 Good afternoon and welcome to likeable science here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host Ethan Allen. Thanks for joining us today. Today we're sort of continuing from last week actually. Same guest is on. Again, joining us from Ecuador is Dr. Tracy Tokama. Welcome Tracy. Thank you very much. Thank you Ethan. Thanks for coming back again and talking. We had a good conversation about sleep last week. We couldn't sleep and we talked some more and decided we were going to do some more neuroscience, both of our favorite topic here. So today we're going to be talking about the myths of the adolescent brain and people have a lot of misconceptions about teenagers and adolescents and their brains and all the crazy things that teenagers do and how their brains are sort of driving them wonky. And so we thought we should maybe Tracy will fill us in on some of the latest research and we can clear up some of these ideas. Anyhow, thank you very much. I appreciate you're coming on in here. So let me just start. I mean teenagers' brains in some ways are different, right? Teenagers and adolescents are going through some changes in their lives typically. They're growing, they're having hormonal changes, they're exploring more of the world, their behaviors are changing, their capacities are enlarging. So not surprisingly some of their brains are changing, right? Oh yeah, absolutely. And all of our brains change throughout the lifespan. And definitely teen brains are going through something very special related to, as you point out, specifically hormonal changes. But this idea of adolescence, it's so interesting. We talked a little bit last week about how all mammals dream. Well, all mammals also go through adolescence, which is kind of an interesting idea, sort of pushing boundaries. But a lot of it is to figure out, you know, their place in the group, which is kind of an interesting idea, right? So yes, there are changes and now with better technology, we can measure things that change chemically, mainly also with electrical signals, but mainly in these neural networks that are getting refined. So that leads to some of those myths about, you know, parts of the brain aren't just mature. Well, all the brain parts are actually mature. What's not mature are those networks that refine better decision-making processes, for example. Right, right. It's sort of the difference that anatomically all the structures are in place and the neurons are all there. They're even hooking up, making connections. But those connections haven't been built and refined and strengthened and weakened appropriately to give that final network that an adult more or less becomes more or less stable in adulthood, although it still can change for it. Exactly. And also, you know, this fragile stage is really because of these changes in hormones. There's also a greater susceptibility to certain things like the reward mechanisms in the brain, what motivates you, what gets you, you know, going or keeps you, you know, interested in things. These can be shaped a lot by life experiences. And so some of that can be wonderful and some of that is actually dangerous because maybe early experimentation or changing, for example, intake of drugs and alcohol can change the reward mechanisms in the brain for good, which means that you're going to basically set up a wiring of your brain that might not be ideal. And so this is one of the worries because you would be tempted to maybe have some of these, you know, pushing the boundary kind of things, it can have long-lasting negative effects. So, and that's one of the things that we try to look at when we consider the teen brain or we really now see the adolescent brain because adolescence is considered this period, this time period. It's not the teens. It's not 13, 14. Because the onset of puberty is now labeled, believe it or not, by the National Institute of Health and Girls. Onset of puberty is between 8 and 13 years of age and boys is, you know, 9 to 14. So we've really stretched it well beyond just the teen years. But these are important times and important changing times in people's lives. Right. And the environment is critical, right? I mean, we're all endowed with genes that predispose us to certain things, we'll help our brains develop in certain ways. But the experiences that we go through early in life, pre-adolescents are certainly critical in shaping our brains and they continue to impact the brain's function, not direct structure, during adolescence, right? So bad stress, chronic stress can have tremendous impacts on later brain functioning. Even bad stress very early in life, but bad stress during teenage years likely I think can have the same kind of impacts or at least, again, very negative impacts certainly. Yeah, absolutely. And so, I mean, there's a big, there's a nice saying, a big idea here in neuroscience is that, you know, your brain adapts to what it does most and early experiences that are repeated over and over again basically will set up wiring for things that could be negative in the long-term. As you say, stress hormones can actually have a really negative effect on connectivity in the brain. But the good news is that, you know, we talk about, we used to say nature, you know, or nurture, is that the question? Are you your genes? Are you your environment? And now we say, when you look at this field of epigenetics, it's more like nature via nurture plus free will. So you are who you are because of the genes you inherited from your parents. And only a fraction of those are actually going to be potentiated due to the environment you live in. But there's also this very big idea that you