Marie C. Pacius

It’s a good read, which lists the major insights of studies that examined the adolescent brain. The development of the adolescence brain has been instructive to cognitive neuroscience. Adolescents are healthy, but show some weird behavior, which is nice if you want to correlate behavior to physical processes in the brain. As such, the studies have been worthwhile to neuroscience as a whole. Yet, we shouldn’t accept any of the neuroscience stories as a full explanation for the behavior of adolescents. It’s true that if the rewiring and maturation of the brain is part of some inescapable, timed cascade of chemical reactions, this program could be at the foundation of adolescent behavior. In every age of history, the unfolding brain would have been noticeable through different sorts of behavior, but its biology would have been the same. However, we don’t know what drives the rewiring and maturation of the brain. It may be that these carefully documented rear-to-front brain that is uncultured in our society and in our society alone. It may be that the way we treat kids is reflected in their own behavior is. Without knowledge on the mechanisms through which brain maturation works, it can’t be accepted as a causal explanation for adolescent behavior. It just allows us to take all these psychological observations that we’re familiar with lack of planning, novelty-seeking and rephrase them as neutral processes. That’s useful to science, but doesn’t answer any questions about how to raise your child, or what kind of society fits best with universal human needs. Neuroscientists don’t examine kids from far away tribes. In fact, they stick to college undergrads, usually from the psychology department. That’s no biggie, but it’s something to keep in mind when you’re reading stories about how brain science explains why we are and who we