Transcripts For CSPAN Q A 20150202

Function as a team, because it was basically we lost everything in this house fire that happened just as they were turning into teenagers. What year was that . Around 20002001. So it was an interesting experience. And for them to also be on the side of people donating things to us. It was a really unusual experience where weve been on the other side of the gift giving in the past. And we had to work through recreating our physical lives. I think we all learned that stuff doesnt really matter, that its really all about people. It was an incredible lesson. Not that id ever recommend it to anybody, but it was an incredible life lesson. You were a single mother but what was the impact on a teenager with that fire and what would be the impact on an adult . What would be the difference . Yeah, well. Stress has a greater impact on teenagers and that is one of many topics we talk about in the book. You know, they are surprisingly vulnerable to things that we might think, oh, theyre just resilient. Theyll just get past this. It turns out that stress actually can change the way your brain is developing because your brain is still developing in your teen years. It can lead to lifelong issues. A lot of stress in adolescence has been linked to depression in adulthood in certain circumstances. We see this is sort of a repeating theme that things that happen to teenagers can somehow sometimes have longlasting outcomes and that theyre more vulnerable than we think. Who did you write this book for . Yeah. Well i actually wrote it partly to myself when i was a parent of teenagers. I, having had these two kids and being a single parent, really started to realize that i wasnt in control of everything, you know. And it wasnt just do as mother tells you anymore. They were developing very, you know independently and doing some very interesting things and like other parents, sort of peer parents that were going through it at the same time, we were frustrated, a little scared getting very angry or had a lot of responses, and i thought, well, im a neurologist. Im on the developing brain itself. I got to look into this. This just doesnt make sense. This is not the same kid that i had a year ago. Its almost like a different person. We joked, you know saying its almost like a different species but actually when you get to the brain research, it really is a very different stage of life. The teenager is testimony cli and structurally their chemically and structurally their brain is different from the adult. They are only 80 of the way to the adulthood. It turns out the brain is the last organ in the body to mature, and that it takes until your mid 20s to finish this process. So as i started to read what was going in the literature, i realized a lot of this stuff isnt even out not even amongstt the scientific community. I need to get this translated. I started to give talks. I gave teen brain 101 at their high schools and it sort of started from there. One thing led to another, and it started to amass this body of knowledge that actually i the more i guess the parents are one clear audience for this book. I think, i hope that it would make people a little more patient with their teenagers being more curious than angry, you know at them. Makes them communicate better with their kids. But teenagers are really interested in this. When i was giving the talks to teenagers, theyre really interested in this information. Its a datadriven group, generation right . Its all about information, todays teens. And they respect data. They may not respect that i tell you but they may respect there is something you should know. There is an experiment done, evidence. Youd be surprised what they can observe. Obviously, you know, i have to be realistic. Teenagers are going to go about trying to do their own independent things but some of this information does sink in. Theyre at a point of selfdiscovery, trying to identify who they really are, whats their identity. They need to know this is an incredible time in life where theres a lot of palace tisty as we there is a term around how your brain can really change in this window of development they can take Real Advantage of. Its a time to really work on strength and try to correct weaknesses. Its an amazing time from that standpoint. You came from what part of the country . Northeast. Where were you born . In greenwich, connecticut. When did you first get interested in the brain or even being a medical doctor . Yeah. I think i was interested pretty early on. I was very lucky to get a summer job when i was in high School Working with kids with intellectual disabilities. And it was a special school, Summer School and of course in a Community Like greenwich, connecticut a lot of these kids were, lets say, coming from rather enriched environments so these kids that had genetic disorders, other reasons to have real, you know, they termed it mental retardation back then, intellectual disabilities, were getting all these extra enrichment. They had governeses, butlers, gyms at their home and i was seeing how these children were learning, doing math, really extremely advanced. Didnt look like the textbook at all. Then when i went to college, i knew i wanted to do psychology as an under graduate degree and i decided oh, well ill take a summer job because i really enjoyed i work study jobs during the school year and enjoyed working with this population and i worked at a state institution for essentially sort of an orphanage for intellectually disabled kids where it was completely the opposite. The place has been closed down since. But just vac uniteous rooms. Kids sort of sitting around the edge, you know, with no stimulation at all. Maybe there was one basketball in the middle of the room but nobody was tending to them. And seeing how different they were from the kids that i had seen in this rather affluent community. It brought home to me nature vs. Nurture, that there is so much we can offer and enrich an environment and how if you deprive kids what can happen vs. Enrich them. So it got me immediately interested in this topic of how can the environment modify the way our brains function and develop . The brain is probably the most adaptable organ that we have in our bodies. As i said, the brain is the last organ in the body to mature. So there is a real, long lead