also get to choose. You know, you have a decision in all of this, you're not just your biology and you're not just the conditions of your home, you can choose, which is a really powerful message to send to kids these days. Yeah, and that's particularly true in adolescence, right? Pre-adolescence, a lot of kids don't, they don't understand, they can choose, they don't feel like they have much power or much choice over things. They are being told what to do, their lives are being run and controlled by people around them, adults around them. But in adolescence, this idea begins to come in that you have some responsibility for your own actions, you will have some self-efficacy, you realize you can often do things on your own. And so that, then you begin your behaviors, your choices begin shaping your own environment. And that in turn then shapes that the connectivity, that refinement of these neural networks. And yes, if things are very disempowering to you, if you are still, if you still are controlled by others or your environment, you're constantly having to search for food or safety or shelter or whatever, that's going to give, that's going to result in very different networks than if you have a supportive safe home, safe school environment, can learn and can hang out with friends and enjoy life and explore things in a sort of safe way, right? Absolutely. And I think that also we sort of set up expectations as you're saying, you know, sort of depending on your environment in the home that you're in or whatever, the supportive environment we hope everybody has, but we know some people don't necessarily have that. But one of the other things that's kind of tempting is because society has this general myth that all teens go crazy or whatever, that it almost creates an excuse. And so many kids sort of to live up to the expectations, human beings generally live up or down to the expectations that are placed on them, right? So if we just presume, well, that's the way all, you know, all teenagers do that or whatever, it sort of gives people a pass. And that's another myth about the brain. And, you know, very few adolescents actually really go off the rails and are crazy, right? Very few really do that. And so it's one of those things that we say almost as if it's expected. And when you expect a behavior of people, it's more likely to occur. So we have to be very careful about those messages as well. Sure. I mean, there is certainly statistically some truth for it. If you look at the Darwin Awards, for instance, that as people who take themselves out of the gene pool, almost all the Darwin Award winners are men between the ages of about 18 and 30, you know, very few women on the list, very few older men on the list. They're virtually all young men, you know. That's right. Who are making bad decisions typically in these, you often hear the last thing that they say is, I wonder what happens, yes. Well, that's also one of those very interesting things that things it's very powerful about now telling kids, you know what, it's not that your frontal lobes aren't developed, your frontal lobes are totally developed. What's not developed is your decision making networks. And what is so empowering about that is that it's you can do something about it now that we know that, okay, we need to rehearse those decision making mechanisms more. That means that we can actually do activities with kids that help them make safe experiments and then make better decisions. Because you'll often find those same boys if you say, well, didn't you think about, you know, the consequences and they'll basically say, no, because the whole idea of cause and effect hasn't really kicked in, right? So rehearsing that is one way around that. Yeah, I mean, I like that idea that decision making is a learned skill fundamentally and anyone can and teenagers are at an optimal age to learn that so they won't make stupid decisions on make considered rational smart decisions. And yeah, it's so that that's an interesting difference in between the functional maturity, but the, as you sort of say, the network lack of refinement of the networks, you know, that distinction has not always been clear. Well, that's one of the newer findings and believe it or not, last February, one of the long standing researchers, one of the most famous fellows doing this and really brilliant mind is Jay Geed in California. He's one of the few to do longitudinal studies on teen brains. And one of his big aha moments was that you know what we it's easy to use, you know, the simple metaphor that parts of your brain are working or, you know, your reptilian brain dominates your, you know, rational brain, but that's not true. And it's actually very powerful to parents and teachers to support the teens or the adolescents in their lives with the idea that, you know, it's it's actually those decision making networks that we have to work on. Okay, so let's, you know, do a t charts and what are some pros and cons about doing this? What would be good about it? What would be bad about it? You know, or let's do scenario planning. If this happens, what would happen next, right? Or even simulations, things that you can do by going to the movies with your kids and sort of saying, wow, you know, when that, when that girl, you know, got pregnant, you know, that really changed her life, didn't it? Right? So you can sort of live through something without having to make, you know, make them, you know, live the whole negative themselves, they can actually see how others cope with it. And those types of skill sets are things that are definitely developed. And those are things that we as the adults in these kids