Teens' Penchant For Risk-Taking May Help Them Learn Faster, Says Study (npr.org) 37
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: The teenage brain has been characterized as a risk-taking machine, looking for quick rewards and thrills instead of acting responsibly. But these behaviors could actually make teens better than adults at certain kinds of learning. "In neuroscience, we tend to think that if healthy brains act in a certain way, there should be a reason for it," says Juliet Davidow, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University in the Affective Neuroscience and Development Lab and the lead author of the study, which was published Wednesday in the journal Neuron. But scientists and the public often focus on the negatives of teen behavior, so she and her colleagues set out to test the hypothesis that teenagers' drive for rewards, and the risk-taking that comes from it, exist for a reason. When it comes to what drives reward-seeking in teens, fingers have always been pointed at the striatum, a lobster-claw-shape structure in the brain. When something surprising and good happens -- say, you find $20 on the street -- your body produces the pleasure-related hormone dopamine, and the striatum responds. But the striatum isn't just involved in reward-seeking. It's also involved in learning from rewards, explains Daphna Shohamy, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute at Columbia University who worked on the study. She wanted to see if teenagers would be better at this type of learning than adults would. To test this, Shohamy and her colleagues used an fMRI scanner to watch brain activity in a group of adults and teenagers. They were looking at the striatum, but also in a different part of the brain called the hippocampus. The hippocampus (which looks like, and is named after, a seahorse) helps people remember things like dates and times: the who, what, when and where. As the adults and teens had their brains scanned, they played a game that rewarded players for guessing correctly. Between questions, participants saw random pictures of neutral objects. As expected, the reward-hungry teenagers figured out the game faster than the adults did. Surprisingly, the striatum was equally active in both teenagers and adults. But in teens, it also worked closely with their hippocampus.
Normal (Score:3)
Think of it as evolution in action.
Re:Normal (Score:4, Interesting)
Well it is. But not in the way you are implying it.
We as humans need to know the appropriate amount of risk to take.
To much risk we kill ourselves. To little we do not grow and succeed thus are not an appropriate mating option.
During the teen years you are of suffient strength, intelligence, and ability to try new things however human culture tends to give us still that extra level of protection to prevent us from actually trying to jump off that cliff.
Humans are aggressive animals who take risks that exceed what most other animals may take, and part of that sucrsss as a species is knowing where that risk line falls.
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Well not really. The tone when someone says evolution in action is implying a simplistic view of evolution on where the inferior will get killed for being inferior due to some guiding control of evolution.
The point I was trying to make to go past the tone was to state that this subset of the population is protected so they are allowed to take additional risks.
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Threads like this are a good example of how even the dumbest people survive childhood routinely.
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That's not why teenagers do that (Score:5, Insightful)
The teenage brain has been characterized as a risk-taking machine, looking for quick rewards and thrills instead of acting responsibly
The teenage brain hasn't yet accumulated enough experience to understand the risks of their actions and therefore is naive about the consequences. In the decision making faculties of the brain specifically related to survival, we magnify negative experiences so that we avoid them in the future. The decision tree evolves over time or at least should. Those that don't inevitably have a much higher chance of winning a Darwin award.
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If I did the same shit today that I did as a teen I'm sure I'd be in prison. I'm still looking over my shoulder sometimes to see if the cops are coming for stuff I did 10 years ago.
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The teenage brain hasn't yet accumulated enough experience to understand the risks of their actions and therefore is naive about the consequences.
The teenage brain is actually wired to emphasize reward over risk. Rewards are overvalued, while risks are undervalued. This balance changes as the brain matures.
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The teenage brain is actually wired to emphasize reward over risk. Rewards are overvalued, while risks are undervalued. This balance changes as the brain matures.
Everybody's brain is wired to seek out pleasure. It's how we reproduce. This is not limited to teenagers.
Inconclusive experiment (Score:2, Interesting)
The experiment, as reported here, doesn't prove anything.
They admit the striatum was equally active in teenagers and adults, so one would rather conclude that it has no role in learning. The only thing that this experiment proves is that a more active hippocampus corresponds to better memory - as everybody knew already. The connection between risk seeking attitude and better learning is postulated, not proved.
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fMRI (Score:1, Troll)
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Why do they charge $800 for an MRI. Total BS...
They have to learn "the hard way"... (Score:3)
So basically, they have to learn the hard way...
Could never ever have guessed that on our own... Go science ;)
Or maybe ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe, just maybe, taking bigger risks than the other guys and still getting away with it is seen as an attractive trait when females look for a mate.
There you go, natural selection for risk-taking in the teenage years.
Continuation of Corporate Sponsored Child Worship (Score:3, Interesting)
This is just the continuation of youth worship.
You see the adults have figured out that they can make money off of the thoughtless consumer behavior of "risk takers".
It's not news. Just look at the marketing tactics of basically every teen focused consumer brand - Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Nike, Apple
George Carlin had it right
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6wOt2iXdc4
We let 18 year old take big risks on student loans (Score:4, Insightful)
We let 18 year old take big risks on student loans and when they mess up they are the ones stuck with the 40K+ bill.
Neuro-"scicnce" again (Score:3)
These people have the most shoddy experiments and the grandest claims. And they have a flawed, nonscientific base-assumption, namely that physicalism is correct. There is no indication for that and quite a few to the contrary, but the scientific facts at this time are that we simply do not know. Building a scientific discipline on such a flawed basis makes it pseudo-science at best and a bizarre form of religion at worst.
Absurd bravery is necessary for the young (Score:2)
Non-news and Not Science (Score:2)
Most adults have responsibilities for things like a family, a mortgage, and a full-time job. Hence, their brains adapt to each adult's chosen setting and responsibility-load. Teenagers don't.
The article mentions nothing of controlling for external factors such as this.
Adults who are free of burdensome monthly worries are the best creatives. And the best scientists. And so on.
Last, the study simply showed a correlation when they compared apples to oranges. Correlation =/= Causation.