Transcripts For CSPAN2 Q A 20150331

Livestreamed land and john from the bank of america for making these political conversations possible and thank my political colleagues who worked so hard on this event. I thank all of you for coming out and thank administrator mccarthy for a fantastic conversation. [applause] this week on q a, our guest is dr. Frances jensen neuroscientist and author of sub for. She talks about the most recent the teenage brain. She talks about the most recent work on the brain and the development of adolescence and the reasons behind any of the behaviors parents see during the sometimes turbulent years. Cspan dr. Frances jensen author of the teenage brain, what impact did the fire in your house have on your life and your teenagers . Guest will have brought us a lot closer together. It was one of those events that you certainly dont plan for and be learned how to function as a team. It was basically we lost everything in this house fire that happened just as they were turning into teenagers. Cspan what you are that . Guest around 2000 or 2001. So it was an interesting experience and for them to also be on the side of people donating things to us. It was an unusual experience where we had been on the other side of the giftgiving in the past and we had to work through recreating our physical lives but i think we all learned that stuff doesnt really matter. Its really all about people and was an incredible lesson not that i would ever recommend this to anybody but what it was an incredible life lesson. Cspan you were a single mother but what was the impact on the teenager with that fire and what would be the impact on an adult. [inaudible question] be the difference . Guest well stress has a greater effect on teenagers and thats one of many topics we talk about in the book. They are surprisingly vulnerable to things that we might think of to they are just resilient. They will just get past this. Turns out the stress can change the way your brain is developing fissure brain is still developing for years and it could lead to lifelong issues. A lot of stress during adolescence has been leading to depression in adulthood for instance. Under certain circumstances and i think we see this as a repeating theme that things that happen to teenagers can sometimes have longlasting outcomes and their mobile mobile than we think. Cspan who did you he write this book for . Guest well i actually wrote it partly to myself when i was a parent of teenagers. I having have these two kids and been a single parent really started to realize that i wasnt in control of everything as this process started and it wasnt just to do as mother tells you anymore. They were developing very independently and doing interesting things and like other parents that were going through it at the same time we were frustrated, little scared, getting very angry or had a lot of responses. I thought well im a neurologist and im doing work in the developing brain itself. I have to look into this. This just doesnt make sense. This isnt the same kid i had a year ago. We were joking that its almost like a different species but when you get to the Brain Research it really is a very different stage of life. The teenager is chemically and structurally their brain is still different than the adult. There only 80 of the way to adulthood and it turns out the brain is the last organ in the body to mature and it takes you until your mid20s to finish this process. So as i started to read what was going in the literature i realized that stuff season it isnt even out among the scientific community. I need to get this translated and i gave teen brain 101 at high schools and it started from there. It started to amass as a body of knowledge that the more the parents are unclear audience for this book i think that it would make people a little more patient with their teenagers being more curious than angry at them. They can communicate better with their kids but teenagers are really interested in this. When i have given the talks to teenagers they are interested in this information. Its a datadriven group a generation. Its all about information with todays teen and they may not respect because mom told me that they might respect that there is something you should know. There was an experiment done and there was evidence of that and you would be surprised what they they i have to be realistic teenagers are going to go about doing their own independent thinks that some of this information to sink in. Theres a point of selfdiscovery, trying to identify who they really are what is their identity. They need to know its an incredible time in life where theres a lot of plasticity, a term around how your rain can change. This window of development that they can take Real Advantage of so its a time to work on strength and try to correct weaknesses. Its an amazing time for that. Cspan you came from a part of the country . Guest the northeast. Cspan where we avoid . Guest in greenwich connecticut. Cspan when did you first get interested in the brain or even being a medical doctor . Guest 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 Summer School and in a Community Like greenwich connecticut a lot of these kids were coming from rather enriched environments so there were kids that have genetic disorders and other reasons to have though they turned its mental retardation back then, intellectual disability. We were getting this extra enrichment. They had governesses and jim in their home. They were extremely advanced. It didnt look like a textbook at also when i went to college i did psychology as an undergraduate degree and i decided i will take a summer job because i really enjoyed or her work study job during school year, really enjoyed working with this population and