"What Were You Thinking?!"
You climb into your car, turn the key in the ignition & are assaulted by rap music so loud the windows are vibrating. You just know your hearing will never be the same. Blame it on the amygdala!

It's a record-breaking frigid day. You're worrying about the pipes bursting & your teen is going to school without her jacket. You ask her where it is and you get a blank look, then, "Oh, it's in the car" or "It's in my locker at school". Blame it on the amygdala!

While you're muttering to yourself, ''What is she thinking?!'' your teen's amygdala is having a field-day. Now, confess: You think the amygdala is a new kind of club drug, don't you?

No, the amygdala is an almond-shaped part of the brain, nestled deep in the back, that pretty much controls the way teens act for their middle-school & high-school years.

So the next time you're ready to bellow, "WHAT in the world were you thinking when you did that?", remember this intriguing fact: Teens are NOT thinking the way adults think because they absolutely, positively can't do that yet. Adolescent brains just aren't ''hard wired'' like adult brains.

Researchers recently discovered that adults think w/the prefrontal cortex, the rational part of the brain; teens process information w/ the amygdala, the instinctual, emotional part of the brain. Teens don't think, ''Binge drinking is very dangerous & stupid.'' Rather, it's ''Oh, boy, a chugging contest! Wouldn't it be cool if I won?''

What the Experts Say
As recently as 1997, conventional thinking, heralded during the White House Conference on Early Learning & Childhood Development, held that the greatest time of brain growth occurred before the age of 18 months & was set forever by the age of 3.

But scientists spent the last several years scanning teens' brains in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine & discovered that the prefrontal cortex, which makes people ''act like an adult,'' isn't fully developed in a teenager until after the age of 18.

So parents watch their teens whiz thru life manipulated by the wild whims of the amygdala, home to primal feelings such as fear, rage, & impulse.

And to complicate things even more, the amygdala gangs up w/all kinds of hormones & pumps them thru puberty-ravaged bodies, making them moody, unpredictable & seemingly irrational. It's a constant struggle to see if the still-developing prefrontal cortex can head off the amygdala & shout: ''Stop! Use good judgment on this one! Think about what can happen!''

And that's why teens parade thru adolescence doing all those things that keep parents up at night. Sneaking out late at night. Moving from hysterics to hugs in warp-speed. Flaunting purple hair. Binge drinking, sampling drugs & smoking cigarettes. Waiting until the last minute to do the term paper.....  & the list goes on & on.

But just because they may not naturally think before they act isn't an excuse for bedlam during the teen years.

So, what's a parent to do?!
Tips for Parents

''Adolescence is a time when everything is out of kilter & nothing is stable in the body or mind. It's the second time that kids act like they're 2 years old,'' laughs Ruth Kraus, Ph.D, assistant professor of clinical psychology at the Univ. of Chicago's Child Psychiatry Clinic.

''The difference is that when they're young you say, 'They're only kids. Give them a break.' But when they're teens you expect them to act like adults...& they're not.''

Her advice? Parents have to step in as the "designated" prefrontal cortex & dispense common sense, guidance & advice. In other words, don't just walk away from your teen & think that he or she is ready to make all the decisions without your input.

• Empathize & let your teen understand that impulses are hard to fight, but the end results could be disastrous. Teens must take the time to ponder important decisions & weigh the options. They should look at both sides of an issue & consider the consequences.

• Help them get organized with calendars & planners. Teach them to write down deadlines, meetings & dates & then post them in visible places. Help them understand that waiting until the very last minute to complete an important assignment is a sure bet for stress & disappointment.

• Be there for them. Remind your teens that while you're not running their lives anymore, you're ALWAYS available for advice & help, no matter what comes up.

• Develop a sense of humor! Enjoy your teens as they develop into adults. After all, you can always blame it on the amygdala, right?

The Teenage Brain is a Work in Progress

While 95% of the human brain has developed by the age of 6, scientists tell FRONTLINE that the greatest spurts of growth after infancy occur just around adolescence.

