Interesting article about research into the teenage brain, and possible consequences for redesigning adolescent education:
Teenagers really get a bad time,’ says Sarah-Jayne Blakemore. ‘It is amazing how it seems to be totally acceptable – even institutionalised – to parody and demonise them. We laugh at things that mock teenagers, but if you applied those sorts of jokes to any other sector of society, it just wouldn’t be acceptable.’ Blakemore is a professor of cognitive neuroscience and deputy director of the University College London Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. She is sitting in her office behind Russell Square, the heartland of London academia, mounting a strong defence for every teenager in Britain who has slammed a bedroom door, smoked a cigarette, driven a car too fast and even – though she certainly doesn’t condone this – given in to the peer pressure that surrounds drugs such as Ecstasy.
Society’s response to the teenage conviction that ‘nobody understands’ is often lack of patience. Teenagers, we think, are moody, self-absorbed, reckless, defiant creatures who reject our wisdom in favour of a path of personal sabotage. But the rallying cry from Blakemore – an increasingly powerful voice in the world of international neuroscience, who has given policy advice to the British government – is that teenagers are right. Beyond the world of neuroscientific research, for the most part society does not understand them.
Only 20 years ago, it was thought that brain development stopped in early childhood. Then, with the advent of sophisticated MRI scanners, scientists in the US discovered that the brain continued to change into adolescence. Over the past 10 years, Blakemore (supported by a series of Royal Society research fellowships and other grants) and a growing group of international neuroscientists have been discovering more about how the brain develops during this period of life. The change to grey matter in the prefrontal cortex is particularly acute during the teenage years, wreaking havoc on our children and, by extension, family life.
…She is passionate, for example, about the madness of an 8.30/9am school start time. ‘It’s the middle of the night for a teenager!’ she says. Teenagers release melatonin (the sleepy hormone) a couple of hours later in the day than adults and so are able to stay up later, but then they need more sleep in the morning. ‘It’s like getting us up at 5.30am,’ Blakemore elaborates. Teenagers experience ‘social jet-lag’ asa result, hence the long lie-ins at the weekends (this is absolutely not slothfulness, she says, but their bodies catching up after being forced to awaken so early).
Teenage brains are also capable of immense creativity, Blakemore says, rather like the way a child under the age of one is receptive to learning languages. Secondary schools, she says, often don’t plug into such creativity. When she advised government aides in 2011 (brought in by Willetts), it was with the aim of trying to broaden their outlook, away from a sole focus on the Charlie and Lola generation (a catchphrase for the under-fives). ‘There is such a large amount of new information about teenage brain development, which should be taken into account when politicians are considering evidence-based policy,’ she explains. ‘Traditionally policy has focused on the early years; the new research suggests that investment into adolescence is important too.
Full article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/11410483/Revealed-the-science-behind-teenage-laziness.html
