The Teenage Brain: A neuroscientist’s survival guide to raising adolescents and young adults
between, and many of the kids hadn’t been bathed in quite some time. Like the children at Greenwich’s ARC, some were more disabled than others, but even those who were more functioning seemed to lag far behind their peers at ARC. They sat in corners and rocked and had difficulty speaking, and their eyes appeared vacant.
This was a time at the height of the nature-versus-nurture debate, and my psychology and biology professors at Smith were keen on discussing how much a person’s makeup, from personality to intelligence to likes and dislikes, is dependent on genes (nature) and how much on the influence of environment (nurture). There was clearly little nurturing going on at Belchertown, while at ARC there were always activities, directed therapies, teaching, and, most of all, stimulation.
At some point I realized the children at Belchertown who had the same disabilities and the same hurdles to overcome were far worse off than the kids at ARC in Greenwich, and at least from my limited viewpoint, environment seemed to be the overwhelming determining factor. It was pure and simple: the brains of the ARC children were being stimulated and encouraged, and the brains of the Belchertown children were not.
Like fingerprints, no two brains are identical. Everything we do, think, say, and feel influences the development of our most precious organ, and those developments trigger ever more changes until the thread of action and reaction is too complex to unwind or undo. Our brains, in essence, are self-built. They not only serve the particular needs and functions of the particular individual, but also are shaped—landscaped if you will—by the individual’s particular experiences. In neuroscience, we refer to the human brain’s unique ability to mold itself as plasticity. Thinking, planning, learning, acting—all influence the brain’s physical structure and functional organization, according to the theory of neuroplasticity.
As far back as Socrates, some believed the brain could be “trained,” or changed, much as a gymnast trains his or her body to balance on a high beam. In 1942 the British physiologist and Nobel Prize winner Charles Sherrington wrote that the human brain was like “an enchanted loom, where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern, though never an abiding one.” In essence, the human brain, said Sherrington, was always in a state of flux.
Five years after Sherrington, Donald Hebb, an American neuropsychologist, was struck by a kind of accidental inspiration that led to the first quasi-experimental test of the theory of brain plasticity. When the forty-three-year-old researcher took rat pups home from his lab at Canada’s McGill University and gave them to his children as pets, he allowed the rodents to roam freely around the house. Hebb’s inspiration was to compare the brains of these free-roaming pet rats with those of rats kept in cages in his lab. After several weeks he put both groups of rats through a kind of intelligence test involving a maze. The pet rats, which had free access to explore the environment of Hebb’s home and unfettered interaction with one another as well as with Hebb and his family, performed significantly better on the maze test than the lab rats confined to small cages.
By the late 1990s researchers had confirmed a range of changes associated with experience and stimulation, including brain size, gray matter volume, neuron size, dendritic branching, and the number of synapses per neuron. The more stimulation and experience, they concluded, the larger the neurons, the bushier the dendrites, the higher the number of synapses, and the thicker the gray matter.
During my senior year at Smith College in 1977–78, I wrote my first professional journal article under the tutelage of Nico Spinelli, a professor in both the psychology department and the computer and information science department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He was doing pioneering experiments in the plasticity of the visual cortex. Previous research had looked at the brains of mammals raised in a deprived environment. Spinelli wanted to see if plasticity was still at work in a “normal” environment. So we took kittens raised with their mothers in a standard animal facility and gave them what’s called avoidance training. In these experiments, a “safe” and an “unsafe” stimulus were associated with two different visual stimuli: vertical lines and horizontal lines. As the kittens learned to associate the safe stimulus with either the horizontal or the vertical lines, the number of neurons in those parts of the visual cortex expanded. The results, which were published in the journal Science, confirmed “that early learning produces plastic changes in the structure of the developing brain,” or, to put it more simply, young brains are shaped by experience.
Of course, adult brains can be shaped by experience as well. Researchers in neural plasticity have found that even in the last decades of life, adult brains can be remodeled, just not as easily or as constantly as during childhood and adolescence. Whereas kids’ brains will respond and change in response to virtually any stimulation, so-called adult plasticity occurs only in specific behavioral contexts. For instance, cab drivers in London (a notoriously difficult city to navigate) have been found by scientists to have an enlarged hippocampus particularly in the area responsible for spatial memory. Violinists and cellists, who must use their hands fluidly and rapidly, have been shown to have an enhanced motor cortex. And in an unusual experiment conducted several years ago, Patricia McKinley of McGill University was able to show that learning the tango, which involves both complex movement and a fine sense of balance, improved the ability of senior citizens, ages sixty-eight to ninety-one, to switch between two different cognitive tasks. “Plasticity,” then, is just another way of saying “learning.”
In the first few years of childhood there is a critical period of plasticity in which learning comes quickly and easily. Evolution experts believe this is the brain’s way of helping us adapt early to the specific environment in which we are raised. The concept is the same as that of imprinting, whereby a baby duckling develops a keen and powerful preference to follow the mother duck over any other. When I was five years old, I saw this in action, although I obviously didn’t know it at the time. It was Easter, and my baby brother had just been born. Perhaps because of that, friends of my parents gave me my own “baby”—a baby chick, that is, much to my parents’ consternation. I loved that fuzzy little animal and was absolutely fascinated that it would follow me around the house, through the swinging door between the kitchen and the dining room, even out of the house and around the yard. Because I was with the chick almost from its birth, it had determined I was its mother. Years later I would read the children’s book Are You My Mother? by P. D. Eastman to my sons. Basically, the book is really all about imprinting. A young hatchling leaves its nest too early while its mother is out foraging for food, and goes on a journey, asking every animal and object it meets—a kitten, a hen, a dog, a cow, a car, even an enormous power shovel—the question of the title. Luckily the power shovel lifts the young bird up and deposits it back in its nest beside its real mother.
Five-year-old me, of course, was the only mother my baby chick had. Unfortunately, the end of the relationship was sudden and brutal. About a week after Easter, after I’d just gotten home from kindergarten, my baby chick was once again following me all over the house, but this time, as I skipped between the kitchen and the dining room, the little hatchling failed to make it through the swinging door and was squished. I cried for days.
Thirteen years later, as a freshman at Smith, I created my own chick-imprinting experiment for a class in advanced biology. In order to imprint them to sound, I exposed my baby chicks to a specific sound or tone every day over a week. At the end of this training period, the chicks were placed on a kind of runway and were then exposed to two sounds, one of them being the familiar tone I’d played for them for seven straight days. Every one of the chicks toddled toward the familiar tone: they had imprinted to sound. I remember this so well because my mother was visiting me at the time of the experiment and she helped me type the results!
But how does learning actually happen? Young brains and old brains work much the same way, by receiving information from the senses—hearing, seeing, tasting, touching, smelling. Sensory information is transmitted by synapses through a network of neurons and is stored, temporarily, in short-term memory. This short-term memory region is highly volatile and is constantly