Nalaris wrote:National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH) wrote:Another series of MRI studies is shedding light on how teens may process emotions differently than adults. Using functional MRI (fMRI), a team led by Dr. Deborah Yurgelun-Todd at Harvard's McLean Hospital scanned subjects' brain activity while they identified emotions on pictures of faces displayed on a computer screen.5 Young teens, who characteristically perform poorly on the task, activated the amygdala, a brain center that mediates fear and other "gut" reactions, more than the frontal lobe. As teens grow older, their brain activity during this task tends to shift to the frontal lobe, leading to more reasoned perceptions and improved performance. Similarly, the researchers saw a shift in activation from the temporal lobe to the frontal lobe during a language skills task, as teens got older. These functional changes paralleled structural changes in temporal lobe white matter.
Tadaa! Scientific proof that teenagers will react more with gut insticts than higher thought and rationalization. Do we really want to unleash that on our sophisticated society? I admit, treating all teenagers as guilty until proven innocent is a breach of justice, but still, my point stands.
Ok... Having spent the last year studying this, I will now proceed to fill this post with academic studies that have shown the ability of teenagers to make rational, weighted choices, and are fully at grasp with their own emotions and descisions.
Chidlress, H (2000)
Landscapes of betrayal, landscapes of joy : Curtisville in the lives of its teenagers Albany : State University of New York Press: Showed very clearly the maturity of teenagers in descision making, and their constant frustration at being confronted by the two tier system which sees both teenagers as criminals, and guilty, and at the same time, as being 'too young' to make 'proper' descisions.
Gill Valentine has written extensively on childhood. Her studies, both as books and academic papers, cover the way in which childhood, and the assumptions it brings, are purely modern, western inventions. She has expanded this theory to fit many of her studies. The theory itself, being linked to the seminal work by Phillipe Aries'
Centuries of Chldhood (1962) which shows very clearly that the concept of childhood and teenager as seperate life stages did not exist until at least the 17th Century, and did not take it's current form until the Victorian era.
150 years ago - teenagers, those 14 and above, were regularly working, getting married, living 'adult' lives. Clearly seen to be able to make rational, adult descisions.
Has there been so much change in the neural physiology of humans in the past Century that teenagers are somehow less 'rational'? Or maybe the 'science' you posted is just utter crap? And badly mis-quoted by yourself.
Let's leave sociology and the like aside now, seeing that you seem to like the neurology and biology side of things.
Shaw et al. Recently (March 2006) Produced
Intellectual ability and cortical development in children and adolescents (NATURE 440 (7084): 676-679) Which showed how cortical development is closely linked to intelligence. They concluded that cortical development was not predicated by age, and that cortical development between children, adolescents and adults was dynamic, in that it was not possible to seperate the development of the brain or intelligence by age of the subject.
O'Donnel et al. (2005)
Cortical thickness of the frontopolar area in typically developing children and adolescents Neuroimage, Vol. 24(4): Show clearly how, yes, the brain develops over childhood. We all know that. But, what they confirm, which is the generally understood position amoing neurobiologists, is that whilst there is development over age most 'adult' features of the brain are firmly in place at the onset of adolescents, and there is little brain development between then and 'adulthood'. What they also confirm, is that the differences between development of children the same ages are great, and that whilst the brain develops over time, it does os at very different rates for different people.
Casey, Galvan and Hare (2005)
Changes in cerebral functional organization during cognitive development -Current Opinion in Neurobiology Volume 15, Issue 2-: Again, show that some brain development is correlated with age, primarily the cognitive areas. What they note, however, is that other developments, those which are arguably the 'social' parts of the brain, are not correlated with age. They are much more specific to the individual and other factors.
I can go on, if you'd like?
Do we really want to unleash that on our sophisticated society?
A sophisticated society is one which has space for considering teenagers as mentaly and intelligently equal as adults. A sophisticated society is one which does not mark all people of a similar age with the same brush, and does not see age as a pre-requisite for rationality, or intelligence. A sophisticated society is one which can accept that teenagers are fully functional human beings who are the experts on their own experiences, and are thus in the best position to make descisions on what affects them. A sophisticated society is one which is not based upon, or even has the space to accommodate the bigoted, predjudiced, short-sighted and disgustingly intollerant outlook that you put forward.
Whoever you vote for.
The government wins.
I know that a lot of 16-year-olds drive like idiots, but not being able to drive yourself at 16 would be so inconvenient. Old people can be just as bad drivers, so where's the upper age restrictions?
