The Teenage Brain: A neuroscientist’s survival guide to raising adolescents and young adults
the size of the human skull. Basically, the brain has to fit inside the skull. As a neurologist, you have to measure the size of children’s heads as they grow up. I have to admit there were occasions when I did this with my own sons—just like noting changes in their height—to make sure they were on track and in the normal range for skull size. When they were older, they thought I was nuts, of course, but when they were babies and toddlers, I just couldn’t resist coming at them with a tape measure I’d take from my sewing kit, then trying to get them to stop squiggling free so I could take just one more measurement. The truth is, skull size doesn’t tell us a lot. It’s a gross measurement, and the skull can be large or small for a variety of reasons. There are disorders in which the head is too big and disorders in which the head is too small. The most important characteristic of the skull is that it limits the size of the brain. Eight of the twenty-two bones in the human skull are cranial, and their chief job is to protect the brain. At birth, these cranial bones are only loosely held together with connective tissue so that the head can compress a bit as the baby moves through the birth canal. The skull bones are loosely attached and have spaces between them: one of these is the “soft spot” all babies have at birth, which closes during the first year of life as the bones fuse together. Most growth in head size occurs from birth to seven years, with the largest increase in cranial size occurring during the first year of life because of massive early brain development.
So with a fixed skull size, human evolution did its best to jam as much brain matter inside as possible. Homo erectus, from whom the modern human species evolved, appeared about two million years ago. Its brain size was only about 800 to 900 cubic centimeters, as opposed to the approximately 1,500 cubic centimeters of today’s Homo sapiens. With modern human brains nearly double the size of these ancestors’, the skull had to grow as well and, in turn, the female pelvis had to widen to accommodate the larger head. Evolution accomplished all of this within just two million years. Perhaps that’s why the brain’s design, while extraordinarily ingenious, also gives a bit of the impression that it was updated on the fly. How else to explain the cramped conditions? Like too many clothes crammed in too small a closet, the evolution-sculpted brain looks like a ribbon repeatedly folded and pressed together. These folds, with their ridges (gyri) and valleys (sulci), as seen in Figure 1, give the human brain an irregular surface appearance, the result of all that tight packing inside the skull. Not surprisingly, humans have the most complex brain folding structure of all species. As you move down the phylogenic scale to simpler mammals, the folds begin to disappear. Cats and dogs have some, but not nearly as many as humans do, and rats and mice have virtually none. The smoother the surface, the simpler the brain.
While the brain looks fairly symmetrical from the outside, inside there are important side-to-side differences. No one is really sure why, but the right side of your brain controls the left side of your body and vice versa; this means that the right cortex governs the movements of your left eye, left arm, and left leg and the left cortex governs the movements of your right eye, right arm, and right leg. For vision, the input from the left side of the visual field goes through the right thalamus to the right occipital cortex, and information from the right visual field goes to the left. In general, visual and spatial perception is thought to be more on the right side of the brain.
The image of the body, in fact, can actually be “mapped” onto the surface of the brain, and this map has been termed the “homunculus” (Latin for “little man”). In the motor and sensory cortex, the different areas of the body get more or less real estate depending upon their functional importance. The face, lips, tongue, and fingertips get the largest amount of space, as the sensation and control necessary for these areas have to be more accurate than for other areas such as the middle of the back.
An early-twentieth-century Canadian neuroscientist, Wilder Penfield, was the first to describe the cortical map, or homunculus, which he did after doing surgery to remove parts of the brain that caused epileptic seizures. He would stimulate areas of the surface to determine which parts would be safe to remove. Stimulating one area would cause a limb or facial part, for instance, to twitch, and having done this on many patients he was able to create a standard map.
FIGURE 2. The “Homunculus”: A “map” of the brain illustrating the regions that control the different body parts.
The amount of brain area devoted to a given body part varies depending on how complicated its function is. For instance, the area given to hands and fingers, lips and mouth, is about ten times larger than that for the whole surface of the back. (But then, what do you do with your back anyway—except bend it?) This way all the brain regions for the same part of the body end up in close proximity to one another.
My undergraduate thesis at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, examined several of those areas of the brain given over to individual body parts and whether overstimulation of one of the body’s limbs might result in more brain area devoted to that part. This was actually an early experiment in brain plasticity, to see if the brain changed in response to outward stimulation. Many impressive studies that have been done since the late 1970s back up the whole concept of imprinting. Some of the most famous work, which inspired me to do my little undergraduate thesis, was done by a pair of Harvard scientists named David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel. The term that started to be used was “plasticity,” meaning that the brain could be changed by experience—it was moldable, like plastic. Hubel and Wiesel showed that if baby kittens were reared with a patch on one eye during the equivalent of their childhood years (they looked sort of like pirate kittens!), for the rest of their lives they were unable to see out of the eye that had been patched. The scientists also saw that the brain area devoted to the patched eye had been partially taken over by the open eye’s connections. They did another set of experiments where the kittens were raised in visual environments with vertical lines and found that their brains would respond only to vertical lines when they were adults. The point is that the types of cues and stimuli that are present during brain development really change the way the brain works later in life. So my experiment in college showed basically the same thing, not for vision, but rather for touch.
I actually had some fun showing off this cool imprinting effect in our everyday lives. Our beloved cat had died at the ripe old age of nineteen, and we all missed her so. Of course, it didn’t take long before Andrew, Will, and I were at the local animal shelter, looking at kittens to bring home. We fell in love with the runt of a litter and brought home the most petite and needy little tabby kitten you could ever imagine. The boys came up with a name: Jill. Jill was always on our laps; she was a very people-friendly cat. I remembered the experiments on brain plasticity and said to Andrew and Will, when we hold her, let’s massage her paws and see if she becomes a more coordinated cat. So anytime we had her in our laps, we would massage her paws with our hands, spreading them out, touching the little “fingers” that cats’ paws contain. Sure enough, Jill started to use her paws much more than any other cat we had ever had (and I have had back-to-back cats since the age of eight). She used her paws for things most cats don’t. She was very “paw-centric,” going around the house batting small objects off tables and taking obvious pleasure in watching them hit the ground. This was a source of consternation as not all the things she knocked off were unbreakable. She also often used her left paw to eat, gingerly reaching into the cat food can with her paw and scooping up food to bring to her mouth. Watching her, we started to notice that she almost always used her left paw to do these things. We had a left-pawed cat! Then suddenly we realized that when we picked her up to massage her paws, she was facing us and because we are all right-handed, we were always stimulating her left paw much more than her right! Home neuronal plasticity demonstration project accomplished. I know if we could have looked into her brain, we’d have seen that she had more brain space given over to her paws, and especially her left paw, than the average cat. This same phenomenon of reallocating brain space based on experience during life happens in people, too. We call this part of life the critical period, when “nurture,” that is, the environment, can modify “nature.” But more on that later.
So what I have just