Many decades ago, a writer said that adolescence is a disease. While some have argued against this characterization, in one of the chapters of my book, “Tell, Don’t Yell,” I maintain that their brains are still developing. In other words, they’re incomplete.
In doing that, I used stories and science to argue my point. Enjoy.
The following stories and explanations by scientists will show that teenagers or young adults may be telling the truth when they do something reckless and say “I don’t know why I did it.”
Analyze this:
Some girls in a girls-only boarding school were being punished by the school. Outraged, they decided to burn down the school, starting with the room in which they were observing the time out.
If they had succeeded, they wouldn’t have been alive to enjoy that victory. Because the unintended consequence of the fire consuming them would have incinerated their objective and their souls.
In another boarding school, this time a boys-only school, the senior students requested that the school and their teachers should help them to pass the external examinations. By help, they meant the school should allow them to cheat.
This wasn’t uncommon. They knew that their friends in other schools were being “helped” by their teachers. Indeed, it was common for schools to bribe the external invigilator to look away so that the teachers could dictate or write answers on the board for students.
But the position of their management was clear: we will give you all the assistance you need provided it’s not during the examinations.
The students thought that the school was joking. How will you exempt yourself from what every school is doing? They ask.
But when the first exams came and they saw that the school frustrated all their cheating attempts, they were livid.
Here’s where it gets interesting.
They had a meeting and resolved to collectively fail if the school should refuse to help them during the exams.
By this, they meant to ruin the reputation of the school. No school wants to fail WAEC, that’s why so many of them cheat. So this position was a not-so-subtle threat.
It escaped them that if they failed they would lose at least one year before going to the university. When this was pointed out to them, it didn’t appear to affect their position. Why? Because they didn’t get it. The science below will explain why such reality didn’t register.
When I was in secondary and my WAEC fee wasn’t paid on time, I got angry. I looked at my friends who had already paid and felt sad.
So I resolved to never go to school again if my WAEC fee wasn’t paid on time. It didn’t occur to me that it would affect only my own future if I refused to go to school. Why? Because I didn’t get it.
Why was it that these teenagers couldn’t grasp the consequences of their thoughts and actions?
Here’s the science. But this is an oversimplification of the function of the brain to explain behaviour. Even the experts, readily concede this.
Robert Sapolsky, a neuroscientist, asked, “What’s the best way to think about the brain? It’s insanely complicated [where] everything connects to everything that there are a gazillion little sub-regions. But in the middle of that complexity, there’s a sort of simplified way to think about the aspect of the brain function when it comes to behaviour.”
To explain the brain, therefore, Paul MacLeans (a big shot in the field) came up with this explanation that categorizes the brain into three layers. The first layer is the reptilian brain. This is the part of the brain that we’re born with. We have no control over it. And it controls our autonomic nervous system such as breathing, temperature change and digestion. All the regulatory stuff. Reptilian because it suggests that we have the same wiring as the lizards.
The second layer is the limbic system. A mammalian speciality. Lizards are not known to possess this. This system controls our emotions. It has to do with fear, anxiety, arousal and so forth. We’re generally born with this system too. For example, nobody teaches a baby how to get angry when it’s hungry.
Sitting on the limbic system is the topmost layer which is called the neocortex. This is the system that is responsible for decisions and weighing the consequences of those decisions. This part of the brain doesn’t get developed until in our mid-twenties. Why is this crucial?
In a paper, titled “Maturation of the adolescent brain“ by Mariam Arain and her colleagues, the authors wrote:
“The development and maturation of the prefrontal cortex occurs primarily during adolescence and is fully accomplished at the age of 25 years.”
But why is this relevant to our discussion?
“The development of the prefrontal cortex is,” the authors continued, “very important for complex behavioural performance, as this region of the brain helps accomplish executive brain functions.”
What this means is that all the teenagers and young adults who are giving their parents and teachers problems are still under construction. They are all less than 25. In other words, they don’t yet possess all the tools or faculties to handle the type of reasoning we require of them.
Once we understand that teenagers and young adults are incomplete, then we begin to appreciate their situation and empathize with them. Indeed, we begin to even marvel at the fact that they can do some sophisticated thinking.
The foregoing explanation is in the light of Paul MacLeans the triune brain. I concede that the theory itself is somewhat controversial.
In his obituary, the New York Times wrote in 2007, “Dr Thomas R. Insel, a neuroscientist and director of the National Institute of Mental Health in Rockville, Md., said the theory was ‘outside the mainstream of scientific effort,’ but added that Dr MacLean’s research had opened the door for neuroscience to ‘ask big questions about consciousness and philosophy, instead of the more tractable questions about vision and movement.’”
Yet, many notable neuroscientists, including Robert Sapolsky(author of “Behave”) have adopted this interpretation. For this book, therefore, I’ve done the same.
However, the most important message of this chapter is something about which almost everyone is united: the neocortex gets fully developed in the mid-twenties. So lower expectations where teenagers are concerned because they’re half-baked – still under construction.
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