Communication and the Teenage Brain. | Martyn Richards | TEDxNorwichED

[Music] [Applause] teenagers who'd happens well I did three of them so I've experienced how the sweetness of I love you daddy can turn into the bitterness of I hate you dad less than a decade later but it's nothing new in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale a shepherd complains that a couple of teenagers have frightened his sheep away he says I were there were no age between 10 and 3 and 20 or that youth would sleep out the rest for there is nothing in the between but getting wench's with child wronging the ancient tree stealing fighting and we can go back even further than 400 years listen to this children now have bad manners contempt for authority they show disrespect to their elders they contradict their parents they gobble up dainty's from the table they cross their legs and they tantalize their teachers now that is Socrates over 2,000 years ago but to my generation the archetypal teenager has to be that of Kevin cariann fields wonderful creation who took the best part of a day to clean his father's car and whose idea of tidying his bedroom was kicking the dirty clothes under the bed but it all passes doesn't it my NAR all fine now it's just a phase isn't it maybe but at the turn of the last century and following it a lot has gone on in the area of brain science which informs us about teenagers and what goes on up here a lot of behaviors can now be explained and scientists are still very much learning today I want to share three aspects of this neuroscience with you and finish with a suggestion to parents like myself and to teachers like you the first of these concerns the prefrontal cortex the PFC this part at the front of the brain that's like a decision-making Center I like Robert Winston's description of it he describes its role as the part of the brain that stops us stealing a chip from somebody's plate as we walk through a restaurant despite the fact that we're feeling hungry now in the actual TV episode where Kevin morphed into a teenager his father observed he's losing the power of rational thought now Harry Enfield probably didn't realize just how close to the truth he was I'm going to tell you the story of Phineas Gage railway worker now back in the 1840s when the US was extending its communication routes westward this twenty-something young man's job was to place explosives to blast through mountains now in order to do this he put dynamite into a drilled hole had an assistant come along and cover it with sand and then compressed the sand into the hole to ensure a mind blast and in order to do this he used something called a tamping iron okay about four foot high about an inch in diameter sharp at the end he held it flat at the other end in order to compress it into the hole thus and now one September afternoon his assistant forgot to place the sand in the hole a mistake that Phineas needed like a hole in the head because what happened was the tamping iron blew back entered his left cheek and exited his head out of the top taking a piece of skull and quite a bit of brain matter with it Phineas was blown back and the tamping iron flew javelin like and landed about 20 meters behind him but Phineas got up walked to a nearby cart after speaking rationally to his men and then got driven home where he waited about half an hour until a doctor came and patched him up now he recovered enough to exhibit himself and his tamping iron all around the country including a PT Barnum's New York Museum and then he started looking after horses he moved down to Chile where he worked in the livery stables and eventually he died in California some eleven years later but in the interim his personality changed from a likable young man to somebody who was untrustworthy and had fits of temper when he didn't get his own way sound familiar our understanding of the human brain and particularly of the PFC came on leaps and bounds that we could lose a substantial amount of brain matter and continue to be a walking talking human being became apparent and that this frontal section of the brain is responsible for Kari and personality also became apparent and this was no more horrific Lee Illustrated and in the middle of the last century when some scientists used this knowledge to deliberately disable the frontal lobes in order to cure mental illness in the US alone between 1936 and 1978 some 35,000 lobotomies were conducted thankfully we don't do that anymore what we do have is MRI scanning now when it was first invented back in the 70s a scan would take several hours now they take several minutes and a chap called jadeed set the neurosis in Euro scientific ball rolling when he conducted a study using MRI scanners with with children he discovered against all knowledge that around the time of puberty we get an extra set of neurons this completely wasn't understood until he discovered this now what then happens is through a process called myelination pathways that are used are reinforced a bit like lagging pipes okay now jakey calls this the use-it-or-lose-it stage so myelination starts at the back of the brain and works its way forward so the last area to mature is this are PFC the decision-making center which is why you are as well asking your teenager why they left the gas hob on as asking your puppy why it messed on the carpet teenagers are bad at making decisions and now we know why the second aspect introduces us to another scientist Deborah Yoga land Todd now she conducted an experiment using MRI scanners she put adults and teenagers into them and showed them pictures in order to see which parts of their brains they used to interpret what they saw here's one of the pictures now all adults shown this picture interpreted it as fear half the teenagers who saw it interpreted it as sadness shock confusion or anger why well what Juergen Todd discovered was that adults used the prefrontal cortex to interpret what they saw whereas teenagers use their amygdalas obviously avoiding using the PFC because it's still a work in progress what's the amygdala for mostly for providing emotional rather than rational responses so not only our teenagers avoiding making decisions when they do make them they're often using the wrong parts of their brains the third aspect of this that I want to share with you involves the cerebellum now although it's at the back of the brain it too doesn't mature until our early twenties because it continues to grow during the teenage years jadeed links the cerebellum to what he calls higher thought maths music philosophy so it's entirely possible that taking part in sport or maybe even just running around can stimulate learning at this higher level it's interesting to hear this link between physical activity and learning something many of us have felt intuitively to be true and Socrates was right to complain that children were chatter rather than exercising so what can we do with all this knowledge firstly I'd suggest don't ask teenagers questions that begin with the word why rather get them to recount their behavior to you get them to tell you what they did you'll arrive at the same place in the end but perhaps without challenging what may have appeared as an irrational action secondly avoid questions that contain more than one concept in them there's enough going on in the teenage brain already without adding more confusion to it remember the team brain when faced with something new will often offer an emotional rather than a rational response keeping things simple reduces the likelihood of the teenager defaulting into fight-or-flight mode and in terms of reinforcing the pathways the advice would be to give rests allow the teen brain time to take in and retain so here's the thing I promised a suggestion and it's this why don't we tell them why don't we share some of this knowledge to give them maybe some understanding and maybe even control of their own development there's a lot talked these days about motivation and its impact on learning and obviously motivation is now known to be closely linked to identity a greater openness to understanding ourselves leads to a greater openness to improving ourselves maybe if we gave them a little bit more information about what was going on it could help them it certainly couldn't hurt thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 172,176

Rating: 4.8484349 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United Kingdom, Science (hard), Brain, Childhood, Children, Cognitive science, Education, Parenting, Schools, Science, Teaching

Id: BbruY110Ql8

Length: 12min 23sec (743 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 03 2017