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In reply to the discussion: Sorry, but if you did your job as a parent, your kid would NOT be rioting in the streets!!! [View all]JonLP24
(29,322 posts)I was very similar but I can't say I credit my upbringing but mine & yours' story of being wild & crazy during teen years to being normal & well-adjusted is remarkably common.
FRONTLINE's "Inside the Teenage Brain" focuses on work done by Dr. Jay Giedd at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md., together with colleagues at McGill University in Montreal. In a particularly interesting study, Dr. Giedd looked at the brains of 145 normal children by scanning them at two-year intervals. This was work Giedd was only able to do with magnetic resonance imaging, because it requires neither harmful dyes nor radiation, making the study of normal children, as opposed to sick ones, ethically tenable.
What the researchers have found has shed light on how the brain grows and when it grows. It was thought at one time that the foundation of the brain's architecture was laid down by the time a child is five or six. Indeed, 95 percent of the structure of the brain has been formed by then. But these researchers have discovered changes in the structure of the brain that appear relatively late in child development.
Changes in the Prefrontal Cortex
Giedd and his colleagues found that in an area of the brain called the prefrontal cortex, the brain appeared to be growing again just before puberty. The prefrontal cortex sits just behind the forehead. It is particularly interesting to scientists because it acts as the CEO of the brain, controlling planning, working memory, organization, and modulating mood. As the prefrontal cortex matures, teenagers can reason better, develop more control over impulses and make judgments better. In fact, this part of the brain has been dubbed "the area of sober second thought."
The fact that this area was still growing surprised the scientists. Although they knew that the brain of a baby grew by over-producing synapses, or connections, they had not known that there was a second period of over-production. In a baby, the brain over-produces brain cells (neurons) and connections between brain cells (synapses) and then starts pruning them back around the age of three. The process is much like the pruning of a tree. By cutting back weak branches, others flourish. The second wave of synapse formation described by Giedd showed a spurt of growth in the frontal cortex just before puberty (age 11 in girls, 12 in boys) and then a pruning back in adolescence.
Even though it may seem that having a lot of synapses is a particularly good thing, the brain actually consolidates learning by pruning away synapses and wrapping white matter (myelin) around other connections to stabilize and strengthen them. The period of pruning, in which the brain actually loses gray matter, is as important for brain development as is the period of growth. For instance, even though the brain of a teenager between 13 and 18 is maturing, they are losing 1 percent of their gray matter every year.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/teenbrain/work/adolescent.html
The Pre-Frontal Cortex is a key area of the brain of what makes a sociopath a sociopath, its a very fascinating area of the brain.
This isn't to say I disagree with your overall points, I agree 100% -- especially the prison part.