The mysteries behind teenagers brain and behavior
In a sense, teenage brains are prepared for some tasks in the future, and some skills are being learned to prepare them for adult life. With practice and practice, the pruning period of the brain's neurons will continue, the brain will gradually abolish those neurons and dendrites that are not used, make those often used neurons stronger, and increase the efficiency of information transmission through myelinated axons . Children begin to enter puberty when they are 10 to 12 years old. The brains of adolescent children are very plastic, including the "use it or lose it" of some brain neurons, which is similar to "reintegrating oneself". In the end, the effect of brain reintegration was determined by two factors: first, which neurons teens frequently used through adolescence, and second, what they experienced during the 10 years of adolescence. On the one hand, adolescent brains are primed to learn about a variety of experiences, and on the other hand, they are unable to independently make choices about those experiences. Just like the risky situations we talked about earlier, when adolescents consider risky activities, it is the frontal lobes that process information. Still, when they thought, their assessment of risk-taking was in a hypothetical state compared to adult thinking. So why do they engage in more risky behaviors than adults? This is why neuroscientists have come up with cognitive theories of "heating" and "cooling". "Heat cognition" refers to the thinking that teens engage in when they are in a state of intense arousal, with the frontal lobes in a state of high arousal. It's like you disagree with your teenage kid's reaction when he goes to an all-night beach party. You're full of potential dangers, and he's full of the benefits of camping. For a teen, anything that can arouse his emotions—fear that others won’t play with him, acting cool, feeling bad about some people, disagreeing with parents—can lead to “heat treatment.” "type thinking (that is, lack of rational thinking). So, from that point of view, it also helps to understand why sometimes children seem mature and reasonable, and sometimes moody and demanding, like a 5-year-old does. It also reminds us why parents need to keep teens in a state of "cooling" thinking when communicating and discussing with them. However, strong emotional responses from parents often trigger emotional responses in adolescents. That is what we often say, the irrational behavior of the parents is the "catalyst" for the emotional response of the child.