lives really have a powerful way to influence their, their quicker, they're speeding through this stage of needing to experiment and find my boundaries. Well, let's do that in a safer way, through some of these decision making exercises. Right, this is, it seems to me, this is actually related to this new idea that intelligence is actually not a fixed given quantity, you're not born with x i q, you know, you actually intelligence is a matter of, again, exercising parts of your brain, trying out different ways of thinking, making decisions, making calculations and making considerations, keeping in mind different, different factors as we're reflecting on how we were thinking and learning to think better all the time. And thus, yes, you get a sort of dynamic, dynamic brains that are dynamic intelligence instead. And this is you're talking about is very similar, right? Oh, absolutely. Intelligence is definitely fluid. It changes the more you know, the more you can know. So the way you know things changes the way you can know the next thing. And so the more life experiences you have, I mean, that's what your brain is asking for, which is also why sometimes, you know, you get adolescence, you know, sort of pushing the boundaries of things, just trying to figure out, you know, what are the boundaries there? What are what are the, the, the, the, the, the sort of decision making mechanisms I have to put into play in order to stay safe, but at the same time have those intense life experiences that we're all seeking, right? So yeah, intelligence is definitely fluid. And it is part of this whole decision making network, decision making and understanding how you do make decisions and how you think about things is this general medicognitive ability that we hopefully develop throughout our lifespan? Yes, exactly. I like that idea of decision making as a skill. And like any skill, the first few serious decisions you make, you're liable not to make particularly good ones. You know, the first time you get behind the wheel of a car, you're probably not an ace driver. You probably shouldn't go out and try to drive quickly through five o'clock traffic in LA, you know, that that would be a bad thing to do. You should start out, you know, getting behind the wheel in an empty parking lot on Sunday morning, right? And learning about how you do and how you steer the car. And same thing with decision making, right? You want to practice it. Oh yeah, and that's exactly, that's what the parents, that's what we as parents and as teachers can help with, right? Because we know some of these tools, right? We know, you know, even the smallest thing, you know, should we go out to dinner tonight at, you know, X place or Y? Well, what would be good about going here and what would be bad about going here? Well, this one's cheaper, but this one's more tastier. This will take longer or shorter. But helping kids sort of work through these kind of planning in their own head, how do they actually come to make good choices? And next time it won't be about, you know, where to eat dinner on a Friday night, maybe it'll be, you know, something bigger, you know, do I, ooh, I did have a beer, do I go out and drive now or something like that, they'll be able to have, they'll make better choices just because they've rehearsed that kind of circuitry in the brain, which is something that definitely is not a natural. It does not come without experience. And so our job is to help them have the safer experience possible, the safest way to get through the experimentation stage. Exactly. Exactly. And speaking of choices, we have no choice right now, but to go off to a little one minute break. Tracy Tokahama is with me today from Equador. She's a Harvard professor of neuroscience. And she and I will both be back to talk more about myths of the adolescent brain in one minute. Aloha. This is Winston Welch. I am your host of Out and About, where every other week, Mondays at 3, we explore a variety of topics in our city, state, nation and world and events, organizations, the people that fuel them. It's a really interesting show. We welcome you to tune in and we welcome your suggestions for shows. You got a lot of them out there and we have an awesome studio here where we can get your ideas out as well. So I look forward to you tuning in every other week where we've got some great guests and great topics. You're going to learn a lot. You're going to come away inspired like I do. So I'll see you every other week here at 3 o'clock on Monday afternoon. Aloha. Aloha. My name is Chip Fletcher. I'm at the University of Hawaii School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology. I'm here to tell you about the four key things you can do to combat climate change. Have smaller families, eat a more plant-based diet, drive less and fly airplanes less. Thank you very much for your time. Good afternoon and welcome back to the second half of Likeable Science here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host Ethan Allen, joining me today from Quito, Ecuador, Dr. Tracy Tokama. Welcome again, Tracy. Thank you. Great to have you back. We were before the before the break, we were talking about the adolescent brain and about decision making and all and how this is a real skill that should be developed and it's not the brain itself isn't sort of connected up. The brain has made a lot of connections to matter of have those connections been sort of pruned and the network's been strengthened and practiced as you through a basically a set of skill development, ongoing practice, making small decisions and bigger decisions and decisions in different ways, in different forms, considering