The Teenage Brain

 Jensen, Frances and Amy Nutt. (2015) The Teenage Brain. A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults.  New York, NY. Harper Collins. 

96- The more you learn, the more you need to sleep.

96- Researchers have found that teens who used their cell phones after "lights out" not only  had reduced time asleep but also were at increased risk of mental health disorders, including self-harm and suicide.100-bright LED light of a computer screen, which should be turned off about an hour before bedtime to relax the overstimulated eyes and brain...2-hour exposure to the self-luminous backlit displays of smart phones, computers, and other LED devices suppressed melatonin by about 22 percent.

 

105-Contrary to that popular misconception, a person's reasoning abilities are more or less fully developed by the age of fifteen.  So why do they do the crazy things they do?  In general, teen brains get more of a sense of reward than adult brains, and...release of and response to dopamine...This is why sensation-seeking is correlated with puberty.

 

106- [Because adults can engage their frontal lobes (frontal lobes are not fully developed in teenagers), they are] better able to resist temptation.  Hence, adolescents [have] to put much more effort into staying away from what [is] forbidden.

 

107- the ability to quickly grasp the general contours of a situation and make a good judgment about costs versus benefits arises from activity in the frontal cortex, the same areas that we keep coming back to, the parts of the brain that are still under construction during adolescence.

107- Adults are also better at learning from their mistakes, courtesy of areas in and around the frontal lobes...This part of the brain is still being wired in teenagers, making it more difficult for them, even when they recognize a mistake, to learn from it.

107- The chief predictor of adolescent behavior, studies show, is not the perception of the risk, but the anticipation of the reward despite the risk.  In other words, gratification is at the heart of an adolescent's impulsivity...

 

109- Addiction...is more strongly "hardwired" into the adolescent brain, and...detox is much harder and fails more often in adolescents.

 

110- The sight of a happy face stimulates the reward seeking response in the bran in the same way the sight of  a fifty dollar bill or a tasty dessert does.

111- Because adolescents are hypersensitive to dopamine, even small rewards, if they are immediate, trigger greater nucleus accumbens activity than larger, delayed rewards.  Immediacy and emotion, in other words, are linked in the decision to take a risk and in the brain's inability to delay gratification.

113- The role of peers should not be underestimated when it comes to risk-taking behavior in teens...social isolation for girls and a lack of extracurricular activities for boys increased risk-taking behaviors.

114- So here's the paradox: Adolescence is a stage of development in which teens have superb cognitive abilities and high rates of learning and memory...These abilities give them a distinct advantage over adults, but because they are so primed to learn, they are also exceedingly vulnerable to learning the wrong things....It all goes back to the brain's craving for rewards, and the fact that anything that is learned, good or bad, that stimulates the production of dopamine is construed by the brain as a reward.

115- Sleep deprivation and teenagers...can lead to increased cigarette use.

117- Because teenage brains are more plastic and primed for learning, they are, unfortunately, also more prone to addictions.  [in fact,] the processes of learning and addiction in the teen brain [are very similar].