i worked at a state institution for essentially an orphanage for intellectually disabled kids where it was completely the opposite. The place has been closed down sense but just vacuous rooms with kids sitting around the edge 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 versus nurture. There are so much that we can offer and a rich environment and how if you deprive kids what can happen versus enriching them so it got me admittedly interested in this topic of neuronal or synaptic plasticity. That is how can the environment modified the way our brains function and develop . The brain is probably the most adaptable organ we have in our bodies and as i said the brain is the last organ in the body to mature. There is a real long lead time on how much you can really work on shaping your brain. Cspan we have some excerpts from your ted med speech. When was. When the secular netware was a given . Guest it was given probably six or seven years ago and it was given in california in san diego at one of the conferences. Cspan year education started when . Where was your undergraduate degree . Guest my undergraduate degree was from Smith College i went to medical school at cornell. So that ted med i had been at harvard for 25 years by then. Cspan lets watch an excerpt. Guest we have the connections between the paradox is that while they are learning really fast the connections between different brain regions are not as fast as the adult and heres an example showing how the brain connects up over the life. You can see on the left that the blue areas of our connected parts of the brain and you can see that its going from the back to the front so the back of the brain which is at the bottom of the slide goes to the frontal lobes which is the last to connect to what he think the frontal lobes to . They are the seat of our inside judgment and impulse control. Need i say more . This process is not done until 20 and look there on the bottom at age 20 there are a couple of green spots still and males actually are two to three years behind females. So that mightve been a male but we really didnt need neuroscience to tell us that did we . Cspan so you talk about his synapse. What is a synapse and how many do we have in our brain . Guest we have millions and millions of synapses. Our synopsis are where our brain cells connect when they talk to each other so when you are learning something or doing something you are connecting a whole bunch of neurons, brain cells together to result in the memory or the action. So they build synapses and as you strengthen your synapses as he learns the learning is a process whereby one set of brain cells are talking to the other repeatedly. You are practicing in memorizing and its doing it through synopsis. The process of learning includes increasing the size of the synopsis to though when you have a bigger synopsis you have a stronger signal, which is sort of the memorized state. So that is the synopsis and actually synaptic plasticity means input from the environment which can trigger your brain cells to turn on can cause a plastic meaning a a change, a physical change in your synopsis. Cspan when was the first time you had your hands on a brain . Guest actually in high school. I really loved and this is going to sound kind of nerdy, i left my dissection of the fetal that we did in high school. It was basically the separator of people that wanted to go into science and people that wouldnt that were destined to never go and it was an acid test of whether you were going to go for science i think, that dissection dissection. Cspan what was it about the brain that really opened up your knowledge . Iowa point . Guest i think i started to look at it in college in experiments where i was working the lab on synaptic plasticity where we could use experiences in the visual system to change the way the visual cortex a part of your brain that does vision functions. And looking at the brain under the microscope and seeing this thank you of neurons, this busy busy population of active neurons and actually that is how we learn. Its the excitation of your brain cells, the turning on of them repeatedly that causes these changes. Cspan what is in what is a neuron first of all . Guest a neuron is a regular little cell like you have cells in the rest of your body except neurons are little different. They usually dont divide after birth so most of the neurons in our brain we have had since birth and we have 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 week become a daily basis but your brain cells are very special. Most of them stay with you for your entire life so that neuron has a cell body which is command central and then it has an outgoing signal process called an axon and on the other and its got a receiving and which is called a dendrite which has things called receptors on it. So an axon will talk to a dendrite or a receptor and theres a synapse at that place where the two sales talk. That is the part that is the most changeable and the proteins and the molecules that are involved in that process of turning on a synapse and building it with a memory art delta and at higher levels in the childhood brain and the adolescent brain compared to adults. Of course thats why children and adolescents can learn so much better and so much more effortlessly compared to adults. We know for instance children who have even more synopsis than adolescents children can learn one in two languages effortlessly. Its maddening to see them do this. As adults we barely get a thank at second language and without a bad accent. So adolescents arent quite as high as the children in terms of the number of the synopsis but they are still much higher than adults. Most brain cells function they have to turn on and of course you want