time on how much you can really work on shaping. We have excerpts from your ted med speech. When was that given and where . It was given probably six or seven years ago and it was given in california in san diego. At one of the ted med conferences. And your education started when . Where is your under graduate degree . My under graduate degree was from smith college. I went to medical school at cornell. The ted med i was already, i had been at harvard for about 25 years by then or 20 something years by then. Okay. Lets watch an excerpt and then get you to give us some more. Okay. We have the connection between the paradoxes that while theyre learning really fast the connection between different brain regionss are not as fast as adults. Here is an example showing how the brain connects up over life and you can see on the left that the blue areas are connected parts of brains and you can see its going from the back to the front, so the back of the brain which is the bottom of the slide, the top is the frontal lobe which is the last to connect. What do you think the frontal lobes do . They are the seat of our insight, judgment, impulse control. Need i say more . This process is not done until 20. And look there on the bottom at that age 20. Theres a couple green spots still. And men, males actually are about two to three years behind females. So that might have been a male. We really didnt need neuroscience to tell us that did we . So you say talk about a synapse. What is it and how many do we have . We have millions and millions of synapses. They are where our brain cells connect when they talk to each other. When youre learning something or doing something, youre connecting a whole bunch of neurons, brain cells together to actually result in the memory or the action. So they build synapses and you strengthen them as you learn. So learning is a process whereby one set of brain cells are talking to the other repeatedly, right . Youre practicing, memorizing. And its doing it through synapses. The process of learning includes increasing the size of the synapse. When you have a bigger synapse you have a stronger signal, which is sort of the memorized state, right . So thats the synapses. And, actually, synaptic plasticty means input from the environment which can trigger your brain cells to turn on can cause a plastic meaning a change, physical change in your synapse. When is the first times you had your hands on a brain . Wow. Actually in high school. I really loved going to sound kind of nerdy. I loved di section of the fetal pig we did in high school. It was basically the separator of people that wanted to go into scientist and people probably destined to never go in. An acid test of whether youd go for science i think. So what was it about the brain that really opened your knowledge up . At what point . I think as i started to look at it in college in experiments where i was working in the lab on synaptic plasticity where we could use experiences in the visual system to change the way the visual core text the part of your brain that does vision, functions and looking at the brain under the microscope and seeing that this tangle of neurons, this busy, busy, you know population of active neurons and actually that is what how we learn. Its the excitation of your brain cells, turning on repeatedly that causes these changes. How many newerons what is a neuron, first of all . A neuron is a its a regular little cell like you have cells in all the rest of your body except neurons are a little different. They usually dont divide after birth, so most of the neurons in our brain weve had since birth. And weve also got helper cells that help the neurons stay alive. There are some areas of the brain that do divide like other parts of your body. You have skin cells that divide on a weekly, daily basis but your brain cells are very special. Most stay with you for your entire life. The neurons have a cell body which is kind of command central and then an outgoing signal process called an axon and on the other end a receiving end which has things called receptors on it. So an axon will talk to a dendryte through a receptor and there is a synapse at the place where the two cells talk and that is the part that is the most changeable. The proteins and the molecules involved in this process of turning on the synapse and actually building it with the memory are built in at higher levels in the childhood brain and the adolescent brain compared to adults. And, of course thats why children and adolescents can learn so much better and more effortlessly compared to adults. We know for instance children who have even more synapses than adolescents can learn one and two languages effortlessly, right . And its maddening to see them do this. As adults we barely get a second language in without a really bad accent. So adolescents arent quite as high as the children in terms of the number of these synapses but theyre still much higher than adults. Most brain function they have to turn on and you want them to turn off as well so they have exciteation, some which turn them on and others which turn them off. It turns out that the exiting synapses are at higher levels during childhood and adolescence compared to adults. We have video of young people talking about the things you talk about in your book. The first is an 18yearold where she talks about being a heroin addict at a rehab center. I want you to explain the impact on the brain after you listen to this. Okay. Im 18 years old. Ive been here for seven months. What brought me here is i over dosed on heroin. I dont really remember exactly what happened that night, but i remember i gave my friend some heroin and i asked him to cook me up some heroin and he cooked it up for me. He shot me up. And the next thing i know i woke up in an ambulance. I was living like a double life almost. On one hand i was going to school going to work, pleasing my parents, and on the other hand, in the other life, i was running around doing drugs. How familiar is this kind of story to you . Its very familiar. Thats one of the things we talk a lot about in the book is that teenagers can get addicted faster harder, longer, stronger than adults. What is fascinating as a reason for this is that i was just talking about synaptic plastic itty and their ability to learn it for build it for learning