different costs and the different benefits, the different potential upsides and downsides of the decisions, right? This is all great and it is very empowering to teach kids and again it gets back to this general intelligence thing. I've talked a little bit about this before about teaching metacognitive skills to younger kids. Kids are quite capable of realizing, I think, and learning to think about their thinking, learning to reflect back on how they came to certain decisions, how do they figure out this problem? How did they, why did they end up choosing this rather than that? If they're trained that way from early, early age they can then, this is again, it's right, it's right into your idea of making a practicing decision making, right? Oh, absolutely because also this, it's much more proactive because before we've been thinking for the past 20 years that the adolescent brain just isn't mature and we just have to wait for those frontal lobes to kick in and that is really helpless, isn't it? You can't really do much but you can be very proactive now if you realize that the new thinking on this is not an underdeveloped part of the brain but actually the rehearsal of certain networks that needs to kick in based on the experiences we can give kids as far as, you know, just practicing, you know, what are the pros and cons and what is the basic scenario of this and what would happen if? All of those kinds of things are pretty simple to work in your everyday conversations but they can make a huge difference in whether or not that kid makes that, you know, fatal mistake, you know, just trying to experiment his way out of trying to find those boundaries of his own decision making without doing that safely within the context of our own schools or homes. Yeah, yeah, this is, it's great stuff that kids should learn, they have that power, they can think about this, they can make these decisions, they can practice this, they can learn these skills and become better at them. You know, this is, this is, you as a teenager, yes, you are sort of washing hormones that your brain isn't used to sort of dealing with and that is going to change your perceptions and change the way you think but nonetheless it's not, it's not that you are helplessly washing them, right? You are washing them but you still get, you still can assume some control over it and assume some responsibility for your actions and, yeah, behave responsibly. Well, you mentioned something earlier when we were talking about, you know, the, it's usually these teenager teenage boys that sort of go off. Well, one of the very interesting things that goes back to one of the very first things you mentioned about the changes in hormonal balance which is very interesting. Most people misunderstand, you know, chemicals or hormones are basically how your brain makes decisions. Men and women have the same hormones. What's so fascinating is that we have them in different proportions and it seems to be that because of that, the greater risk taking does seem to happen in general with males but it doesn't necessarily always happen that way and I guess that sort of brings up this other myth about, okay, the, you know, teenage brain is just sort of wired that way. It's not the brain itself, you know, it's really is this balance of hormones and even that is not so different. I'm not sure if we have that graphic there about the female and male crossover there but the very interesting thing to note is Cordelia Fine who's done a whole lot of work. She's a neuroscientist who's tried to understand differences between male and female brains and basically comes to the conclusion that there are greater differences between or among all of the females in the world and among all the males in the world than there are between men and women in the world and so when we make these vast generalizations about, you know, well, you know, always the teenage boy, he does those things, yes and no and we have to kind of be careful with those things because again when I what I mentioned about this idea of, you know, people living up to the expectations you sort of get a pass if you're a teenage boy because we think you're gonna do things the truth of the matter is there's it's not necessarily due to your gender it's not necessarily due to other things like that but we do have to accept that the there is a difference in hormones based on gender and also that males tend to mature slightly slower than females and so there's a lot of things that happen even socially trying to catch up with the group because boys will mature a little bit slower and so there's a lot of things that work come into play here for that but I think it's we should we should not go into this simplicity that saying that it's just one thing or another there's a lot going on in the brain right right and it is a very nuanced balance again your your genes have predisposed you to certain behaviors your environment has shaped you in other ways but you still have this this basic concept of free will that you are a thinking sentient being and you can make decisions and ultimately you are going to have to live with them so yeah how much that you want to defer off to somebody else versus take on yourself is a is a nuanced point for for anyone right oh absolutely absolutely yeah but I gather now that there's really some people actually trying to do a study it's it goes by the acronym of ABCD the adolescent brain cognitive development study where they are going to try to try to really monitor brain development from a group of relatively young people before nine or 10 years old and monitor them for 10 or 15 years or something yeah this was a planned