Used to be such a nice girl

NEXT TIME A TEENAGED STUDENT DRIVES YOU WILD, STOP AND HAVE A THINK: WHICH ONE OF YOU HAS THE STABLE NEUROCHEMISTRY AND WHICH IS SWIMMING IN A NEUROCHEMICAL SOUP? ANDREW CURRAN EXPLAINS WHAT’S REALLY HAPPENING INSIDE THE TEENAGE BRAIN.

‘Today’s media portrayals of teens employ the same stereotypes once openly applied to unpopular racial and ethnic groups: violent, reckless, hypersexed, welfare-draining, obnoxious, ignorant. And like traditional stereotypes, the modern media teenager is a distorted image, derived from the dire fictions promoted by official agencies and interest groups.’

That’s the way Mike Males, writing back in 1994, summed up the way we see teenagers. The stereotype is the result of more than a dire fiction, however; it comes from the fact that, being not-children, yet not-adults either, adolescents are hard to understand.

Even though we’ve all passed through adolescence with more or less success, adolescents are still hard to understand, but it’s only by understanding more about the neurobiological changes that are occurring to them that we can best deal with these not-children, not-adults.

The brain does not reach adult levels of maturity until the age of approximately twenty-five years, give or take a few years depending on the individual. As a member of an audience I was talking to once remarked, some footballers of course never get there. She seemed to be referring to a footballing husband. Adolescence is a time when this maturation process is moving ahead rapidly as the child’s neurobiology gradually changes over a ten-year period to that of an adult.
Basic neuroanatomical changes are progressing steadily in the background from conception to twenty-five years, but adolescence marks a time when significant neurochemical events dramatically alter how the brain is functioning as it prepares for adult life. Central to this neurochemical change is a relative over-activity of dopamine, as Andrew Chambers, Jane Taylor and Marc Potenza have explained. (2003) Dopamine is a hugely important neurochemical in our brains.

Its release in the brain is predominantly under the control of the emotional brain or limbic system, to give it its posh name, although it’s also released by stress.

Dopamine is central to most of what our brains do. It’s the critical neurochemical for attention, for learning and for reward appreciation – which are the three key elements for all successful learning – and everything about who you are, how you feel, the way you brush your hair, even your beliefs are because you have learned those responses using the actions of dopamine to remodel the connections between the nerve cells in your brain.

The relative increase in dopamine activity that occurs at the time of puberty, however, has other rather more dramatic effects. The normal adolescent expressing behaviours characterised by impulsivity and poor decision making is not in fact abnormal. Rather, the adolescent – male or female – is responding to the relative increase in dopamine in a way that maximises social learning and, through the mixture of success and failure in social interactions that is the hallmark of adolescence, establishing patterns of social behaviour that will dictate how successfully they negotiate adult life.

Underlying this adventurous activity is the whole concept of motivation. As an adult watching an adolescent stagger through one disaster after another, it’s not unusual to ask ourselves, ‘Why on earth would he or she want to do that?’ Motivation is a highly complex concept. It’s not a simple reflex which produces this behaviour for that stimulus. Instead, as Peter Kalivas, Lynn Churchill and Anasatasia Romanides have shown, it involves higher-order processing designed to organise behaviour to maximise survival. (1999)

In the case of our staggering adolescent, that survival learning is aimed towards adulthood rather than the present. The adolescent therefore has changed his or her motivational drive from the childhood one of playing to promote non-participatory learning about adult experiences, to participation in novel adult experiences, but without the benefit of contextual experiential knowledge to guide decision making. (See the work of Jaak Panksepp (1998), and Michael Shaughnessy and Janna Siegel (1995) for more on this.)

Dopamine is also the central neurochemical involved in our higher-order processing. It is secreted predominantly in the frontal and temporal cortices, as well as deeper brain structures such as the basal ganglia and hippocampi. Increased dopamine activity in the frontal lobes is what you experience when you’ve drunk alcohol, or smoked cannabis or a cigarette, or in fact ingested virtually any chemical that makes you momentarily feel different in a way you enjoy. As we all know, anyone who’s frontal lobes are under the influence of chemicals is usually not making the best decisions.

