wonderful opportunity to ensure none of this ‘equipment’ is lost. How? By exposing young people to as many opportunities and novel encounters as possible to send the message to the brain that says, this potential is going to be needed, so don’t prune it away. It really is – and this phrase is basically what all the books about the brain that have been written in the last 50 years are saying –‘use it or lose it’.
Which leads us to the fascinating phenomenon that is ‘pseudostupidity’.
Ask an adolescent a really straightforward question like, ‘Swimming with sharks – good idea or bad idea?’ and see what happens. This is exactly what researchers did; measuring the time it took for the adolescent to come up with an answer. An adult brain knows immediately the answer is bad idea, without a great deal of thinking. The child’s brain would probably want to know what the shark’s name was and if they could bring a friend. The teenage brain, on the other hand hesitates because, well, there are lots of answers to that question and, hey, I want to make sure I’m not missing anything here. The spurt in neural connectivity they are experiencing, especially in their immature pre-frontal cortex (PFC), means that their brains have many, many possible ways to get from A – Is swimming with sharks dangerous? – to B – Well, duh! A mature brain has fewer connections but the ones we do have, have been honed by experience, by learning, making our thought processes far more efficient. We rely less on our PFCs and more on our memories. We don’t have as much potential for creativity maybe, but equally we don’t have as much potential for coming up with dumb answers.
Another way of thinking about it – and one that resonates with me as I have just recently started living in Dubai and anyone who has been there will know what I mean – is to imagine you have just moved to a new city whose roads are a tangled web of motorways, intersections, roundabouts, traffic lights, road works, speed cameras and traffic jams. You want to go from A to B for the very first time. You have a map, a sense of direction, afull tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark and you’re wearing sunglasses. The very first time you set off from A to get to B you are overwhelmed by everything the trip is throwing at you and you have so many choices about how to get there it is hard to know which one to make. It would be so much easier if the place had just two roads, one leading in, one leading out. Like Cromer. If you get to where you want to go quickly it is more by luck than judgement and you usually get home tired, confused and stressed. The second time you make the journey, however, it suddenly becomes a whole lot easier. You still may make the odd wrong turn but that may be more through lapse of concentration than anything else. It doesn’t take very long before, despite all the factors being the same as they were the first time you travelled, you can make that same journey on autopilot, without even having to think about it.
This process of learning how to get quickly from A to B, as if all the other roads and possible routes were no longer there, is what is going on in the adolescent brain and explains so much about the bad choices, the wrong turns, the dumb decisions, the obviously stupid things they do. Contrary to existential values, they are not stupid, they are just acting that way.
There are other ways in which their brains differ from ours too. The nucleus accumbens are part of our slow-maturing PFC and have a role to play directing our motivation to seek out rewards. Yet in the adolescent brain, research shows there is less activity here, explaining the need for using short-term goals when working with young people as well as encouraging them to develop a longer-term perspective. The nucleus accumbens 2 also have a role in the processing of rewards such as food and sex. Hence the title of this chapter. Another
Which leads us to the fascinating phenomenon that is ‘pseudostupidity’.
Ask an adolescent a really straightforward question like, ‘Swimming with sharks – good idea or bad idea?’ and see what happens. This is exactly what researchers did; measuring the time it took for the adolescent to come up with an answer. An adult brain knows immediately the answer is bad idea, without a great deal of thinking. The child’s brain would probably want to know what the shark’s name was and if they could bring a friend. The teenage brain, on the other hand hesitates because, well, there are lots of answers to that question and, hey, I want to make sure I’m not missing anything here. The spurt in neural connectivity they are experiencing, especially in their immature pre-frontal cortex (PFC), means that their brains have many, many possible ways to get from A – Is swimming with sharks dangerous? – to B – Well, duh! A mature brain has fewer connections but the ones we do have, have been honed by experience, by learning, making our thought processes far more efficient. We rely less on our PFCs and more on our memories. We don’t have as much potential for creativity maybe, but equally we don’t have as much potential for coming up with dumb answers.
Another way of thinking about it – and one that resonates with me as I have just recently started living in Dubai and anyone who has been there will know what I mean – is to imagine you have just moved to a new city whose roads are a tangled web of motorways, intersections, roundabouts, traffic lights, road works, speed cameras and traffic jams. You want to go from A to B for the very first time. You have a map, a sense of direction, afull tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark and you’re wearing sunglasses. The very first time you set off from A to get to B you are overwhelmed by everything the trip is throwing at you and you have so many choices about how to get there it is hard to know which one to make. It would be so much easier if the place had just two roads, one leading in, one leading out. Like Cromer. If you get to where you want to go quickly it is more by luck than judgement and you usually get home tired, confused and stressed. The second time you make the journey, however, it suddenly becomes a whole lot easier. You still may make the odd wrong turn but that may be more through lapse of concentration than anything else. It doesn’t take very long before, despite all the factors being the same as they were the first time you travelled, you can make that same journey on autopilot, without even having to think about it.
This process of learning how to get quickly from A to B, as if all the other roads and possible routes were no longer there, is what is going on in the adolescent brain and explains so much about the bad choices, the wrong turns, the dumb decisions, the obviously stupid things they do. Contrary to existential values, they are not stupid, they are just acting that way.
There are other ways in which their brains differ from ours too. The nucleus accumbens are part of our slow-maturing PFC and have a role to play directing our motivation to seek out rewards. Yet in the adolescent brain, research shows there is less activity here, explaining the need for using short-term goals when working with young people as well as encouraging them to develop a longer-term perspective. The nucleus accumbens 2 also have a role in the processing of rewards such as food and sex. Hence the title of this chapter. Another
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