Inside the Teenage Brain, Essay Example

What Dr. Giedd discovered via his brain scanning project was that the part of the brain known as the frontal or pre-frontal cortex which is located in the forehead region experiences a growth spurt sometime around the age of 11 or 12. This is due to the overproduction of certain brain cells in the frontal cortex. Giedd refers to this as a second wave of overproduction that thickens the frontal cortex which is responsible for many brain activities like thinking. What is really surprising about this process is that by the age of six, the human brain is 95% fully formed, but just before puberty, the frontal cortex increases in size.

According to Dr. Giedd, the “use it or lose it” phrase refers to a hypothesis that cells and connections in the human brain that are used the most tend to become dominant, while those cells that are not used tend to degenerate. In other words, the dominant cells become hard-wired in the brain.

As discussed by Dr. Charles Nelson in the video, the pre-frontal cortex influences cognitive or thinking skills and allows a person to think rationally. Dr. Giedd calls this part of the brain the CEO which helps to make decisions and to plan things in advance. However, since the teenage brain is not fully developed, teenagers often make the wrong decisions and are unable to solve a problem that requires critical thinking skills.

Dr. Yurgelun-Todd, along with her colleague Staci Gruber, discovered that teenagers and adults “read” emotions differently. As Yurgelun-Todd points out, before her research, she assumed that the teenage brain would act and respond like that of an adult related to specific tasks. However, MRI scans revealed that teenage brains do not respond in the same way related to viewing pictures of emotional expressions on faces. Thus, Yurgelun-Todd found out that teenage brains have problems discerning emotions in faces. One of the possible consequences is that teenagers might mistake one emotion for another, such as thinking that a person is not angry when in fact he/she is infuriated.

As Dr. Carlyle Smith sees it, the best predictor related to how well a teenager is going to perform in school or when taking the SAT exam is if they had a good night’s sleep which tends to reinvigorate the entire brain. Obviously, getting a good night’s sleep and waking up feeling refreshed and invigorated will result in a wider attention span in class and better grades.

REM sleep or Rapid Eye Movement sleep which the narrator in the video refers to as the time of dreaming and learning while physically asleep but with the subconscious mind fully awake and very active. Basically, prolonged REM sleep appears to reinvigorate the brain much more than sleeping for long hours without “dreaming and learning” while sound asleep.

After watching “Inside the Teenage Brain,” I was surprised to learn about the rapid growth spurt in the pre-frontal or frontal cortex of the brain sometime around the age of 11 or 12, just before entering puberty or the teenage years of growth and development. However, I was not surprised by the fact that getting a good night’s sleep, especially REM sleep, can make all of the difference during a person’s waking hours, especially if the person happens to be sixteen years old. In the end, I guess that teenagers act the way that they do because of their brains, meaning that some of their actions and behaviors are not truly their fault. It’s all biology and chemistry. I certainly hope that researchers like Dr. Giedd continue to explore the workings of the human brain which might lead to new discoveries on why human beings act and behave as they do.

Works Cited

“Transcript: Inside the Teenage Brain.” Frontline. 31 January 2002. Web. 2 February 2014 <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/teenbrain/etc/script.html>.