Moving on from 7–9 year olds’ bizarre ideas about water consumption, John Scott alerted me last month to a new book investigating why it is that teenage boys so often appear to take the craziest of risks. This is especially concerning if you are the parent of an allergic teenage boy leaving home and coping with his food allergies on his own for the first time.
Three American researchers, Pradeep Bhide, Barry Kasofky and BJ Casey from Florida State College, and Weill Medical College at Cornell, have pulled together the results of 19 studies looking at the problem from multiple scientific angles, including psychology, neurochemistry, brain imaging, clinical neuroscience and neurobiology. Their conclusions have been published in a book, “Teenage Brains: Think Different?” You can see the table of contents here.
I am afraid that I have not read the book but the points that leapt out from the report in Science Daily suggested that:
• A molecule that is known to be vital in developing a fear of dangerous situations (an anaphylactic allergic reaction?….) is much less active in adolescent male brains.
• Magnetic scanner resonance readings of the brains of teenage boys showed that, when confronted with a threat, the level of activity in their limbic brains (the part of the brain that controls emotions when confronted with a threat) was significantly different to the level of activity in the brains of adult men – even when the boys had been told not to respond to the threat.
• Brain activity measurements shows that teenage boys were all but immune to the threat of punishment but hypersensitive to the possibility of large gains from gambling. (Not entirely sure how this could be adapted to help allergy awareness, but maybe there is a way.)
I do also remember reading a report years ago suggesting that the part of the male brain which deals with organising one’s diary, not losing one’s keys, sorting out one’s dirty washing, remembering to phone Gran and all of those boring domestic necessities, does not actually develop until they are over 25. Make you feel slightly better about your entirely useless and disorganised early 20s son?….