May 10, 2021 • 23 mins
The experiences of being a teenager are deep and lasting — first break-ups, fierce arguments with parents, that time a friend tried to skateboard off the roof. Why is that time of life experienced so intensely and remembered so vividly?
Dessa finds that many answers lie in neuroanatomy and the way our brain wires itself as we grow. She meets teens and a brain scientist to find out why the rollercoaster highs and lows of teenage life might be good for us in ways adults just don’t get.
Deeply Human is a BBC World Service and American Public Media coproduction with iHeartMedia.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey, you found us. Come on in. Welcome to Deeply Human.
Today we're talking with and about teenagers, and I'm your host.
Former adolescent dessay. During the teenage years, there's a rite
of passage around every corner of our mitzvaha, maybe a
(00:23):
driver's license or a first kiss, if you're into that
sort of thing. When I was fourteen, my best friend
Maria had moved away to Sweden and I got to
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
(00:44):
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
(01:07):
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
(01:29):
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
(01:50):
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
(02:10):
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
(02:32):
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
(02:54):
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
(03:17):
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.
(03:48):
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
(04:15):
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
(04:38):
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
(04:58):
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
(05:19):
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
(05:40):
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
(06:09):
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
(06:34):
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
(06:55):
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
(07:16):
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
(07:40):
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
(08:01):
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
(08:24):
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
(08:45):
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,
(09:05):
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,
(09:27):
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
(09:49):
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
(10:10):
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,
(10:34):
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
(10:54):
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
(11:14):
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
(11:36):
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
(12:00):
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
(12:21):
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
(12:43):
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
(13:04):
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
(13:25):
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
(13:50):
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
(14:12):
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,
(14:33):
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
(14:55):
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
(15:18):
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
(15:39):
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
(16:02):
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
(16:25):
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
(16:47):
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
(17:11):
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,
(17:32):
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
(17:56):
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
(18:17):
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
(18:38):
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
(18:58):
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
(19:20):
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
(19:44):
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
(20:06):
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
(20:31):
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.
(20:51):
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
(21:12):
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
(21:32):
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
(21:54):
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
(22:18):
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
(22:38):
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
(23:02):
this time around to company three Theater Group in London,
Hey, you found us. Come on in. Welcome to Deeply Human.
Today we're talking with and about teenagers, and I'm your host.
Former adolescent dessay. During the teenage years, there's a rite
of passage around every corner of our mitzvaha, maybe a
(00:23):
driver's license or a first kiss, if you're into that
sort of thing. When I was fourteen, my best friend
Maria had moved away to Sweden and I got to
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
(00:44):
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
(01:07):
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
(01:29):
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
(01:50):
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
(02:10):
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
(02:32):
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
(02:54):
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
(03:17):
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.
(03:48):
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
(04:15):
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
(04:38):
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
(04:58):
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
(05:19):
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
(05:40):
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
(06:09):
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
(06:34):
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
(06:55):
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
(07:16):
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
(07:40):
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
(08:01):
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
(08:24):
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
(08:45):
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,
(09:05):
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,
(09:27):
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
(09:49):
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
(10:10):
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,
(10:34):
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
(10:54):
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
(11:14):
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
(11:36):
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
(12:00):
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
(12:21):
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
(12:43):
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
(13:04):
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
(13:25):
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
(13:50):
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
(14:12):
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,
(14:33):
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
(14:55):
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
(15:18):
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
(15:39):
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
(16:02):
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
(16:25):
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
(16:47):
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
(17:11):
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,
(17:32):
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
(17:56):
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
(18:17):
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
(18:38):
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
(18:58):
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
(19:20):
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
(19:44):
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
(20:06):
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
(20:31):
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.
(20:51):
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
(21:12):
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
(21:32):
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
(21:54):
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
(22:18):
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
(22:38):
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
(23:02):
this time around to company three Theater Group in London,
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