them to turn off as well so they have expectations, some synapses that turn them on and other synapses that are inhibitory turning them off. It turns out the excitatory synapses are at higher levels during childhood and adolescence can pair. An adult. Cspan we have video of young people talking about all the Different Things to talk about in your book. The first one is an 18yearold where she talks about being a heroin addict at a rehab center and i want you to explain the impact on the brain after listening. Im kristen im 18 years old. I have been here for seven months. What brought me here is i overdosed 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, shot me up and the next thing i know i woke up in an ambulance. I was living a doublelife 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. Cspan how familiar is this kind of story to you . Guest is very familiar. Thats one of the things we talk a lot about in the book. Teenagers can get addicted faster, harder, longer, stronger than adults and what is fascinating is the reason for this is that i was just talking about synaptic plasticity in the ability to build synapses for learning that happens in the hippocampus and cortex that addiction turns out is synaptic plasticity to. Its a form of learning. Its repeated. Stimulation just like if you are practicing something except its a drug and its your reward circuit not your other memory circuits and its using different chemicals but at the same process. So they are primed to become addicted much more easily, just as they can learn good things. Their brain can learn to become addicted much more easily than an adult. We see this over and over again that kids who are exposed to drugs Substance Abuse in which you can get addicted to have a much more difficult time recovering compared to an adult. Cspan here are some teenagers talking about stress caused by school. Some of the stress i feel in my life maybe comes from school or my parents. I get into a few arguments with my parents. School is pretty stressful, testing and homework and studying in this an app. Made me worry about my grades. I dont really like having bad grades. If i get a. Orie d that really upsets me. Theres definitely some pressure and stress in my life was trying to balance so many different activities and academics. Senior year im in a giant pool of stress because i have to be here next year moving on in my life and sometimes i just need to step back from it and sit down and think to myself okay. Cspan it shows the impact of stress on the brain. Just goes stress actually can affect your synapses. They are chemicals cortisol and other chemicals that get produced when you are under stress and they actually interrupt that process i was talking about of having to build a synapse. Building a synapse during learning a few steps that take a few hours to happen and minutes to hours and those Building Blocks can be interfered with by hormones like cortisol. Its produced under stress so its no now, basic research is showing exact we help stress can disrupt it and of course its a downward spiral. If 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 two or more stress. So its a 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 the stimulation and the kids are seeing 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 thats a good and bad thing because it they learn better but they can also be affected by things that they are also not able to 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 should not have been texted so the problem is this paradox they have got. You know a very active brain but maybe they are leaving it in the wrong direction about thinking twice. Cspan you talked about this in your ted talk and i 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 synopsis they are because they are are more materials to affect teenagers with binge drinking will have greater brain damage than adults. Likewise marijuana or thc affects it numerous places in this pathway and because they have more substrate to their effects are more long lasting. In fact after getting high there can be four days of cognitive impairments to suggest whats going to happen on that test on thursday when you have a busy weekend . These are things these kids need to know. Cspan so how much more alcohol and order marijuana is there today among teenagers . Guest actually there is a lot. There is nih data that is telling us is still a very big problem, especially in the midteen years. Actually some of these other drugs though are possibly beginning to look like they are eclipsing alcohol. Cigarettes are coming down because that is not as big an issue as it has been although its still an issue. These are very real problems. Now the point is that kids can get access to these agents a lot easier now than five or 10 years ago to social social networking so it is a real issue to discuss with them. Of course some of these drugs like pot gets legalized and pot is legal its around and available. I think the big point as opposed to the way we used to talk about this oh dont worry they are resilient and they will bounce back. They had quite a bender last night in the parents not laugh it off but dismiss it actually more damage can be done to the teen brain when its exposed to the excesses of alcohol or pot and into an adult for the same amount. One of the interesting things theres a group at mclean in boston who has done studies looking at the longterm effects of chronic daily pot smoking for instance. It turns out theres a dosedependent effect on daily pot smoking. The more you smoke the more your iq drops permanently so that was an eyeopener. Or corollary to that is though it tells us that the brain is very changeable during the adolescent period. I for one didnt realize that iq