Healthcast: Teen BrainsThe following Healthcast report by medical editor Marilyn Brooks first aired May 18, 2004, on Channel 4 Action News at 5 p.m.
Why is my teenager behaving this way?What happened to my nice, quiet, sweet child?If you have ever asked yourself those questions, some fascinating new pictures of the teenage brain tell the story.Doctors
at UCLA and the National Institutes of Health followed hundreds of
normal children and gave them brain scans every two years. The result
is the first road map of a growing brain. We now know that the brain
doesn't fully mature until the teenage years, or even later.Dr.
Jay Geidd, NIH: "The part of the brain that fills in last is the part
involved in decision-making and controlling our impulses."Dr.
Paul Thompson, UCLA School of Medicine: "Things that are emotional --
the areas of the brain that help process those are really not fully
developed until the very late teens, so I think it helps parents
understand maybe why their children aren't behaving in a way that they
would expect them to."Researchers also found that a bigger brain is not always better.Thompson: "As you get older, you don't necessarily get more brain. The outer layer of the brain is actually thinning."Dr. Judy Rapaport, NIH: "You end up with a sort of leaner, meaner thinking machine by the time you're an adult."The good news for parents is that those turbulent teen years are normal, and now we may have the brains scans to prove it.
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