The Teenage Brain: A neuroscientist’s survival guide to raising adolescents and young adults. Frances Jensen E.

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СКАЧАТЬ young teens between the ages of eleven and sixteen have had to cope at one time or another with a friend who was sick, injured, or unconscious owing to excessive alcohol consumption. Half of those had to deal with a friend who passed out. More broadly, the survey found that nine out of ten adolescents have had to deal with some kind of crisis involving another person during their teenage years—a head injury, choking, an asthma attack, an epileptic seizure, etc. Forty-four percent of the teens surveyed admitted to panicking in that emergency situation, and nearly half (46 percent) acknowledged they didn’t know how to respond to the crisis at all.

      Dan Gordon, a fifteen-year-old boy from Hampshire, England, who was interviewed by the Guardian for a story about the study, spoke about a house party he attended at which there was widespread underage drinking. After one girl passed out on the floor, facedown, she began to vomit, and the others in the room, all teenagers, panicked. Thinking only that they needed to prevent her from choking, they stood her up and, with effort, walked her outside for fresh air and waited for her to wake up. Dan admitted to the reporter that neither he nor anyone else at the party had thought to call for an ambulance. In other words, the teenagers’ amygdalae had signaled danger, but their frontal lobes didn’t respond. Instead, the teens acted in the moment.

      My son Andrew witnessed something similar during college. He was visiting his then-girlfriend at a college in Boston. The girlfriend’s roommate also had an out-of-town visitor, a shy freshman girl from the South who quickly became intoxicated at a party in another student’s room. When Andrew and his girlfriend returned to her dorm, they found the young girl passed out, and just as in Dan Gordon’s story, they all panicked. Instead of calling 911 or campus security, or driving her to an emergency room, they found a couple of friends to help, and then drove all the way out to our house, about ten miles away.

      “We didn’t want to call campus security,” Andrew’s girlfriend explained, as I observed the young girl, whom they had helped into the house and who was now almost unresponsive. “She’s a freshman. If we brought her to the health center, me and my roommate could get in trouble.”

      Andrew and his former girlfriend were both twenty-one at the time, but the visiting student was just eighteen.

      “What about taking her to the hospital?” I said.

      “We didn’t know how drunk she was,” the other friend said. “She was talking when we put her in the car, and now she’s completely out of it.”

      None of them in fact knew the girl—they had met her briefly for the first time earlier that day, when she had arrived to visit the roommate. She had her wallet and an ID from her South Carolina college with her, but no other information. The roommate who had invited her to Boston was nowhere to be found. Already drowsy, she was rapidly becoming more sedated, and then she vomited on the floor. At that point, I insisted they get her to a local community hospital just a mile from our house. It took three of them to half-carry her back to the car. About fifteen minutes later, I got a call from Andrew’s girlfriend, who said the hospital was going to admit the girl for observation. The poor thing spent an unhappy night in the hospital, and the college crew picked her up the next afternoon. On their way back to Boston, they stopped by my house to gather things they had left there the night before. The young freshman looked pale and very tired, but otherwise was fine. Apparently her blood alcohol level had peaked at 0.34, which was more than four times the legal driving limit, and life threatening. Had she not been taken to the hospital, where her stomach was pumped and charcoal administered to prevent her body from absorbing any more alcohol, I shudder to think of what might have happened. As I had a captive audience, I sat them all down in the kitchen, turned on my laptop, and showed them a chart about blood alcohol levels and the effects on coordination and consciousness. I pointed out that 0.4, which was only a little more than her blood alcohol reached at its height, can be lethal. Turns out she had done about seventeen Jell-O shots that evening—to the best of her memory. There was no point in asking the usual question—“What were you thinking?”—but I felt this was a good teaching moment to show them all how close she had come to a very different end the night before.

      The young girl recovered and hopefully learned her lesson, but obviously the consequences of poor decision-making can be, and often are, disastrous for teens. Bennett Barber was sixteen years old on New Year’s Eve 2008 when he left an unsupervised party at a friend’s house in Marblehead, Massachusetts, and began to walk home. It was around 11:30 p.m., snow was falling, and the wind was gusting up to thirty miles per hour. Dressed in jeans and sneakers, Bennett was drunk and disoriented, and although his home was only a half mile away, he became lost. With the temperature plunging into single digits, Bennett eventually collapsed, face-first, into a snowbank. At three o’clock in the morning his mother notified the police, and a search party was sent out into the subfreezing night. Hours later, a firefighter discovered a beer bottle in the snow and followed a blurry set of footprints. When he found Bennett, the boy was semiconscious and suffering from hypothermia. He was also missing a sneaker and a sock. The high school hockey player was taken by ambulance to Massachusetts General Hospital, where his core temperature was only 88 degrees and his right foot appeared to be frozen solid. Isolated in a special chamber to raise his body temperature, he was eventually transferred to a burn center for treatment of his frostbite.

      Bennett later told his father why it had taken so long for authorities to rescue him. He was trying to elude them, he said. The police report filled in the details:

      He remembers seeing all the lights, but told his father that he hid every time someone with a light went by, because he did not want to get in trouble for drinking.

      The teenage girl who hosted the spontaneous party when her parents went out for the night initially told the police that Bennett was drunk when he arrived and that she had walked him part of the way home. Not until 5:00 a.m. did she admit the truth, that there had been more than a dozen people at the house, many of them drinking alcohol, all underage, and that she tried to clear them out around 11:30 before her parents returned home. Two girls said they were going to walk Bennett up the street, “but when they went outside with him and he was too drunk,” they took him back inside and left him alone while they helped their friend clean up. That was the last time they saw Bennett.

      Teen consumption of alcohol was only half the problem. The other half was the poor decision-making on the part of Bennett and his friends at the party, the lying that led to a delay before the police found Bennett, and even his panic at the thought of being caught by the police. All the teenagers involved exhibited a stunning lack of insight.

      What scientists tell us is that insight depends on the ability to look outside oneself, and because that skill arises in the frontal and prefrontal lobes, it takes time to develop. The dynamic changes taking place in the brain are part of what make the adolescent years an age of exuberance. But a malleable, still-maturing teenage brain can be a scary proposition. Anything can happen—much of it not good. Teenagers may look like adults, they may even think like adults in many ways, and their ability to learn is staggering, but knowing what teenagers are unable to do—what their cognitive, emotional, and behavioral limitations are—is critically important.

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       Learning A Job for the Teen Brain

      What did I do wrong?”

      Often that’s the second question I get from parents of teenagers. The first question is usually rhetorical:

      “How could my [son/daughter] [fill in the blank]?”

      Most of the СКАЧАТЬ