The case of the teenage brain

Since there are staunch believers that aliens have come and even lived among us, I would like to ask these "witnesses" if they could arrange an appointment for me with any adult alien who likes to discuss over coffee. You see, I am presuming that since these aliens figured out a way to reach another planet with life on it, then they are far more advanced than we are. "Advanced" is, I think, a NASA term for "they just know a heck of a lot more" since they were ingenious enough (but maybe not discriminating enough because they chose us) to come up with ways and means to evolve far more intelligently than we here on Earth who, in contrast, seem to be unable to get a grip of the basics just yet – basics like talking out differences with our fellow human beings who sometimes happen to live in separate land masses, without threatening to blow them up. I will eagerly meet these aliens and ask them about what I think is one of the deepest, most fundamental challenges in human evolution: teenagers.

Specifically, I have the following questions lined up to ask the presumably adult aliens:

"Did you color-code your teenagers so that they will not come out all at once during the day and inundate adult congregations in malls, gyms and cafés who are just trying to get away from them even for a short while?"

"Did you make them glow in the dark so that their parents can easily spot them in unlit places where they are not supposed to be?" 

"What did you do to their rooms, especially to teenage boys’ rooms that accumulate dirt and trash that in humorist Dave Barry’s words, are ‘enough to support agriculture’?"

If you think my questions are not hitting the nail on the head, you can come up with your own questions and submit them to me so that I can include them in my list when I meet up with the aliens. Like what the elders in my own genetic clan say, I probably behave and think this way because I do not have children of my own or have forgotten what it was like to be a teenager. But I do have close friends and relatives who have teenage kids and I can bet that they will be curious, if not desperate, for answers to this mystery of science called teenagers.

Wouldn’t you be interested how a far more advanced civilization dealt with "teenagers," a physical and mental stage in the growth and development of a species, which seems so far to be unique to humans? Our closest genetic kin, the chimpanzees, seem to have the lines blurred between childhood and the teenage years, which means that in the studies I have encountered, there are no "distinct" teenage years in chimps that are as defined like the ones we experience with our own kind. There are no equivalent support groups for moms and dads of teenagers in the chimp world. No Mommy and Daddy chimps coming home and finding the family tree trashed and with traces of mind-altering weeds hanging by the branches. And even if 14-year-old Chimp Frank had 14-year-old Chimp Shirley pregnant, their respective chimp clans do not have a showdown and exchange assets and liabilities under the threats of lawsuits and firepower. The 14-year-old chimps become adults de facto and nothing in their behavior as a species indicate yet that it is against the nature of chimps to already treat them as adults.

Some scientists (probably parents of teenagers) in Dartmouth College were also wondering along these lines and decided to peer inside the brains of 18-year-olds, an age when they are considered as "adults" in that country, except in enterprises that have to do with cavorting with the sprits of Mr. Budweiser. Here in the Philippines, if you are a girl and your parents can afford it, you can dress you up like Princess Barbie for your 18th birthday party. This debut party is an event that could not only be described as a failure of common sense but also as a triumph of irony since the debutante is supposed to be ushered in to the real world, now as an adult, wearing well, a pink gown, a hair-do and a jeweled crown. The brain images of these debutante teenagers also intrigue me but they require a whole separate experimental design in neuroscience to explain the whole pink gown/jeweled crown affair so let us deal with teenagers in general for this column for now.

The kids who were subjects of the study were kids who had to move over 100 miles to attend school. They found out that the brains of these kids still showed clear signs of adjusting to the new situation, and these signs were in areas of the brain where we make sense of what we feel, such as the cingulate, caudate and insula regions. They compared these to the brains of those 25-35 and they found that in effect, the teenagers’ brains are still far from resembling those of the older group’s (where the prevalence of rational thought is the general pattern), saying in a report by Ker Than in LiveScience last Feb. 6 that "the changes represent an increased awareness of the students’ inner feelings and an improved ability to organize and integrate incoming sensory information; this synthesis helps shape the kinds of emotional and behavioral responses they have to new experiences." Ker’s report even cites earlier supporting studies that reveal that our brain continues to "grow," in terms of connections, well into adulthood and studies that also suggest that "humans don’t really develop the ability to handle multiple pieces of information at once until about the age of 16 or 17." The study was recently published in the journal Human Brain Mapping.

While this almost lends an "excuse" to what I find as irrational and difficult behavior of teenage humans, the study also makes me think of the influence of "culture" on the pace of "maturity" on the teenage brain. In my own observation, I find that Filipino teenagers who consciously choose to go to school, who are more exposed to or themselves immersed in deep and serious human experiences like poverty, behave more maturely than other teenagers who are wholly shielded from such experiences. I cannot forget the teenage girl I saw in a past documentary of The Correspondents who, with only a stubby pencil and notebook, no meal money, no food, but only money to ride a roofless banca in the heat of the summer or the relentless monsoon rains, perseveres to go to school in the same clothes all year round. She goes home to hardly a square meter shack with sacks as walls, to a family of eight kids where she is the only one who can go to school. When asked by the correspondent why she persists, she pursed her lips to gracefully contain her emotions and simply but resolutely answered, "Gusto ko lang po talaga matuto (I really want to learn)." That puts to shame not just those teenagers’ brains who stretch their teenage status like chewing gum, even if they are already blessed by their parents with much better opportunities in terms of an environment that provides "sensory information" that is far less "harsh" to their "cingulates, caudates and insulas" than to those of the teenage girl I just mentioned. What could be so emotionally wrenching in the sensory experience of teenagers who are "forced" to go to gardened campuses, sturdy, clean, well-equipped buildings of good high schools, particularly the exclusive ones, that the cingulates and caudates and insulas of these teenagers can’t figure out? If you tell me that it even compares to the daily travails of that young teenage girl’s sensory experience (traveling in the heat and rain and hungry), you should have your own cingulate, caudate and insula checked and some other brain region that has to do with a sense of scale. I still think a teenager’s brain growing up in an environment where he or she has no choice but to make rational decisions in order to survive, will overtake the supposed pace of the brain’s maturity in teenage years. I have intimately known people who had to make such kind of decisions when they were teenagers and I have fallen in love and deeply admire not just the cingulates, caudates and insulas of these people but the entirely beautiful persons that they have become and the lives they have led.

I hope some neuroscientists here will peer inside the Filipino teenagers’ brains so my suspicions on the influence of culture on the maturity pace of the teenage brain could be explored. If so, I really hope I could observe. I also think that the teenage strangers for whom I have taken the time (to their surprise) to carefully point out how irrational some of their acts are in gyms, malls and cafés would deeply appreciate having me out of where they are, even for a while.

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