Interview: Jay Giedd - Giedd is a neuroscientist at the National Institute of Mental Health. Recently, he spearheaded research showing for the first time that there's a wave of growth & change in the adolescent brain. He believes that what teens do during their adolescent years -- whether it's playing sports or playing video games -- can affect how their brains develop.

But the gray matter, or thinking part of the brain, continues to thicken throughout childhood as the brain cells get extra connections, much like a tree growing extra branches, twigs & roots.

In the frontal part of the brain, the part of the brain involved in judgment, organization, planning, strategizing -- those very skills that teens get better & better at -- this process of thickening of the gray matter peaks at about age 11 in girls & age 12 in boys, roughly about the same time as puberty.

After that peak, the gray matter thins as the excess connections are eliminated or pruned. So much of our research is focusing on trying to understand what influences or guides the building-up stage when the gray matter is growing extra branches & connections & what guides the thinning or pruning phase when the excess connections are eliminated.

And what do you think this might mean, this exuberant growth of those early adolescent years?

I think the exuberant growth during the pre-puberty years gives the brain enormous potential. The capacity to be skilled in many different areas is building up during those times.

What the influences are of parenting or teachers, society, nutrition, bacterial & viral infections -- all these factors -- on this building-up phase, we're just beginning to try to understand.

But the pruning-down phase is perhaps even more interesting, because our leading hypothesis for that is the "Use it or lose it" principle. Those cells & connections that are used will survive & flourish.

Those cells & connections that aren't used will wither & die.

Right around the time of puberty & on into the adult years is a particularly critical time for the brain sculpting to take place. Much like Michelangelo's David, you start out w/a huge block of granite at the peak at the puberty years.

Then the art is created by removing pieces of the granite & that's the way the brain also sculpts itself. Bigger isn't necessarily better, or else the peak in brain function would occur at age 11 or 12. ... The advances come from actually taking away & pruning down of certain connections themselves.

The frontal lobe is often called the CEO, or the executive of the brain. It's involved in things like planning & strategizing & organizing, initiating attention & stopping & starting & shifting attention.

It's a part of the brain that most separates man from beast, if you will. That's the part of the brain that has changed most in our human evolution & a part of the brain that allows us to conduct philosophy & to think about thinking & to think about our place in the universe. ...

I think that [in the teen years, this] part of the brain that is helping organization, planning & strategizing isn't done being built yet ... [It's] not that the teens are stupid or incapable of [things]. It's sort of unfair to expect them to have adult levels of organizational skills or decision making before their brain is finished being built. ...

It's also a particularly cruel irony of nature, I think, that right at this time when the brain is most vulnerable is also the time when teens are most likely to experiment w/drugs or alcohol.

Sometimes when I'm working w/teens, I actually show them these brain development curves, how they peak at puberty & then prune down & try to reason w/them that if they're doing drugs or alcohol that evening, it may not just be affecting their brains for that night or even for that weekend, but for the next 80 years of their life. ...

Tell me a little bit about how the brain develops.

How does the brain - arguably the most complicated 3 lb. mass of matter in the known universe --how does the brain become the brain? It does so thru two simple but powerful processes.

The first one is over-production. The brain produces way more cells & connections than can possibly survive. There's only so many nutrients, there's only so many growth factors, there's only so much room in the skull. After this vast over-production, there's a fierce, competitive elimination, in which the brain cells & connections fight it out for survival. Only a small percentage of the cells & connections make it.

This is a process that we knew happened in the womb, maybe even the first 18 months of life. But it was only when we started following the same children by scanning their brains at 2 year intervals that we detected a second wave of over-production.

Do you have particular concerns about that period, too, though?

Yes. It's a time of enormous opportunity & of enormous risk. And how the teens spend their time seems to be particularly crucial. If the "Lose it or use it" principle holds true, then the activities of the teen may help guide the hard-wiring, actual physical connections in their brain. ...

Can you describe to me what people used to believe about the brain, actually, very recently?

One of the most exciting discoveries from recent neuroscience research is how incredibly plastic the human brain is. For a long time, we used to think that the brain, because it's already 95% of adult size by age 6, things were largely set in place early in life. ...

