Teenagers: it's not that they don't think, it's that their thinking is slower

http://www.npr.org/templates/player/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=124119468&m=124188677

Story on NPR this morning.

I always thought there HAD to be an explanation for the behavior. This pediatric neurologist was trying to figure out her own kids.

:shrug:

Yeah, we have three teens. :banghead:

We are not evolved to live in the society we have, our evolution has fitted us to live in a hunter-gatherer group of probably no more than thirty to forty individuals.

There is such a vast amount to learn in order to fit in as a part of our society it's really surprising that fewer people don't totally fail at it.

Teenagers have to spend a lot of time doing actual thinking. Life gets easier later on, as we develop conditioned responses.

A totally different world.

Our society is changing so fast that none of us live in the same society as adults that we came into as children.

Future shock is a very real thing and only a small percentage of us are mentally equipped to deal with it.

Just as long as I can find a teenager to program my remote.

And once the change gets severe enough you may want to embrace it but you won't be able to.

We are not infinitely flexible mentally.

Without seeing what it says, my thoughts are that if teenagers 'think slower' it is because they are untrained in weighing potentialities. Every option is given equal weight, and so it makes decision-making more difficult, giving the appearance of 'slower thinking' when actually they are thinking fast, very very fast, but unable to come to any conclusion. Kind of like a car stuck in a snowdrift - the car isn't moving, but those wheels are just spinning like crazy.

That leads to 'impulsive' decisions, where the teen just stops the spinning and goes with whatever happened to be there at the stopping point.

The best way to counter this is to encourage coin flipping for decision making. It by default reduces the myriad options and potentialities down to two, and leaves the results to chance. Those two options may be good/good, good/bad, or bad/bad, but usually, by reducing it to two, it automatically eliminates 'catastrophic' as a choice.

Does this fit in at all with what the piece says?

The upshot is this: The brain grows from the time you're in utero until you're in your early 20s.

During the teen years a lot of stuff is happening ("teen" in this case goes until about the time you'd finish your bachelor's, perhaps your master's). One of the most significant things is that portions are still undergoing myelination: Nerves have myelin sheathes that helps keep signals coherent, so that they get through quickly and efficiently and in good shape. (The brain's still developing, as well: Inhibition centers are still maturing.)

As the NPR report put it, the frontal cortex is poorly connected to the rest of the brain. Higher-order thinking happens there. It's not just training--the actual connections aren't in place to ensure quick thinking or efficient thinking.

It means that when kids appear to not be thinking, it's because they don't slow down to let their brain do what we think it should. They can usually get to the right answer but it takes longer. "Answer" can be decisions like, "Should I drink that?" or "Hmm, yes, punching is the right response" or even, "Sure, I can jump that far!"

Since they can't quickly think through consequences or effects on other people, they seem self-centered and uncaring.

Moreover, the teen brain tends to react more quickly and easily to things. Good for learning. Bad for things like addiction. Combine this with slow thinking and you see the problem.

And, finally, while it wasn't in the NPR stories we tend to lose the ability to narrowly focus as life goes on: older people can tune out things with more difficulty than younger people. So a teen can focus on something and completely exclude most of the world. "I'm talking to you, didn't you hear me?" has the answer, "Sorry, I wasn't aware you were talking."

I love the High Church of Redemptive Violence and its blood-drenched god.