which happens in one area of your brain but addiction turns out, is synaptic plasticity, too. It is actually a form of learning. It is repeated stimulation just like you would if you were practicing something except its a drug and its your reward circuit not your other memory circuits. Its using different chemicals. But its the same process. So theyre prime to become addicted, much more easily. Just as they can learn good things their brain can learn to become addicted much more easily than the adult. We see this over and over again that kids who are exposed to drugs, Substance Abuse in which you can get addicted, they have a much more difficult time recovering compared to an adult. Here is some here are some teenagers talking about stress caused by school. Some of the stress i feel in my life is maybe from school or my parents. I get into a few arguments with my parents. School is pretty stressful. Tests and quizzes and homework and studying and all this and that. Mainly i worry about my grades. I dont really like having bad grades. If i get a c or a d, that really upsets me. Theres definitely some pressure and stress in my life. With trying to balance so many different activities and the academics and everything. Senior year, im in a giant pool of stress because i have to figure out everything thats going to happen next year, moving on in my life, and kind of sometimes i just need to step back from it and, you know, sit down and think to myself, okay. So the impact of stress on the brain, what is it . Yeah. So well, stress actually can affect your synapses. Chemicals. Cortisols. Other chemicals produced when under stress. They actually interrupt the process of how you build a synapse. So building during learning a few steps that take a few hours, minutes to hours to happen. Those Building Blocks can be interfered with by hormones like cortisol thats produced under stress. So basic research is showing exactly how stress can disrupt learning. And of course its a downward spiral because you get stressed. You have much difficulty trying to memorize something or function well in school, and then of course you get a worse grade. Youre more stressed. So its a downward, you know, downward sort of spiral for some of these kids. I think we also have to think about the time we live in right now. All of this stimulation and the kids are seeing, you know, stimuli from all Different Directions and can very quickly feel overloaded. Its something parents really need to know about. Its a vulnerable group. One other thing of course is not only are their synapses very vulnerable and that is a good and bad thing because they can learn better but also be affected by things but theyre also not able to sort of navigate their way through with full use of full judgment that an adult can do. So they may make poor decisions, which only increase their stress, like social networking, texting something that shouldnt have been texted and the problem is this paradox that theyve got, you know very active brain but maybe leading it in the wrong direction without thinking twice. You talked about this also in your ted talk and want to run 30 seconds of this about marijuana and alcohols impact on teens in the middle of all of this. Alcohol actually which affects the synapses there because there is more material to affect, kids, teenagers with binge drinking will have greater brain damage than adults. Likewise marijuana or t. H. C. , affects numerous places in this pathway and because they have more, the effects are more long lasting. It can last after getting high, there can be four days of cognitive impairment. So it suggests that, you know, whats going to happen on that test on thursday when youve had a busy weekend . These are things these kids need to know. So how much more alcohol and or marijuana is there today among teenagers . Actually, theres a lot. There is n. I. H. Data, c. D. C. Data telling us it is still a very big problem. Especially in the mid teen years. Actually, some of these other drugs, though, are possibly beginning to look like theyre eclipsing alcohol. Cigarettes are coming down because thats kind of not as big an issue as it had been though its still an issue. But these are very real problems. Now, the point is that kids can get access to these agents a lot easier now than even five or ten years ago through social networking. So it is a real issue to discuss with them. Of course as some of these drugs like pot get legalized and of course alcohol is legal it is actually around and available. I think the big point is that as opposed to the way we used to talk about this that, oh, dont worry. Theyre resilient. Theyll bounce back, they had quite a bender last night, you know and the parents kind of not laugh it off but dismiss it actually more damage can be done to the teen brain when exposed to excesses of alcohol or pot than to an adult for the same amount. One of the interesting things, there is a group up at mclean, up in boston who have done studies looking at longterm effects of chronic daily pot smoking, for instance, and it turns out that the there is a dosedependent effect, the more you smoke the more you i. Q. Drop permanently. That was kind of an eye opener. A corollary to that though, is that it tells us that the brain is very changeable during the adolescent period. I, for one didnt realize that i. Q. Could change during, after you were a child. I thought you get that test done as a kid and you have a number and its kind of your number for the rest of your life. No. Onethird of people do stay more or less the same. There was a study done three or four years ago using m. R. I. Imaging and pairing it with i. Q. Testing showing onethird of peoples i. Q. S goes up during their teen years and a third goes down. The kind of maddening thing about the study, still early days, is that they didnt track exactly what the people were doing all of those years that made their i. Q. Get better or worse. But the pot smoking experiments or observations are people who have been chronic daily pot smokers tells at least that there is one way that your brain can actually go down with respect to i. Q. You say in your book, you tell me the exact statistics like if you smoke four marijuana cigarettes a day that is equal to a full pack of regular tobacco . So in terms of tobacco and damage to the lungs, there is a