[There was the] saying. "Give me your child & by the age of 5, I can make him a priest or a thief or a scholar."

[There was] this notion that things were largely set at fairly early ages. And now we realize that isn't true; that even throughout childhood & even the teen years, there's enormous capacity for change. We think that this capacity for change is very empowering for teens. ...

This is an area of neuroscience that's receiving a great deal of attention ... the forces that can guide this plasticity.

• How do we optimize the brain's ability to learn?
• Are schools doing a good job?
• Are we as parents doing a good job?

And the challenge now is to ... bridging the gap between neuroscience & practical advice for parents, teachers & society. We're not there yet, but we're closer than ever & it's really an exciting time in neuroscience. ...

The next step will be, what can you do about it, what can we do to help people? What can we do to help the teen optimize the development of their own brain? ...

There has been a great deal of attention on the early years & particularly on stimulating the early brain. What do you think of that work & that popularization of that brain science?

There's been a great deal of emphasis in the 1990's on the critical importance of the first three years. I certainly applaud those efforts. But what happens sometimes when an area is emphasized so much, is other areas are forgotten.

And even though the first 3 years are important, so are the next 16. And the ages between 3 & 16, there's still enormous dynamic activity happening in brain biology. I think that that might have been somewhat overlooked w/the emphasis on the early years. ...

Not so long ago, people were emphasizing teaching little children thru flashcards, thru particular kinds of mobiles w/black & white checks on them, playing Mozart.

In fact, some states have sent CD's back w/new mothers. What do you think of that? Has that been a misinterpretation of brain science?

... We all want to do the best for our children. And what I fear is happening is that we're leaping too far from the neuroscience to such things. I don't think there is any established videotape or CD or computer program or type of music to play that we've shown w/any scientific backing to actually help our children.

The more technical & more advanced the science becomes, often the more it leads us back to some very basic tenets of spending loving, quality time w/our children. The brain is largely wired for social interaction & for bonding w/caretakers.

And sometimes it's even disappointing to people that, w/all the science & all the advances the best advice we can give is things that our grandmother could have told us generations ago: to spend loving, quality time w/our children. ...

I think [it] probably does more harm than good for parents to be confronted w/so many of these conflicting reports in the media w/out any scientific basis. ...

What directions is the research taking to explore how we can optimize brain development?

Now that we've been able to detect the developmental path of different parts of the brain, the next phase of our research is to try to understand what influences these brain development paths.

Is it nutrient or parenting or video games or the activity of the [child]? Or is it genes? By studying twins, we can begin to address some of these very basic nature/nurture-type of questions.

i.e., when twins are in the 1st grade, their parents often dress them in the same clothes. They get the same haircut. It's sort of cute how alike they are. But that's not as cool in high school anymore. And so a lot of the twins as teens in high school start doing different things.

The one who was a little bit better in sports may become an athlete. The one who was a little bit better at academics may become a scholar. Or one may turn to music and one to art. But they often have different daily activities.

So we can scan the brains when the twins are young & doing everything very much alike; then we can scan them as teenagers, when they start having different daily activities. This gives us a sense of which parts of the brain are influenced by behavior & which parts by the genes themselves.

We've already got some interesting early data on this. One part of the brain is called the corpus callosum: a thick cable of nerves that connects that two halves of the brain & is involved in creativity & higher type of thinking. It's very popular for imaging studies because it leaps out of the picture. It's very easy to measure & quantify.

It's also interesting because it changes a lot throughout childhood & adolescence. It's been reported to be different in size & shape in many different illnesses that happen during childhood ... many higher cognitive thought [processes] like creativity & ability to solve problems.

So it's been of great interest, especially to child psychiatrists. And what we find is that the size & shape of the corpus callosum is remarkably similar amongst twins ... & [so] seems to be surprisingly under the control of the genes.

But another part of the brain -- the cerebellum, in the back of the brain -- isn't very genetically controlled. Identical twins' cerebellum are no more alike than non-identical twins. So we think this part of the brain is very susceptible to the environment.