back in 2015 and the ABCD project again mentioning I mentioned Jay Geed who's one of these great leaders in this field is is really tried to look at the long-term benefits we realize that many many things do happen in these adolescent years and one of the bigger red flags was that for example early drug or alcohol abuse in the early years the earlier you start abusing substances the greater the probability you'll have long-term problems with that right as we mentioned before it does rewire you know reward mechanisms in the brain and so but we didn't really we don't have enough evidence to do this and so this project is trying to track down about 10 000 people in the united states to follow them for 10 years to figure out what goes on with alcohol marijuana tobacco and other drugs and see what really is happening as far as changes in the brain which is going to be fascinating and so we're just in the first early years of this but they're already starting to put out some studies and this is wonderful because part of this is to give us usable knowledge which which teachers and parents can use because they're often closer whereas you have you know the medical doctor or the person or psychiatrist or psychologist they'll take a kid to they're not that close to the scene and they don't see that kid develop over time whereas parents and teachers do and so the idea is to pull from this study usable knowledge of use observable traits that could actually be shared with teachers and with parents so that they can actually you know head off some of these problems that are that can potentially occur during adolescence. Sure and presumably that study they're also going to be looking at things like like self-reported stress levels that these participants are under their self-reported happiness and satisfaction with life because these things again are going to be big impacts on as you can be maybe doing some drugs and be very happy and satisfied versus not doing any drugs but being under a lot of stress all the time and those two are very you know very different scenarios so yeah and it's going to be very interesting in in these days this is a very big I would say a watershed moment in terms of educational psychology is that finally um mental health has become you know something an issue that everybody's willing to talk about and that schools are really taking on as far as trying to train in social emotional learning and helping understand that the teacher is not just in teaching subjects but helping kids grow and and become you know the best citizens that they could possibly be at all different levels including things um like you know a self-reported sense of happiness or sadness and one of the things we are seeing is this increase in self-reported depressive states or anxious states and there's a lot of debate going on right now where is this coming from is this being triggered by something that's happening in the brain or is this something that our environment is extra stressful or is it simply that um it's now okay to say I'm feeling depressed or something like and that people are now um more open about that and so all of those things are really um being looked at now a lot more seriously than they have in the past there's a lot more financing going into actually looking at this because the issues of mental health have now really started to come to the forefront which is wonderful yeah and all this now plays in with the whole new realm of technologies and communication technologies which have blown up so much in the last decade with kids now having much greater access to huge networks of people all around the world different walks of life different circumstances and how that access is going to impact their their well-being here there's obviously a sort of thousand new factors in in this in this equation as it were yeah well there's actually this study by by mills you know she was trying to have a look at it what are the effects of the internet on the adolescent brain and I think there was a slide on that as well that was sort of pointing this idea she's asking the question the elephant in the room everybody's saying oh the you know science has changed so much technology has changed so much the internet is really what's pushing kids you know to to take risks or do whatever and what is fascinating is that the bottom line of her study is actually no and in fact she goes back you know thousands of years to even quote good old play-doh and talk about socrates discussion of you know how wild adolescents were back in the time and how you know their brains are going to change because now they're going to write and they're not going to need to remember things because they can pass this onto paper and so there's been this fear for thousands of years we've always feared technology which is really I guess it's it's it's healthy to have that you know healthy skepticism but the bottom line is in her research she's actually found almost no evidence to support the claim that technology is messing up you know adolescent brains which is fascinating that is fascinating and it's fascinating that our technology is telling me that we are at the end of our show here unfortunately so we're gonna have to have to call call it quits thank you uh Tracy Tokahama has been generously giving her her time here and and enlightening us about the adolescent brain here miss the adolescent brain thank you so much for being with me Tracy really enjoyed it thank you very much it was a pleasure thank you very much and we hope you'll come back next week when there'll be another episode of likable science here on think tech hawai until then I'm Ethan Allen signing off