could change after you were a child. I thought you get a test done as a kid and you have a number and its your number for the rest of your life. No a third of people stay more or less the same but there was a study done three or four years ago using mri imaging functional imaging and compared it with iq testing showed that one third of peoples iq goes up during their teen years and wondered goes down. The maddening thing about the study in the early days was they didnt track what the people were doing all of those years that made their iq get better or worse but the pot smoking experiments or observations of people who had been chronic pot smokers shows theres one way that your brain can actually go down with respect to iq. Cspan you say in your book to and you can tell me the exact statistic. If you smoke or merra one of cigarettes a day that is equal to a full pack of regular tobacco . Guest so in terms of tobacco and damage to the lungs theres a lot of similarities of the two but the other way that pot is similar to nicotine is that there can be an addictive aspect of this. I think nicotine is a really good example of addiction and its been very well studied in adolescent humans and adolescent animals, experimental studies and it really shows with one or two hits of nicotine to brain just turns on and adolescent and the same amount in an adult doesnt have that much of her a response. And of course it begins to build this addictive circuitry that we talked about that 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 causing hard changes which has adult we certainly know people that started smoking when they were teenagers. Its almost impossible for them to fully quit. Host how much more do we know about the brain today than when he started at madison . And why . Guest well we have had an explosion of Amazing Technology. We know so much more. When i was starting in medical school neurology for instance was a field where we had a hoard of that horrible set of diseases, things that would go downhill and we made diagnoses. Now of course we have so many new pieces of information coming from the basic sciences. At the decade of the brain remember and Clinical Sciences or with modern neuroimaging like the ability to want to brain regions turn on and off different behavioral states, genomics coming in. Theres this explosion of really wonderful information. So we are able to now begin to understand why this has happened. We can find along the pathway targets to work on to devise treatments and even though the circuitry of the brain so we are able to do stimulation now. We know where to stimulate the brain. We have a bit more of an understanding of its wiring diagram so its really like a revolutionary period right now. Cspan how long have you been in an operating room watching a brain operation . Guest im a neurologist and not a brain surgeon but i have been in many times one place of the epilepsy. Epilepsy is an example of a disease that we are just learning so much more about how it happened that is not just one disease. There many different ways to have epilepsy. Theres epilepsy, depending on where your brain is in development so its very different in a baby brain than the adult brain in different in the adolescent brain. Epilepsy we now know were 30 of people with epilepsy dont get treated fully with drugs and they have a big problem because note drug is working on that and it turns out those are ideal candidates sometimes for epilepsy surgery. That could be curative for that. Cspan go back to the teenager that has stressed. I dont remember that word in high school and has the drug situation. What do you say to parents that have to decide about medicine in that case and how often do these kids when they are under stress go get drugs to take them out of stress . Guest i think theres a lot of selfmedication that goes on. There are a lot of sedative drugs that are rolling around. Theres also a lot of stimulative drugs rolling around it being shared trait also i think a lot of kids that smoke pot say they are doing it to decrease their anxiety. I think there is a real connection there. I guess what parents have to realize is you need to stay on top of being connected to your teenager. That was one of the things i wanted to make clear in this book he we have this incredible amount of information that is a state unto itself. And its not an adult with fewer miles. Therein between and they have special strengths and weaknesses. Todays world is creating more choices for teenagers then they may actually know how to deal with. As parents we do have our frontal lobes connected. And so are the teachers because we are over 25. We need to stay connected and offer information. Cspan heres a report from abc in the year 2009 about something we hear about every day now. Meet 13yearold raina hardesty. Im a. Im attacked the holy period Record Number of text in a month, 14,005 and 28. 