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This was published in Scientific
American Mind, April 2007. You can
read the entire article at sciammind.com. Here is the last page of the article. The Truth about Teens If teen chaos is not inevitable, and if
such difficulty cannot legitimately be blamed on a faulty brain, just what is
the truth about teens? The truth is
that they are extraordinarily competent, even if they do not normally express
the competence. Research I conducted
with Dumas shows, for example, that teens are as competent or virtually as
competent as adults across a wide range of adult abilities. And long-standing studies of intelligence,
perceptual abilities and memory function show that teens are in many
instances far superior to adults. Visual acuity, for example, peaks around
the time of puberty. “Incidental
memory” – the kind of memory that occurs automatically, without any mnemonic
effort, peaks at about age 12 and declines through life. By the time we are in our 60s, we remember
relatively little “incidentally,” which is one reason many older people have trouble
mastering new technologies. In the 1940s
pioneering intelligence researcher J.C. Raven and David Wechsler, relying on
radically different kinds of intelligence test, each showed that raw scores
on intelligence tests peak between age 13 and 15 and decline after that
throughout life. Although verbal
expertise and some forms of judgment can remain strong throughout life, the
extraordinary cognitive abilities of teens, and especially their ability to learn
new things rapidly, is beyond question.
And whereas brain size is not necessarily a good indication of
processing ability, it is notable that recent scanning data … show that brain
volume peaks at about age 14. By the
time we are 70 years old, our brain has shrunk to the size it had been when
we were about three. [I hope this did
happen to me.] Findings of this kind make ample sense
when you think about teenagers from an evolutionary perspective. Mammals bear their young shortly after
puberty, and until very recently so have members of our species. No matter how they appear or perform,
teens must be incredibly capable, or it is doubtful the human race
could ever exist. Today, with teens trapped in the
frivolous world of peer culture, they learn virtually everything they know
from one another rather than from the people they are about to become. Isolated from adults and wrongly treated
like children, it is no wonder that some teens behave, by adult standards,
recklessly or irresponsibly. Almost without
exception, the reckless and irresponsible behavior we see is the teen’s way
of declaring his or her adulthood or, through pregnancy or the commission of
serious crime, of instantly becoming an adult under the law. Fortunately, we also know from extensive
research both in the U.S. and elsewhere that when we treat teens like adults,
they almost immediately rise to the challenge. We need to replace the myth of the immature teen brain with a frank look at capable and savvy teens in history, at teens in other cultures and at the truly extraordinary potential of our own young people today. When we treat teens like adults, they almost immediately rise to the challenge. Source: Scientific American Mind, April 2007 |
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