lot of similarities but the two the other way pot is similar to nicotine is that it there can be an addictive aspect to this. I think nicotine is a really good example of addiction and its been very well studied in adolescent humans and adolescent animals, in experimental studies. It really shows that with one or two hits of nicotine the brain just turns on in an adolescent and the same amount in the adult doesnt have that much response. And, of course, it begins to build this addictive circuitry that we talked about that, you know addiction is a form of learning and teens will get addicted to nicotine, for instance, a lot faster than adults and a lot more permanently. Its kind of causing hard wiring changes, which, you know, as adults we certainly know people that, you know, started smoking when they were teenagers. They have, its almost impossible for them to fully quit. How much more do we know about the brain today than when you started in medicine . My gosh. And why . Oh, well, weve had an explosion of Amazing Technology. We know so much more. When i was starting in medical school neurology, for instance, was kind of a field where, well, we have the horrible set of diseases, things that just go downhill and we just make diagnoses and cant treat anything. Now of course we have so many new pieces of information coming from the basic sciences, that decade of the brain, remember and then of course the clinical neurosciences are really with modern Neuro Imaging like the ability to watch how brains brain regions turn on and off in different behavioral states genomics coming in, this explosion of really wonderful information. So were able to now begin to understand why diseases happen. We can find along the pathway like targets to work on to devise treatments and even know the circuitry of the brain. Were able to do stimulation now. We know where to stimulate the brain. We have a little more of an understanding of its wiring diagram. So its really like a revolutionary period right now. How often have you been in an operating room watching a brain operation . I am a neurologist not a neuro surgeon but ive been in plenty of times and one place would be epilepsy. Epilepsy is an example of a disease thats really we are just learning so much more about how it happens, that its just not one disease. There are many different ways to have epilepsy. Theres epilepsy depends on how, where your brain is in development, so very different in the baby brain than in the adult brain and different in the adolescent brain. But epilepsy, we now know that for 30 of people with epilepsy, dont get treated fully with drugs and they are have a big problem. Because no drug is working on them. It turns out those are ideal candidates sometimes for epilepsy surgery. That could actually be curative for them. Back to the teenager that has stress, i dont even remember that word when i was in high school, and has a drug situation, what about what do you say to parents that have to decide about medicine in that case . And how often do these kids when theyre under stress go get drugs to take them out of stress . Yes. I think theres a lot of selfmedication that goes on, you know. There are a lot of sedative drugs that are rolling around. Theres also a lot of stimulant drugs rolling around and being sort of shared. Also i think a lot of kids that smoke pot say theyre doing it to decrease their anxiety. I think this is, you know, there is a real connection there. I guess what parents have to realize is that you need to sort of stay on top of your of being connected to your teenager. I think that was one of the things i wanted to make very clear in this book is we have this incredible amount of information now that it is a stage unto itself. Its not the same as an overgrown child and not an adult. They are in between. And they have special strengths and weaknesses. And you kind of have to stay connected. I think this, todays world is probably creating more choices for our teenagers than they may actually know how to deal with and as parents, you know we do have our frontal lobes connected and so do the teachers. We are over 25. And so we have to sort of step in and at least try to offer some information and stay connected. Heres a report from abc and the year 2009 about something that we hear about every day now. Meet 13yearold reyna. Yes, i am a technoholik. Record number of texts in a month . 14,528. 14,528. She is such a hard core texter that at her 13th Birthday Party she was texting back and forth with her best friend who was sitting right next to her. Texting is like breathing for her. It is something that happens along with all the other normal things that this 13yearold does. The Technology May also play a part in an adolescents need to separate from their parents. I would stick my nose in a book. That was my way to get away from my parents. Is texting part of that . I would say yeah. I dont exactly like to talk to my parents so i text with my friends instead. I feel a little more comfortable that way for some reason. Its called being a teenager. Yeah. To put the incredible amount of texting in perspective the average 13 to 17yearold sends over 1700 texts a month. Youre saying in your book its now 3300. Oh, yes. A month. It could be a week for some of these kids. It is a huge force in their lives. As parents we dont really have our firsthand experience with this. So this is something were all learning about at the same time. Of course, we, being adults, are learning more slowly than are teenagers who are much faster learners. How much slower is our brain than theirs . I dont think a number has been put on it but probably about 30 faster than we are we suspect at learning. Whats caused that . Because we have fewer of these exsite synapses and the machinery for the long term. Why is that . Because were programmed to turn on and off. Proteins and genes in our, over our life span in our neurons and there is a surge genetically programmed to be up in childhood coming down in adolescence and flatening out in the adult years. So we are working at a bit of a disadvantage. It will take us more practice to learn the same skill than a teenager. So they are adapting very quickly. Theyre clearly showing us that theyre able to multi task better than we are. But it is not fail safe. There were studies and i point this out in the book