14,528. Reina is such a hardcore text or at her 13th Birthday Party she was texting back and forthwith her best friend who was sitting right next to hurt. Texting is like reading for her. Something that happens along with all the other normal things that this 13yearold does. The Technology May also play a part in an adolescence need to separate from their parents. I would stick my nose in the book and that was my way to get away for my parents. Is texting part of that . I would say yeah. I talked to my friends instead. I feel a little bit more comfortable for some reason. Is called being a teenager. She does an incredible amount of texting perspective. Average 13 to 17yearold sends over 1700 text amount to a. Cspan you say in your book is now 3300. It can be a week for some of these kids. It is a huge force in your life. This is something as parents we dont have firsthand experience with this. This is something we are learning about at the same time. We as adults are learning more slowly than our teenagers who are much faster learners. Cspan how much lowers her brain than there is . Guest im up numbers have been put on it that probably 30 faster than we are a suspect. Cspan with this cause that . Guest we have fewer of these excitatory synapses and jean ray for the longterm potentiation macculloch. Cspan ways that . Guest because genetically we are programmed to turn on and off proteins and genes over our lifespan in our neurons and there is a surge that is genetically programmed coming down in adolescence and flattening out in the adult years. We are working on it bit of a disadvantage. It will take us more practice to learn the same skill as a teenager. They are adapting quickly. They are clearly showing as they are able to mop the test better than we are but its not failsafe. I point out in the book that their studies done on teenagers around distracted learning and they get a condition of being distracted upon trying to memorize or whether they are being tested and they are compared to kids at the same age that have no distractions. Even this multitasking generation they still show significant effects of my not as much learning as they were distracted were trying to memorize. So we have to remind that theres only so much a brain can handle and if they want to learn something most effectively they would probably do Something Better with less distraction and more. Cspan how do you ask this question . Or their brains that are significantly better than other brains and can you look at a human being as they get older and say that person has a better brain than that person . Guest i think its very difficult to say that. The more we learn about brains theres not just one way to measure them. Theyre people who have incredible strength with social interactions that may be horrible at math. In fact we are all mixture of strengths and weaknesses. We are starting to see the brain functioning as a whole with their new technology. We are all amazed at the diversity of types of people and how they function and environment. Often they will see functioning in their strengths to someone who isnt good at math will end up eating an artist or something that doesnt need that skill set. Teenage years are a great time to do this discovery. 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. Sort of interesting because given how its so recent that we have no misses and adaptive. Mechanism biology behind it we tend to think oh well by 13 or 14 at lease some other cultures and some other countries if you are a scholar by then or not its like a done deal. By 13 or 14 you are off on one track or another in the good news here is clearly they are late boomers. Im sure we all know those people and theres a real biology to that and its okay and we should probably not close the door certainly educationally or respect to any strength or person showing. Right around puberty. Theres a long time to continue to work on these things. Cspan you said iqs can change. Guest iqs can change . Cspan what is the iq iq measure to bring . Guest with an old silent silent signs that we are trying to understand in a biological basis structural basis. Theres Amazing Technology called functional mri which is Magnetic Resonance imaging which can measure metabolism of blood flow was part of your brain is on at any given time. So you can look at hotspots of what is turning on during iq testing for instance. Its starting to unravel where it is the basis of your math iq your verbal iq. This is still ongoing research. Its starting to really allow us to measure these things and do a comparison of before and after. The study i told you about about looking at people between ages 13 and 17 in seeing the changes was a combination of a classic written iq test with the mri findings. Cspan can you take any medicine that will make you smarter . Guest i wish. Cspan i know theyll do you get a they start advertising about i dont know what it is ginkgo below the like that is supposed to make you smarter. It will help you remember things better and all that. Any truth to that . Guest theres an explosion of information coming out of the basic sciences and now being tested in Human Imaging and early human trials thinking about what we know of this process and what is learning. There have been a huge amount of research now on what receptors and what molecules turn on and off in that process. And there is work that is showing if you can target some of those, this just a model still you can enhance the process of memory for sure. One interesting thing is the brain as i said is a very adaptive organ and its very much nature versus nurture. Its monitoring the environment constantly. The degree of interaction you have with. Amber actually can set your threshold for how easily you can learn. Very interestingly there is work being done by a guy named mike mrsa in california who is a longterm scientist through his entire career and synapses and he gets to his 70s and he became interested in the aging brain. He did studies looking at what is the effect of stimulation on the aging brain . And found a miraculous finding when you stimulate these rats you have rats sitting in a boring old cage and a medical laboratory. A cage with wheels and all kinds of things for them to play with. It took the age of the rats and put them in the normal cage or the fancy cage and then measured their brain levels on these proteins that are important for learning and receptors. They were much higher in the animals in the enriched environment. Then he went and had them learn a task and of course the elderly animals that were in this enriched environment were actually