Children given too much power

[dieseltaylor]

I have often said that young adults brains are not fully developed until they are about 20 with the physical development of the "consequences" part of the brain being last. Now some research pushing the date back over brain efficieincy.

New research from the UK has found that teenagers and young adults find it hard to concentrate because their brains are more similar to those of much younger children than those of mature adults, with more grey matter but lower efficiency. The findings suggest the brain is not fully developed until people reach their late twenties or even early thirties, which is much later than previously thought. The researchers, Dr Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and colleagues, from the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University College London, used MRI scans to monitor the activity in the brains of 200 volunteers aged between seven and 27 as they tried to run through the alphabet mentally or with letters on a computer screen while simultaneously deciding whether or not the letters contained a curve. At the same time they had to ignore distracting letters without curves.

The results found the human brain continues to develop longer into the teenage years and adulthood than previously believed, with the abilities of the volunteers improving with their age. In the teenagers an unexpectedly high level of activity was observed in the part of the brain known as the prefrontal cortex, which is a region known to be involved in multi-tasking and making decisions. This suggests their brains had to work harder to process the information. The same type of activity was known to occur in the prefrontal cortex in the brains of young children, but was not expected to continue into the teens and beyond.

The researchers said the results indicate the brains of teenagers are working less efficiently than adults’ brains. Dr Blakemore said the part of the brain needed to solve the problem is still developing in the adolescents, and the activity in the prefrontal cortex indicates they are doing a lot of needless work with "chaotic thought patterns".

Blakemore said the research shows “there is simply too much going on in the brains of adolescents” for them to concentrate on the task at hand. That means resources and energy in the brain are wasted, which has a negative effect on decision-making.

http://www.physorg.com/news194674084.html

Teenagers take less account than adults of people’s feelings and, often, even fail to think about their own, according to a UCL neuroscientist. The results, presented at the BA Festival of Science today, show that teenagers hardly use the area of the brain that is involved in thinking about other people’s emotions and thoughts, when considering a course of action.

Many areas of the brain alter dramatically during adolescence. One area in development well beyond the teenage years is the medial prefrontal cortex, a large region at the front of the brain associated with higher-level thinking, empathy, guilt and understanding other people’s motivations. Scientists have now found that, when making decisions about what action to take, the medial prefrontal cortex is under-used by teenagers. Instead, a posterior area of the brain, involved in perceiving and imagining actions, takes over.

Dr Sarah-Jayne Blakemore of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, giving the BA Festival’s BAYS lecture, said: “Thinking strategies change with age. As you get older you use more or less the same brain network to make decisions about your actions as you did when you were a teenager, but the crucial difference is that the distribution of that brain activity shifts from the back of the brain (when you are a teenager) to the front (when you are an adult).

http://www.physorg.com/news76864704.html

So lets remove the vote until they are 25 or so. : )

[gunnergoz]

I wonder how much of this has a cultural bias? Western children/teens are notoriously self-centered, but in other cultures, children are raised with a greater sense of social connection to family and other adults. I might not have thought this except that I saw how children can behave very differently in other cultures, when the expectations placed upon them are very different from our own, and from the earliest days of their lives.

[dieseltaylor]

Good point. I wonder if Asian children are more developed.

My own hypotheses is that the people being tested are the TV generation and I would have no problems fingering TV for giving yougsters the attention span of a gnat.

[Michael Emrys]

Good point. I wonder if Asian children are more developed.

I had a friend who spent a lot of time among the Hopi, and his comparison of American children to Hopi children was not flattering to the former.

My own hypotheses is that the people being tested are the TV generation and I would have no problems fingering TV for giving yougsters the attention span of a gnat.

I am inclined to agree with that. It's not that I advocate the abolition of tv, but I think the possibilities of using it in more responsible ways are huge. The problem with that though—like with so many of our social ills—is that we are a very long way from achieving a consensus on what must be done and how to go about it.

Michael

[costard]

I had a friend who spent a lot of time among the Hopi, and his comparison of American children to Hopi children was not flattering to the former.

I am inclined to agree with that. It's not that I advocate the abolition of tv, but I think the possibilities of using it in more responsible ways are huge. The problem with that though—like with so many of our social ills—is that we are a very long way from achieving a consensus on what must be done and how to go about it.

Michael

...not to mention a real cultural bias in favour of not being told how to raise our kids.

[noxnoctum]

Removing the vote till 25 would probably result in the government going much further to the right, at least that's how it would be in the States. I'm sure it would be similar in the UK or anywhere really though. We don't need that. Not to mention the fact that if you're old enough to go to some god forsaken part of the middle east to blow people's heads off for the benefit of Big Oil then you're old enough to vote. I know you're joking though .

I'm skeptical about these kinds of studies though. A lot of times they sound nice but aren't really grounded in reality. Remember when they "proved" pot caused brain damage? Yeah . There's also a huge variety of "young people". You've got the intellectual college types, the party types, and the people living out of their parents' basement, and everything in between. My sis went to a lot of shrinks a few years ago for depression and anxiety and she told me that they said that a lot of the work they do is essentially guess work (these are experts talking). The fact is the brain is incredibly complex and we'll probably never completely understand it.

And although maturity and wisdom might come with age, so does cynicism and bitterness for some.