that there are studies done on teenagers around distracted learning. And they get either distracted upon trying to memorize information or when theyre being tested. Then theyre compared to kids of the same age that had no distractions. It turns out even this multi tasking generation they still showed pretty significant effects of not as much learning when they were tested later if they were distracted when trying to memorize more and some still affected if they were distracted when taking the test so to speak. We have to remind our kids that there is only so much a brain can handle and that if they really want to learn something most effectively they probably will do better with less distraction than more. How do you ask this question . Are there brains that are significantly better than other brains . I mean, can you look at a human being as they get older and say, that person has got a better brain than that person . I think it is very difficult to say that. The more we learn about brains there is not just one way to measure them. There are people who have incredible strengths with social interactions but maybe horrible at math for instance. In fact were all a mixture of strengths and weaknesses, right . As we are starting to see the brain functioning as a whole with all of our new technology i think were all amazed at the diversity of types of people and how they function in the environment. Often youll see theyll function to their strengths so somebody who isnt good at math will end up being an artist or something that doesnt need that skill set. Teenage years are a great time to do this discovery. And, in fact, you can really work on your strength but you can also try to correct some of your weaknesses that are really needing some intervention. Its sort of interesting because given how its so recent that weve known this is such an adaptive sort of plastic period and there is biology behind it, we tend to sort of think oh, well. Despite 13 or 14 at least some cultures in other countries, if youre a scholar by then or not its like its a done deal. You know, by 13 or 14 youre on one track or another. I think the good news here is that its clearly, for late bloomers, im sure we all know those people, there is a real biology to that. Its okay. We should probably not close the door certainly educationally or with respect to any strengths a person is showing right around puberty. Theres a long time to continue to work on these things. You said i. Q. s can change. I. Q. s can change. What does it measure in the brain . Well, yes. This is a very old science that were trying to understand what it maps on to in a by logical, structural basis. So really Amazing Technology now called functional m. R. I. Which is magnetic residence imaging can actually measure based on metabolism and blood flow what part of your brain is on at any given time, so you can look at a hot box of whats turning on during i. Q. Testing, for instance. Its starting to unravel, where is the basis of your math i. Q. , your verbal i. Q. . This is still ongoing research, but it is starting to really allow us to measure these things and do a comparison of the before and after. The study i told you about, looking at people between ages 13 and 17 and seeing the changes, was a combination of a classic sort of written i. Q. Test with the m. R. I. Findings. Can you take any medicine that will make you smarter . I wish. You know the older you get they start advertising about i dont know what it is. Ginkgo biloba or something that is supposed to make you smarter and, you know, able to remember things better and all that. Any truth to that . Well, there is an explosion of information coming out of the basic sciences and now being tested sort of in early human, you know, imaging and trials thinking about what we know of this process of what actually is learning. And, specifically, this thing that i was talking about synaptic plasticity, there has been a huge amount of research now on what receptors, what molecules turn on and off in that process. And theres work that is showing if you can actually target some of those this is just a model still, you can enhance the process of memory for sure. The brain as i said is a very adaptive organ and very much nature vs. Nurture. It is monitoring the environment constantly. The degree of interaction you have with the environment actually can set your threshold for how easily youre going to learn. Very interestingly there is a longterm scientist in california, in his entire career he was in this area and he hit his 70s and became very interested in the aging brain so he did studies looking at what is the effect of stimulation on the aging brain . And he found a miraculous findings that when you stimulate, you had rats sitting in a boring old cage we keep them in in Medical Laboratories versus an enriched cage with wheels and all kinds of things for them to play with he took the aged rats and put them in either the normal cage or the really fancy cage and then measured their brain levels off these proteins im talking about that are important for learning and the receptors. They were much higher in the animals in the enriched environment. Then he went and had them learn a task. Of course, the elderly animals that were in this enriched environment were actually functioning like middle aged animals. So it tells us that theres a lot of Natural Forces that we, you know, that are really helping stimulate our brain and it also helps substantiate the adage like to go try and learn a second language when youre, you know, to keep your brain going, in retirement age or, you know trying to do cross words, this kind of thing. It really does substantiate that. You talked in your ted med speech about your two teenage sons. Theyre not teenagers anymore. But lets watch a minute of what you said there. Well go back to your experience with your own kids. Okay. Unknown to me there was another experiment going on in my own home. My two teen sons. Now, how many of you in this audience have one this much species living under your roof . Great. So you will definitely get what im saying here. I would marvel at their antics of what they were doing how my two sons, one who was very bright, a student seemed to be despite getting as couldnt seem to understand the rules of the road in massachusetts despite the fact it was written in the proverbial sixth grade language. What about the disorganization that these guys had . What was that pile in the bedroom . Was it composet or laundry . Very unclear. And i just i was just marveling and that would be the polite word, tearing my hair out perhaps and i decided thats it. I have the wherewithal. Im going to go back and learn about the teen brain. Will and andrew. Yes. First, you married a doctor. How long were you married . 