the best show ever. Why
why are these guys not millionaires? Like this should be
this should be the most popular show in the world.
And of course it isn't. Because a show like say
Garth Marenghi's Dark Place, which is one of my favorite
comedies of all time, British show, brilliant show, look Around
(37:11):
You as another one, just brilliant show, brilliant hum I
love them to death, but these are not things that
a wide audience is going to find the humor in well,
and I have to realize that that it's more of
a you know, it's it's it's a smaller thing. And
I was thinking about Louis and there's no doubt that,
like I would say, like ninety eight percent of the
audience will be turned off at some point because they'll
(37:31):
be insulted by something that he says. And yet it's
brilliant comedy. Yeah, something that show alienates everybody at one
point or another. So anyway, thanks, it's about for the
wonderful insight and also the personal bit about your family.
And I wasn't laughing at I kind of choked up
a little bit and laughed. There was not laughing into death,
but just the idea just that I could just easily
imagine this older gentleman cracking some joke and then just
(37:54):
you know, just losing it and you can't help but
think of someone laughing without sort of la think yourself
so well, and as she had noted, it seems like
a nice way to exit all go, it's like uncontrollable
laughter seems like a pretty good way to kick it.
So if the rest of you would like to share
anything with us, particularly about today's topic about teenagers, some
(38:17):
of you are teenagers and then the rest of you
probably were teenagers or in some rare cases, will become teenagers.
So it would be interesting to get perspectives from everybody
on this point. Let us know what your teenage experience
was like and how it matches up with some of
the science we discussed here. If you are a teenager, uh,
you know, turn it on yourself and tell us how
does how does this make you feel? Do you see
(38:40):
this stuff happening in yourself and how how you're processing it?
And if you are not yet a teenager, or better yet,
if you're a parent you have a not yet a teenager,
maybe quiz them a little bit, find out what the
pter they think about the teenagers in their life and
what's what's about to change in them. We'd we'd love
to hear about any of that. You can find us
on Facebook and you can find us on Twitter. We're
we are Stuffed to blow your mind on Facebook as
(39:02):
well as tumbler and on Twitter we are blow the
Mind and you can drop us a line at blow
the Mind at discovery dot com for more on this
and thousands of other topics. Is It how Stuff Works
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