The last posting of this blog left the reader
with the concern about how the natural development of the mind affects young
people. It did this after introducing
the field of study that looks at adolescence from the physical side of brain
development. The posting relied, along
with this one, on an article by Sarah-Jayne Blakemore.[1]
She writes:
“Given the fact that we know that social brain regions continue to
develop, both in terms of structure and function, during adolescence, we were
interested in how social cognitive behavior changes in adolescence.”[2] The
first revelations found the consequence of this development was with young
people.
That is, when confronted with difficult problems
or tasks, adolescents were disposed to seek the help of others – not a trait
observed in younger children. This finding
was contrary to what had been taken to be the case. The belief was that children sought help. Such a finding, to the contrary, motivated study
into related concerns such as risk taking and how peers influence young people
in their decision-making.
Another
area of interest is how genetic makeups influence brain development during
those teen years. This research
stretches into maladies such as schizophrenia mentioned in the last posting. Also, studies of excessive paranoia have been
conducted. In those efforts, such
imaging tools as fMRIs have been useful.
More specifically, ways to measure blood flow have been relied upon
because the telling fact is that neurons, to be active, need more energy and
that is provided by blood. Or stated
succinctly, when commenting on brain activity, what one is talking about is
blood flowing to and in the brain.
Blakemore
writes:
I think the area of adolescent brain
development is one of the areas in cognitive neuroscience where actually brain
imaging has completely revolutionized what we know. … We just didn’t know until
10 or 15 [today 20 or 25] years ago that the brain undergoes such dramatic
development and even reorganization during the period of adolescence starting
at puberty and continuing right throughout adolescence. … [I]t has
revolutionized how we understand teenagers.[3]
And one very far-reaching finding is that no
evidence – contrary to previous common belief – exists that the brain is fixed
in a person’s early childhood. This was
considered doctrine, but due to imaging studies, it is now considered totally
wrong. Today, it is believed that
significant change takes place throughout adolescent years and continues into a
person’s 20s and 30s.
And this change doesn’t end there. The brain’s plasticity – that’s its baseline
state of the brain – continues to change.
And as such, that fact affects intervention and educational efforts
directed to help teenagers. But there is
one challenging fact related to this promising development.
Unfortunately, such analysis calls for the use
of scanning techniques and they are expensive and long-lasting protocols. These treatments, to be effective, are
large-scale studies that one can consider to be longitudinal in that they last a
number of years. Blakemore suggests not
longitudinal studies but cross-sectional ones in which comparisons among
different teenagers, situated with different adults, can be conducted.
Blakemore opines:
It would be ideal if you could scan a very
large number of teenagers every couple of years as they go into adulthood. The icing on the cake would be to scan a
sufficient number of individuals so that you track people who, for example,
develop schizophrenia, and go back and look at their brain imaging data from
when they were a teenager, and look at how it differs from teenagers who don’t
develop schizophrenia. … [They] really need to be doing it [i.e., this type of
analysis] for 20 years.[4]
And with that bit of insight, Blakemore ends
with a hopeful observation. This type of
research is new – as of the publishing of her article ten years ago – and
promises to provide meaningful insights into various fields of behavior and
development, such as psychiatric disorder and psychological disorder, where the
lack of knowledge is significant.
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