17 years. How long did you have teenagers in your house that you had to take care of yourself . Practically the entire teen time. And how old are they now . Theyre 24 and 27. What do you say we have a lot of people who work here at this network that have teenagers or soontobe teenagers. Some of them pull their hair out because they cant understand why their teenager is doing what theyre doing. First, would you rather have, this is probably not a fair question girls or boys based on what you know about the brain when theyre teenagers . I think its a total, you know, tradeoff. You get some things with boys and you get other things with girls. So i dont think theres, one is better or worse than the other. I think they can be very different issues. What are the different issues and whats the difference between a boys brain and a girls brain . So a girls actually are, this is probably not a surprise. A couple years ahead of boys in terms of their biological development of their brains. And boys will catch up of course but for say a 14yearold girl versus a 14yearold boy they are very different. I think that, you know, girls are planners at that age. Theyre working stuff out. This tends to be the source of elaborate arguments between mothers and daughters and lots of planning around things, lots of forethought. The boys are a little bit more i would say transparent. Sort of bumping into stuff, having, you know, can have accidents of one kind or another. Theyre not so much planning. I think its an equally as concerning to parents whichever they get the girl or a boy and i think most people would say that they, its unique issues. Now, girls will interestingly may actually have the capacity to learn things earlier than boys because of this process. So whats happening in the brain is that you have this synaptic plasticity i was talking about where youre able to actually learn faster because you have more machinery for learning but at the same time as this sort of being very on and very excitable, impressionable brain, you are trying to slowly hook up the areas of your brain to one another. That process is the thing that takes a really long time. That was what was in that movie clip of the brain getting gradually blue and connected. It goes from the back of the brain to the front. That process is basically little tiny cells that are actually insulating with fat a process of natural insulation that we have. These long tracks that go from one side of the brain to the other and all the way to the front. The girls are further on that journey than the boys. Theyre not there yet. I think it helps explain a lot of where you see them academically. Quote from your book, during adolescence more than any other time emotions rule our lives. You also say in large part what makes adolescence so difficult is that much of the teenagers response to the world is driven by emotion not reason. I think thats true. They dont have their frontal lobes to actually reason. The cause and effect of consequences of actions are not very clear to them because the frontal lobes are not as readily accessible. They have frontal lobes. Its just not, the connections cant be made as quickly for splitsecond Decision Making and also, dont forget, a lot of the hormones are changing a lot in the body of young men and women and the brain hasnt seen these yet in life until you hit teenage years. So the brain is trying to learn how to respond to these new hormones that are rolling around and actually locking on to receptors so theyre trying to, its sort of trial and error. I think this contributes to sort of this very rollercoaster kind of experience that we watch as parents. What was it like raising your two sons . I loved every minute of it. It was the journey of may life. I really enjoyed it. I tried to turn what could have been anger sort of into curiosity. And because i, it was sort of a natural thing because i was really interested. Why anger . Well, anger at being frustrated with your kid whos just lost this really expensive watch you might have given them for christmas or they forgot their home work yet again and they failed their test. Those kinds of things where youre like, why . Why didnt you think of this . And i found that is it helps me, why is this happening . Trying to be curious about it. And then actually i explained it a lot to them, too. Weve had conversations i dont know how much got through, some did get through, they did get out of their teen years, but i think that it did help me be a better parent and when i started to share these, you know, these things, this information to friends like having coffee at a dinner party or something i found over and over again people were like oh, my god thats why. Okay. Now it all makes sense. So this was part of the reason why i ended up, a, giving the teen brain 101 talks which i do in the high schools and then, well, it might as well get put into one place. It is all very new information. What are the kids surprised about when you give them the talk . Okay. A couple things. First of all, this is a period in normal development that is one in which people are inquiring of themselves trying to figure out who they are. A period of some self they are very selfreflective. They want to know about themselves. Anything you tell them about them, their ears perk up. They were very interested to hear about the i. Q. I think they were surprise today could change. I think they were surprised that theyre more vulnerable to alcohol and addiction than adults. They didnt really think about it. I think they were interested there was a biological basis between, you know, the differences between girls and boys, that there was really something going on there. I think they also sleep was another thing, why are they sleeping so late . That gave them an understanding it wasnt willful trying to be obstructionist to your parents. Its a biological thing. How long does