And interestingly, it's a part of the brain that changes most during the teen years. This part of the brain hasn't finished growing well into the early 20's, even. The cerebellum used to be thought to be involved in the coordination of our muscles. So if your cerebellum is working well, you were graceful, a good dancer, a good athlete.

But we now know it's also involved in coordination of our cognitive processes, our thinking processes. Just like one can be physically clumsy, one can be kind of mentally clumsy.

And this ability to smooth out all the different intellectual processes to navigate the complicated social life of the teen & to get thru these things smoothly & gracefully instead of lurching ... seems to be a function of the cerebellum.

And so we think it's intriguing that we see all these dynamic changes in the cerebellum taking place during the teen years, along with the changes in the behaviors that the cerebellum sub-serves.

What would influence the development of the cerebellum?

Traditionally it was thought that physical activity would most influence the cerebellum & that's still one of the leading thoughts. It actually raises thoughts about, as a society, we're less active than we ever have been in the history of humanity.

We're good w/our thumbs & video games & such. But as far as actual physical activity, running, jumping, playing, children are doing less & less of that & we wonder, long term, whether that may have an effect on the development of the cerebellum.

The recess & play seems to be the first thing that is cut out of school curriculums in tight times. But those actually may be as important, or maybe even more important, than some of the academic subjects that the children are doing. ...

We think that the "Use it or lose it" principle holds for the cerebellum as well. If the cerebellum is exercised & used, both for physical activity but also for cognitive activities, that it'll enhance its development.

... One analogy that computer people use is that [the cerebellum is] like a math co-processor. It's not essential for any activity. People can get by quite well w/out large chunks of it. But it makes many activities better.

The more complicated the activity, the more we call upon the cerebellum to help us solve the problem. And so almost anything that one can think of as higher thought -- mathematics, music, philosophy, decision making, social skills -- seems to draw upon the cerebellum. ...

The relationship between the findings that we have in the cerebellum & sort of practical advice or the links between behavior aren't well worked out yet. That's going to be one of the great challenges of neuroscience -- to go from these neuroscience facts to useful information for parents, for teachers or for society.

But it's just so recently that we've been able to capture the cerebellum that no work has yet been done on the forces that will shape the cerebellum or the link between the cerebellum shape or size & function.

When you look at the recent work that you've done in terms of the frontal cortex, do you see a difference between girls & boys?

Yes. One of the things that we're particularly interested in as child psychiatrists is the difference between boys' brains & girls' brains, because nearly everything that we look at as child psychiatrists is different between boys & girls -- different ages of onset, different symptoms, different prevalences & outcomes.

Almost everything in childhood is more common in boys -- autism, dyslexia, learning disabilities, ADHD, Tourette's syndrome -- are all more common in boys. Only anorexia nervosa is more common in girls. So we wonder if the differences between boys' & girls' brains might help explain some of these clinical differences.

The male brain is about 10% larger than the female brain across all the stages of ... 3 to 20; not to imply that the increased size implies any sort of advantage, because it doesn't. The IQs are very similar. But there are differences between the boy & girl brains, both in the size of certain structures & in their developmental path.

The basal ganglia which are a part of the brain that help the frontal lobe do executive functioning are larger in females & this is a part of the brain that is often smaller in the childhood illnesses. I mentioned, such as ADD & Tourette's syndrome.

So girls, by virtue of having larger basal ganglia, may be afforded some protection against these illnesses. But in the general trend for brain maturation, it's that girls' brains mature earlier than boys' brains. ...

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The MEG tells us about brain activity in much the same way as the EEG, indicating the activity of neural networks in real time; but it gives more information than the EEG about deeper structures.

Coherence analysis of EEG or MEG tells which parts of the brain are connected to each other by analyzing similarities in brain activity patterns. Combining information from these & other sources provides a much more complete portrait of brain functioning than has ever been possible.

Greenough: The principal news based upon both newer techniques like fMRI & other technologies is that the brain is a very dynamic place & continues to be so throughout development & even into adulthood.

