Teenage Brains Article in National Geographic

Author David Dobbs’ article in the October 2011 edition of National Geographic Teenage Brains is a must read for Scout leaders.

Within the past decade brain scan studies established that the process of brain development lasted far longer than previously thought.

Initially this led many to believe that this newly discovered period of physical development classified teens as having incomplete processes of thinking that accounted for much of their often inexplicable behavior. More recent study has postulated that teens aren’t just the victims of an underdeveloped brain; that the adolescent experience is a necessary, evolutionary period of development crucial to making us who we are in adulthood. Over the past five years or so, even as the work-in-progress story spread into our culture, the discipline of adolescent brain studies learned to do some more-complex thinking of its own. A few researchers began to view recent brain and genetic findings in a brighter, more flattering light, one distinctly colored by evolutionary theory. The resulting account of the adolescent brain—call it the adaptive-adolescent story—casts the teen less as a rough draft than as an exquisitely sensitive, highly adaptable creature wired almost perfectly for the job of moving from the safety of home into the complicated world outside. This view will likely sit better with teens. More important, it sits better with biology’s most fundamental principle, that of natural selection.

Selection is hell on dysfunctional traits. If adolescence is essentially a collection of them—angst, idiocy, and haste; impulsiveness, selfishness, and reckless bumbling—then how did those traits survive selection? They couldn’t—not if they were the period’s most fundamental or consequential features. The answer is that those troublesome traits don’t really characterize adolescence; they’re just what we notice most because they annoy us or put our children in danger. As B. J.

Casey, a neuroscientist at Weill Cornell Medical College who has spent nearly a decade applying brain and genetic studies to our understanding of adolescence, puts it, “We’re so used to seeing adolescence as a problem. But the more we learn about what really makes this period unique, the more adolescence starts to seem like a highly functional, even adaptive period. It’s exactly what you’d need to do the things you have to do then.”

Appreciating the scientific underpinnings of adolescent brain development helps us better understand our work as Scout leaders and as parents. When ’troublesome traits’ demand our attention we can take some solace and understanding that they are evidence of a predictable, natural and crucial process. Read the whole article here Teenage Brain at National Geographic