that sleep part of it last . It lasts sort of into your late teens early 20s. Funny enough your clock which dictates when you want to go to sleep in all species at least in the mammalian species, this happens in cats and dogs, they have this during adolescence, too. So it turns out wuven fact one factor is melatonit which you can take to get over jet lag, it is our own sleep hormone or chemical inside us. It turns out it is triggered to be released an hour or so before you fall asleep. In adults it happens about 8 30 or 9 00 in teenagers closer to midnight. So they cant fall asleep and then the problem is we adults on our schedule wake them up at 6 00 a. M. To get that bus and theyre in the equivalent of what is probably like 3 00 a. M. For us. Youre waking them out of mid sleep which is not great. Its something theyre dealing with. Also we know sleep deprivation guess what, it breaks down the neuro chemistry responsible for building strong synapsis. It drops when you are sleep deprived. So it is not very helpful the fact that their time zones are not lining up with ours. You told a story, this is a little off target, you told a target and im old enough to remember this very well, a man named Charles Joseph whitman who went to the top of the tower of the university of texas back in the mid 1960s and my memory is he killed like 13 people and wounded another 30 or Something Like that. But the thing i didnt know about was the connection to the brain. Whats the story . So for teenagers, were talking a lot about what the implications of what we know about the frontal lobe and its lack of connectivity, does this change the way we think about how responsible they are for doing criminal acts . In fact, while i was going through this process i got involved in a couple of am cuss briefs to the Supreme Court amicus briefs to the Supreme Court around life without parole for teenagers, if they are accused of a serious crime. And we reasoned in this that there was an absolute life without parole for kids between 13 and 17 if they had committed a capital crime and we were saying that may be what has to happen but it shouldnt be without any exceptions. There should be the opportunity to review on a casebycase basis whether somebody before the age 17 who committed a crime was really as responsible as an adult because of course their frontal lobes are not on and judgment, they could be under the influence. You think of a case in which for instance a 13yearold might be under the influence of an older sibling who has roped them into a crime and theyre standing there. They may not have actually reasoned through this. We also make another point though that they may be rehabilitateable. It is all on an individual basis but because of this plasticity early enough in the, if they are incarcerated, we may be better off trying to work on rehabilitating these kids. But on Charles Joseph whitman, after it was over, they did a depshi dont remember how he died killed himself i think . Im not sure. He wanted in his note an autopsy and they found a brain tumor. In his frontal lobe, yes. What would that have done to him . Well, this is the point. His frontal lobes were being encroached upon by a brain tumor, so they werent functioning normally. It was like he didnt have his full set of frontal lobes. Again, leading to impulsive acts without knowledge and judgment of cause and effect. Are you saying that kind of individual, he was like 26 years old, but that kind of individual shouldnt have a life sentence . Im not saying that at all. I think we have a long way to go around this. But Justice Scalia thinking about adolescence actually made the statement is adolescence akin to mental retardation . Should you actually think of a certain age group, do they have a natural disability, not of course disease like a tumor would be an explanation for somebody but you find that out after the fact. This is a very controversial area of neuroscience. You told a story in the book about Terrence Graham and that was one case you were involved in. By the way, before we forget it, youre doing what right now . What is your job . I am a chair of a Neurology Department at the university of pennsylvania at the Perelman School of medicine. How long were you there . Two and a half years. I was at harvard 30 years before that. I was running a research lab and still have that as well but it was a research lab looking at Brain Development especially in early infancy and early childhood, thinking about new targets for treatments because actually because we say that adolescent brain is different from the adult. The baby brain is like a whole different ball game. Its a very, very different in fact, a lot of drugs that work well in adults dont work at all in the baby brain because the targets arent even there yet. So an example is epilepsy which is an area i was studying and also premature brain injury. There are so many different types of cells and different drug targets and mechanisms of disease in that window that are very different from the adult yet we, most of our drugs for kids are handmedown drugs for the kid brain and they arent built customized for the child or infant brain. Actually since were talking about teenagers, the we know from for instance, you remember oh, probably eight or nine years ago there was a big sort of bustle in the news about antidepressants in adolescents and how certain antidepressants when given at doses great for adults actually increased suicideality in adolescents and it is in part thought to be we cant make asummingss about the way their brain cells are working based on adults. You could have unusual unintended outkohls giving adult drugs to children and teenagers. Go back to the Terrence Graham story. How does a neurologist get involved in a court case . Yes. So i was starting to do these talks around the teen brain. Id given some at the Science Museum and different places. Somehow, somebody had gotten wind i was talking a lot about the teenage brain and was doing work on Brain Development so clifford chance, this law group that was working with the center for justice for youth was trying to put together a team to write an amicus brief to the Supreme Court. I got involved with that. Most of the people were psychologists and social workers and other and lawyers around, you know, dealing with juvenile crimes. But