That, of course, leads to another and more worrying fact: there’s a growing body of research evidence to show that adolescence represents a period of heightened biological vulnerability, perhaps because of the relative increase in dopamine activity, to the addictive properties of illegal and legally sanctioned substances, as Chambers, Taylor and Potenza have suggested. (2003)

Your teenaged students are therefore experiencing a very significant change in their neurochemical profile in directions that promote risk-taking behaviour combined with the potential for poorer judgment, and that also leave them vulnerable to developing addictive behaviours.
This isn’t all that adolescents have to contend with. At the same time, and perhaps interlinked with, the relative increase in dopamine activity in their brains, they are also undergoing the surge of hormones that will transform them from the relative androgyny of childhood to being fully sexually active members of adult society. Yes, I mean puberty.
Research has shown that surges in sex hormones contribute to greater sexual motivation and sensitivity to novel sexual stimuli – no big surprise there – but also to sensitivity to novel social stimuli and aggression.

This last point deserves a little thought, however, before you jump onto some bandwagon about teenage aggression. Testosterone is often the first suspect in the line up as the hormone that triggers aggression, ‘testosterone-driven males’ being a classic and almost always derogatory example. But recent work by Martin Ramirez actually suggests that higher testosterone levels in males should be regarded as a marker of social success in a given context rather than of social maladjustment. (2002) Conversely, lower testosterone levels are associated with social failure. It’s also possible, argue Paul Brain and Elizabeth Susman, that higher testosterone levels may be a consequence and not a cause of aggression. (1996)

On the broader front of sex hormones in general, Martin Ramirez has shown that psychosocial environmental stressful situations can affect sex hormone levels. (2002) The effect on sex hormone levels helps the individual deal with the stress, but also plays a role in aggression. What does all this add up to? It means that high testosterone levels, as well as other sex hormones, do not per se trigger aggressive responses, although they do make an aggressive response more likely. Rather, they are adaptive processes created by environmental stresses to help the individual deal with stressful situations.

How does this shake down to the school environment? Simple really. When adolescents are in an environment where they are being threatened and stressed, their levels of testosterone will rise in response to this threat. This, in turn, will make it more likely that they’ll respond aggressively.

So next time a teenager drives you wild and you end up nose to nose with them stop and have a think. You’re an adult with stable neurochemistry. Why are you acting in a way that makes it much more difficult for the adolescent to learn the most important lessons in life – how to be a successful adult?

For further hints and tips on dealing with teenagers in the classroom, see Three Chairs,  a Table and a Lamp, a DVD published by Crown House Publishing

Andrew Curran is a paediatric neurologist based in the United Kingdom. He lectures widely in the educational sector on brain-based learning and emotional literacy through his connections with Independent Thinking.

References
Brain, P.F. & Susman, E.J. (1996) ‘Hormonal aspects of antisocial behaviour and violence,’ in Handbook of antisocial behaviour, Stoff, D.M., Breiling, J. & Maser J. eds., Laurence Erlbaum: Hillsdale: 314-323.
Chambers, R.A., Taylor, J. R. & Potenza, M. N. (2003) ‘Developmental Neurocircuitry of Motivation in Adolescence: A critical period of addiction vulnerability.’ American Journal of Psychiatry. 160(6): 1041-1052.
Kalivas, P.W., Churchill, L. & Romanides, A. (1999) ‘Involvement of the pallidal-thalamocortical circuit in adaptive behavior.’ Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences .877: 64-70.
Males, M. (1994) ‘Bashing youth: media myths about teenagers.’ Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting: Extra! (March/April) Retrieved 9 February, 2007 from http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1224
Panksepp, J. (1998) Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human & Animal Emotions. Oxford University Press: New York.
Ramirez, J.M. (2002,) ‘Hormones and aggression in childhood and adolescence. ‘Aggression and Violent Behaviour. 266: 1-24.
Siegel, J. & Shaughnessy, M. F. (1995) ‘There’s a first time for everything: understanding adolescence.’ Adolescence. 30(117): 217-221.