New synaptic connections continue to form between neurons throughout life. Patterns of myelination [the process by which brain cells are covered w/a fatty white substance called myelin, which aids in the transmission of information between cells], while perhaps most dynamic from early development thru adolescence, continue to change at least into the 4th decade of life.

And blood vessels, the brain capillary networks in particular, respond to long-term changes in demand throughout much of adult life. Perhaps most exciting is that at least some regions of the brain continue to generate new neurons in adulthood & those neurons appear to participate in the learning & memory process.

Scientists first made these observations in animals & subsequently confirmed them in humans.

Thompson: These new imaging techniques provide extremely detailed pictures of the living brain, revealing how it grows & how its function changes though the teenage years, often in ways no one suspected.

Before brain imaging was invented, autopsy studies showed that older children had more of a fatty substance, called myelin, on their brain cells.

This speeds up the electrical transmission of information between brain cells & is thought to make the brain more efficient as we go thru the teen years. Earlier studies also revealed an exuberant growth of connections in the first 2 years of life, w/a slow elimination of connections thereafter.

Now, imaging technologies let us visualize even more remarkable changes in the brains of children & teens. Using MRI scans, we can watch teenagers' brains change in miraculous patterns as they grow up.

We recently created the first maps of brain growth in individual children & teens. To our surprise, an extraordinary wave of tissue growth spread thru the brain, from front to back, between the ages of 3 & 15.

Frontal brain circuits, which control attention, grew fastest from ages 3 to 6. Language systems, which are further back in the brain, underwent a rapid growth spurt around the age of 11 to 15 & then drastically shut off in the early teen years.

This language system growth is interesting, as it corresponds to the end of a period when we're thought to be most efficient at learning foreign languages.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of all was how much tissue the brain loses in the teen years.

Just before puberty, children lost up to 50% of their brain tissue in their deep motor nuclei -- these systems control motor skills such as writing, sports or piano. This loss moves like a wildfire into the frontal lobes in late teens. We think it's a sign of rapid remodeling of brain tissue well into the teens & beyond.

In short, MRI scans provide the detail necessary to chart brain growth in individual children & we're seeing new growth spurts & surprising losses of cells much later than originally thought.

It's as if a light has now lit up a huge landscape & researchers are only just beginning to see the landmarks & features for the first time.

Siegel: Imaging techniques have provided a revolutionary new view into how the activation of neural circuits in the brain give rise to mental processes, such as:

• memory
• emotion
• decision-making
• reasoning

The correlation of brain structure & function w/the more subjective, but equally real, mental processes that define the mind enables us to deepen our understanding of how systems of neurons within the brain may give rise to how systems of neurons between brains function.

This "interpersonal neurobiology" of understanding how the interaction of brain & human relationships shapes who we are is an exciting possibility in this new era of systems neuroscience.

Fischer: We know much more because we're only now able to examine many dimensions of brain functioning in thriving human beings. Still, we don't know very much!

Key to our understanding is how the brain functions as a system -- i.e., how neural networks grow & function across brain regions. Most of the recent advances in brain science have involved knowledge of the biology of single neurons & synapses, not knowledge of patterns of connection & other aspects of the brain as a system.

In time the new imaging techniques will help scientists & educators to understand how brain & behavior work together, but we have a very long way to go.

Greenough: One thing that we know is that changes in the synaptic connections between neurons, whether involving newly-generated neurons in some brain regions or only pre-existing neurons in others, are a key part of the memory process.

Thompson: Interestingly, a surprising amount is already known. We know a lot about how the brain is organized anatomically & functionally. We know which parts are responsible for specific functions, such as spatial memory, emotion, vision & language.

We know a fair amount about how brain cells develop, how they speak to each other, what molecules are involved in learning & memory & how they may be altered by disease or medication.

In looking at human brain development, several new techniques are now greatly accelerating our understanding of brain & behavior. Functional MRI, i.e., is a new type of imaging technique that lets you see how & where, the brain activates in response to learning new information, recognizing a face rather than just seeing a face, or learning new languages.

These techniques allow you to find out exactly what changes in the brain when some types of information are learned, or when we perform different tasks such as speaking, or when we are ill.

Siegel: