The Myth of the Teen Brain

We blame teen turmoil on immature brains. But did the brains cause the turmoil, or did the turmoil shape the brains? The of the MythTeen Brain By Robert Epstein It’s not only in newspaper headlines—it’s even on magazine covers. TIME, U.S. News & World Report and even Scientific American Mind have all run cover stories proclaiming that an incompletely developed brain accounts for the emotional problems and irresponsible behavior of teenagers. The assertion is driven by various studies of brain activity and anatomy in teens. Imaging studies some- times show, for example, that teens and adults use their brains somewhat differently when performing certain tasks. IAs a longtime researcher in psychology and a sometime teacher of courses on research methods and statistics, I have become increasingly concerned about how such studies are being interpreted. Getty Images Although imaging technology has shed interesting new light on brain activity, it is dangerous to presume that snapshots of activity in certain regions of the brain necessarily provide useful information PETER DAZELEY about the causes of thought, feeling and behavior. www.sciammind.com SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MIND 57 If the “teen brain” were a universal phenomenon, ( we would find teen turmoil around the world. ) This fact is true in part because we know that people onto the streets of America’s burgeoning an individual’s genes and environmental histo- cities. Hall never looked beyond those streets in ry—and even his or her own behavior—mold the formulating his theories about teens, in part be- brain over time. There is clear evidence that any cause he believed in “recapitulation”—a theory unique features that may exist in the brains of from biology that asserted that individual devel- teens—to the limited extent that such features opment (ontogeny) mimicked evolutionary devel- exist—are the result of social influences rather opment (phylogeny). To Hall, adolescence was than the cause of teen turmoil. As you will see, a the necessary and inevitable reenactment of a careful look at relevant data shows that the teen “savage, pigmoid” stage of human evolution. By brain we read about in the headlines—the imma- the 1930s the recapitulation theory was com- ture brain that supposedly causes teen prob- pletely discredited in biology, but psychologists lems—is nothing less than a myth. and the general public never got the message. Many still believe, consistent with Hall’s asser- Cultural Considerations tion, that teen turmoil is an inevitable part of The teen brain fits conveniently into a larger human development. myth, namely, that teens are inherently incompe- Today teens in the U.S. and some other West- tent and irresponsible. Psychologist G. Stanley ernized nations do display some signs of distress. Hall launched this myth in 1904 with the publi- The peak age for arrest in the U.S. for most crimes cation of his landmark two-volume book Ado- has long been 18; for some crimes, such as arson, lescence. Hall was misled both by the turmoil of the peak comes much earlier. On average, Amer- his times and by a popular theory from biology ican parents and teens tend to be in conflict with that later proved faulty. He witnessed an explod- one another 20 times a month—an extremely high ing industrial revolution and massive immigra- figure indicative of great pain on both sides. An tion that put hundreds of thousands of young extensive study conducted in 2004 suggests that 18 is the peak age for depression among people 18 and older in this country. Drug use by teens, both FAST FACTS legal and illegal, is clearly a problem here, and Troubled Teens suicide is the third leading cause of death among U.S. teens. Prompted by a rash of deadly school Various imaging studies of brain activity and anatomy shootings over the past decade, many American 1>> find that teens and adults use their brains somewhat high schools now resemble prisons, with guards, differently when performing certain tasks. These studies are metal detectors and video monitoring systems, said to support the idea that an immature “teen brain” ac- and the high school dropout rate is nearly 50 per- counts for teen mood and behavior problems. cent among minorities in large U.S. cities. But are such problems truly inevitable? If the But, the author argues, snapshots of brain activity do turmoil-generating “teen brain” were a universal 2>> not necessarily identify the causes of such problems. developmental phenomenon, we would presum- Culture, nutrition and even the teen’s own behavior all affect ably find turmoil of this kind around the world. brain development. A variety of research in several fields sug- Do we? gest that teen turmoil is caused by cultural factors, not by a In 1991 anthropologist Alice Schlegel of the faulty brain. University of Arizona and psychologist Herbert Barry III of the University of Pittsburgh reviewed Anthropological research reveals that teens in many research on teens in 186 preindustrial societies. 3>> cultures experience no turmoil whatsoever and that Among the important conclusions they drew teen problems begin to appear only after Western schooling, about these societies: about 60 percent had no movies and television are introduced. word for “adolescence,” teens spent almost all their time with adults, teens showed almost Teens have the potential to perform in exemplary ways, no signs of psychopathology, and antisocial 4>> the author says, but we hold them back by infantilizing behavior in young males was completely them and trapping them in the frivolous world of teen culture. absent in more than half these cultures and 58 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MIND April/May 2007 extremely mild in cultures in which it did occur. lescence is a very recent phenomenon—not much In many Western Even more significant, a series of long-term more than a century old. cultures, teens studies set in motion in the 1980s by anthropolo- My own recent research, viewed in combina- socialize almost gists Beatrice Whiting and John Whiting of Har- tion with many other studies from anthropology, exclusively with vard University suggests that teen trouble begins psychology, sociology, history and other disci- other teens. to appear in other cultures soon after the intro- plines, suggests the turmoil we see among teens duction of certain Western influences, especially in the U.S. is the result of what I call “artificial Western-style schooling, television programs and extension of childhood” past puberty. Over the movies. Delinquency was not an issue among the past century, we have increasingly infantilized Inuit people of Victoria Island, Canada, for ex- our young, treating older and older people as chil- ample, until TV arrived in 1980. By 1988 the dren while also isolating them from adults. Laws Inuit had created their first permanent police sta- have restricted their behavior [see box on next tion to try to cope with the new problem. page]. Surveys I have conducted show that teens Consistent with these modern observations, in the U.S. are subjected to more than 10 times as many historians note that through most of many restrictions as are mainstream adults, twice recorded human history the teen years were a as many restrictions as active-duty U.S. Marines, relatively peaceful time of transition to adult- and even twice as many restrictions as incarcer- hood. Teens were not trying to break away from ated felons. And research I conducted with Diane adults; rather they were learning to become Dumas as part of her dissertation research at the adults. Some historians, such as Hugh Cunning- California School of Professional Psychology Getty Images ham of the University of Kent in England and shows a positive correlation between the extent Marc Kleijwegt of the University of Wisconsin– to which teens are infantilized and the extent to Madison, author of Ancient Youth: The Ambi- which they display signs of psychopathology. guity of Youth and the Absence of Adolescence The headlines notwithstanding, there is no in Greco-Roman Society (J. C. Gieben, 1991), question that teen turbulence is not inevitable. It CATHERINE LEDNER suggest that the tumultuous period we call ado- is a creation of modern culture, pure and sim- www.sciammind.com SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MIND 59 ple—and so, it would appear, is the brain of the two things. First, most of the brain changes that troubled teen. are observed during the teen years lie on a con- tinuum of changes that take place over much of Dissecting Brain Studies our lives. For example, a 1993 study by Jésus A variety of recent research—most of it con- Pujol and his colleagues at the Autonomous Uni- ducted using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) versity of Barcelona looked at changes in the cor- technology—is said to show the existence of a pus callosum—a massive structure that connects teen brain. Studies by Beatriz Luna of the depart- the two sides of the brain—over a two-year pe- ment of psychiatry at the University of Pitts- riod with individuals between 11 and 61 years burgh, for example, are said to show that teens old. They found that although the rate of growth use prefrontal cortical resources differently than declined as people aged, this structure still grew adults do. Susan F. Tapert of the University of by about 4 percent each year in people in their California, San Diego, found that for certain 40s (compared with a growth rate of 29 percent memory tasks, teens use smaller areas of the cor- in their youngest subjects). Other studies, con- tex than adults do. An electroencephalogram ducted by researchers such as Elizabeth Sowell of (EEG) study by Irwin Feinberg and his colleagues the University of California, Los Angeles, show at the University of California, Davis, shows that that gray matter in the brain continues to disap- delta-wave activity during sleep declines in the pear from childhood well into adulthood.

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