they needed somebody to talk about the teen brain and sort of the biology. That was my little contribution to it. What about mr. Graham . Well, i think we felt that this was somebody who was underage who could have been under the influence and we were very sorry to, you know, think that there was no option for life without parole and were able to argue that, for the reasons i just said, that maybe, you know, their judgment was not impaired it was just not present yet. And that he might be rehabilitateable and we were hoping that, to convince the Supreme Court to at least not rule out parole at some point for some of these kids but not everybody gets a free pass and theres parole for everyone. Just that to open it up and say it was at least an option. A couple statistics in your book, about 200,000 youths between the ages of 12 and 17 are arrested for Violent Crimes and there are more than 100 juveniles like Terrence Graham serving life without parole for nonmurders. In the brief time we have left, the chapter on sports and concussions. You describe in there what happens to the brain when youre playing football or you get your head knocked in a wrestling match or whatever. Did you have a son that was an athlete . They both were. Wrestlers and then one also played football. What happens to the brain when theres what degree is there when it comes to this concussion . What does it take to have a concussion . Well, a concussion is a rapid, can be caused by a rapid impact to the brain, i mean to the skull, which causes the brain to sort of shift inside the bony capsule called the skull. Our brains though are more like jello and so it doesnt require you fracturing your skull to cause damage inside the brain. And so it will shift back and forth and it hits the inside walls of the skull and can have some shear injuries because the structure can be torn as its shifting back and forth. With severe brain injury or even moderate brain injury we see this by impact or even of course one of the signature injuries of the last few wars that weve been involved in have been more these impact injuries from explosives nearby where theres not actually a physical injury to the scalp, itself its just that this impact of a pressure wave goes through the brain. So concussion, you can lose consciousness. You dont have to. You have some sort of neurological symptom like feeling dizzy or bad vision. What we find is that theres usually a period following a concussion where people feel a little foggy. They certainly have some amnesia for right before or even right after the head injury. And then they can have a period of weeks of not feeling themselves, having problems with attention headaches and what were finding, what the research is finding with repeat concussions it actually gets worse each time. Now, theres a lot of recent research that is continuing to just be added to by the month about what happens long term following concussions. And theres something called chronic traumatic encephalot thfment y which is almost like a premature alzheimers happening in brains and actually under the microscope some of the same signaling proteins we see have gone wrong in alzheimers are present in these brains of people that have had repeated concussions. We feel that the early life you are very vulnerable. Girls tend to be, have more injury than boys at this time. Its a question of whether the thickness of their skull or not but this is this is an emerging area of intense research. Sports seem to be very, you know theres a lot of impact in sports these days. We have to remind people that you could have a cement block around your head but youre still going to have this shearing thing go in. Helmets only do part of the job. You say that there are a Million High School Football Players in this country . At least. We have a minute left. Theres another statistic that when youre in the womb between three and six months Something Like this you have more neurons than you have for the rest of your life. Is there a billion neurons in your head and that can wrap around the globe four times . Yes. Billions and billions of neurons. We probably dont actually know the absolute number. But there are billions and billions. The good news is that, you know you start off with more than you really need. And we sort of prune our brains as we go through life. Its kind of like you get lean and mean, right . And the neurons that stay are the ones that end up being, staying because theyre being used a lot. So its makes the brain more efficient. This is all meant to happen as part of Brain Development. Our guest has been frances e. Jensen, medical doctor, associated with the university of pennsylvania. The book is called the teenage brain. A neuroscientists Survival Guide to raising adolescents and young adults. We thank you very much. Thank you. For free transcripts or to give your comments about this Program Visit us at q a. Org. Programs are also available at cspan podcasts. All 10 years of q a interviews are Available Online and if you enjoyed this weeks interview here are some others you might like. Dr. Wayne a. I. Frederick, president of howard university, dr. Alfredo quinoneshinojosa neuro surgeon at John Hopkins University and documentary film maker Jonathan Goodman levitt talking about his film follow the leader. Watch them all at cspan. Org. On the next washington journal well focus on president obamas 2016 budget request which is being released tomorrow. Well hear from democratic maryland representative john delaney, a member of the Financial Services and joint economic committees. Republican South Carolina congressman tom rice, a member of the Budget Committee and william hogueland, Senior Vice President of the bipartisan policy center. As always, well take your calls and you can join the conversation on facebook and twitter. Washington journal live at 7 00 a. M. Eastern on cspan. With the sec focusing on Net Neutrality, we spoke with two industry executives. Chris riley and hank hultquist. At the end of the day, the internet needs strong, enforceable, effective rules. Those need to include nondetermination and Resource Management and they need to be effectively enforceable. The problem we have now with where the Net Neutrality issue has gone is that there is a lot of consensus around the fccs Legal Authority to adopt rules and jurisdictional