Download Name #_____ Date ______ Section ____ Teen Brains Under

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Date ________ Section ____
Teen Brains Under Construction
Directions: You will be asked a series of questions after reading the article that asks you to help the government make
laws regarding legal adult age. As you read annotate to make sure that you are looking for arguments and evidences
to support or refute new laws the government may make regarding legal adult age.
Sept. 28, 2005
Even though adults were once teenagers, they often treat teens like they're from Mars. Many times, teens feel they'd fit
in better on another planet. The feelings are so widespread that bookstores are full of titles such as "Now I Know Why
Tigers Eat Their Young: Surviving a New Generation of Teenagers" and "Help! My Family Is Driving Me Crazy: A Survival
Guide for Teenagers." Surging hormones are often blamed for adolescent anxieties. More and more, however, scientists
are realizing that important changes occur in the brain during the teen years. Spurts in brain development, not sudden
bouts of madness, they say, may help explain why kids start caring about different things, acting in new ways, and taking
risks as they make the transition to adulthood. "We don't think [teenage brains are] damaged," says neuroscientist Jay
Giedd. He's the chief of brain imaging at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Md. "They're under
construction."
Brain scans
Every 2 years since 1991, a group of kids (and now adults) has been coming to Giedd's lab. There, the participants have
their brains scanned by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines, which show details of brain structure. Study
members also answer questions about their lives and mental health. At first, Giedd looked only at the brains of healthy
children to see if he could find evidence of physical brain changes in kids who later developed mental illnesses. Initial
results, he says, were disappointing. Brains seemed to develop early and quickly. "By the first grade, the brain is already
about 90 percent of its adult size," Giedd says. However, even though the size of the brain doesn't change much, a closer
look shows that the size of its parts does change a lot.
In 1996, Giedd's team reported that the amount of gray matter (the type of brain tissue that processes information)
increases until about age 11 in girls and 13 in boys. After that, gray matter decreases, while the amount of white matter
goes up and up. White matter connects areas of gray matter and helps brain cells communicate with each other.
MRI images reveal that, as teens get older, the amount of gray matter in
the brain gets smaller as it's replaced by white matter.
Paul Thompson, Kiralee Hayashi, and Arthur Toga/UCLA, N. Gogtay and
Judith Rapoport/NIMH
What these results mean, for one thing, is that girls' brains tend to mature more quickly than boys' brains do. The results
also suggest that kids are best at learning how to play musical instruments or sports and developing other skills between
ages 7 and 11. That's when their gray matter is increasing the fastest. Once gray matter starts to go down, skills can be
perfected, but it's harder to learn new ones.
Learning machine
The brain's frontal lobe seems to undergo a lot of development during the teen years. That's the part of the brain that
controls social activity, and that's the time of life when kids start to care more about friends and what other people think
of them. "The bottom line is that the brain is very plastic," Giedd says. "It changes much more than we used to think."
Adolescence, in particular, appears to be a very busy time for that wrinkled lump behind your forehead. "During this
time, there are so many changes, the potential to learn things is about as high as it will ever be," Giedd says. Among the
most surprising things that Giedd and his coworkers have found is that brains don't stop developing until people are in
their mid-20s. "Initially, we thought we'd study them until they were 16 or 18," Giedd says. "Only recently, we thought,
'Wow, we should follow them longer to find out when things stop maturing.'" The scientists now have about 4,000 brain
scans from 2,000 people. For some individuals, they have six or seven scans covering 15 years of development.
Taking risks
It took 10 years for the researchers to map the patterns and timing of brain development. Now, they're trying to figure
out how changes in the brain contribute to changes in behavior. They also want to know whether school, music, sports,
diet, video games, parenting, TV-watching, medicine, or other factors influence those changes during adolescence. One
goal is to learn what teachers can do to take advantage of the time when their students' brains change the most. If some
parts of the brain develop sooner than others, for example, perhaps school subjects should be taught in a different
order. "Maybe the parts of the brain doing geometry are different from the parts doing algebra," Giedd says. "We
haven't had solid links like this, but that's what we're shooting for." Knowing what their brains are going through might
also motivate teenagers to change their own priorities. "What you do with your brain during that time," Giedd says,
"could have a lot of good and bad implications for the rest of your life." Eventually, brain studies might help resolve
conflicts at home. Teenagers are capable of learning a lot, but the parts of their brains related to emotions and decisionmaking are still in the works. As their brains undergo rewiring, teenagers are particularly vulnerable to risky behavior,
such as drinking and driving too fast. Brain development is no excuse for breaking curfew or taking big risks.
Understanding what's going on in there, however, can make the situation more manageable for everyone.
Directions: Answer the following questions using complete on a separate sheet of paper. Use information and evidence
from the article and personal experiences to support your answers.
1. What are some typical behaviors of kids your age that you think might be linked to brain development?
2. Does reading about brain development make you more sympathetic to kids behaving badly? Should teenagers
be tried as adults for crimes? Why or why not?
3. This article describes how knowing more about kids' brains might help adults understand kids better. Come up
with three ways in which this research could help kids understand themselves. How might it change behavior or
learning?
4. Make a 2 column chart that includes one side that supports raising the legal age to 25 and the other column
refuting the raise in legal age (keeping it at 18). Under each column come up with at least 5 very solid reasons
with evidences (from the article and personal experiences) to support the reasons.
5. After completing the 2 column chart, answer the following question below. Write as if you are writing to the
President and make sure you include evidences (from the article) to support your claim.
a. Do you think research showing that the brain doesn't stop developing until a person reaches his or her
20s should influence the legal age at which someone votes, drives, or drinks alcohol? At what age do you
think a person should be considered legally an adult? Why?