functioning like middleaged animals. So it tells us that there is a lot of Natural Forces that are really helping stimulate our brain and it also helps substantiate the adage to try and learn a second language to keep your brain going in retirement age or tried to do crosswords in this kind of thing. It really does substantiate that. Cspan you talk in your ted med speech about your two teenage sons. They are not teenagers anymore but lets watch a minute of what you said there and we can go back to your experience with your own kids. And announced to me there was another experiment going on in my own home. My two teens found. Now how many of you in this audience have one of these 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 is very bright seem to be despite getting as could not seem to understand the rules of the road in massachusetts despite the fact is written in the proverbial sixthgrade language. And what about the disorganization that these guys had . What was that . Was a composter laundry . Very unclear and i was just marveling marveling would be the right word, tearing my hair out to be the word and i said im going to go back and learn about the teen brain. Cspan will and andrew. First you married a doctor. How long were you married . Guest 17 years. Cspan how long did you have teenagers in your house that you have to take care of yourself . Guest practically the entire team time. Cspan how old are they now . Guest they are 24 and 27. Cspan we have a lot of people who work here at this network but have teenagers or soontobe teenagers and some of them pull their hair out. They can understand why their teenagers doing what they are doing. First would you rather have and this is probably not a fair question, girls or boys based on what you know about the brain when they are teenagers . Guest i think its a total tradeoff. You you getsomethings with poison to get other things with girls. I dont think one is better or worse than the other. I think they can be very different issues. Cspan what is the difference between a boy spring and in the girls brain . Guest girls actually in this may come as a surprise, are a couple of years ahead of boys in terms of their biological development of their brains and boys will catch up of course but for a 14yearold girl versus a 14yearold boy they are very different. I think that girls are planners at that age. Theyre working that out. It tends to be the source of elaborate arguments between mothers and daughters and lots of planning around things, lots of forethought. The boys are little bit more transparent, sort of bumping into stuff. They can have accidents of one kind or another. Theyre not so much planning. I think its equally as concerning to parents whichever they get, the girl or the boy. I think most people would say they have unique issues. Girls will interestingly they actually have the capacity to learn things earlier than boys because of this process. Whats happening in the brain is that you have this synaptic plasticity that im talking about where you are able to learn faster because you have more synapses and there is more machinery for learning but at the same time as being very on an excitable impressionable brain you are trying to slowly cook 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 the movie clip of the brain getting gradually blue and connected. Because from the back of the brain to the front of that process is called myelination. Its tiny cells better insulating with facts process called myelin and natural insulation we have. Islam tracks the government decided to bring to the other novel way to the front. The girls are further on that journey than the boys. Theyre not there yet but it helps explain a lot of for easy them academically academically. Cspan quote from your book. During adolescence more than any other time emotions rule our lives. You also say in large part what makes adolescents a difficult as much of the teenagers response to the world is driven by emotion not reason. Guest i think thats true. They dont have their frontal lobes to reason. The cause and effect and consequences of actions are not clear to them because their frontal lobes are not at the ready. Theres not as readily accessible. The connections can be made as quickly for splitsecond decisions. Also dont forget a lot of the hormones are changing in the body of those young men and women and the brain hasnt been seen these yet in life until you hit teenage years. The brain is trying to learn how to respond to these new hormones that are rolling around and locking onto receptors synapses of different types to its trial and error. I think this contributes to this very rollercoaster kind of experience that we watch as parents. Cspan what was it like raising your two sons . Guest i loved every minute of it. It was a journey of my life. I really enjoyed it. I have tried to turn what could have been anger into curiosity. Because it was sort of a natural thing. I was just really interested. Cspan were with the anger come from . Guest anger and being frustrated with your kid who has just lost a really expensive watch that you mightve given them for christmas or they forgot their homework yet again and they failed their test. Those kinds of things where you are like why didnt you think of this . I found it helps me. Why is this happening . Trying to be curious about it and i explained a lot to them too. We have conversations. I dont know how much got through. Some to get through. They did get out of 13 years but i think it did help me be a better parent and when i started to share these pieces of information to friends having coffee or at a dinner party or something i found over and over again people are like oh my god now it all makes sense. So this was part of the reason why i ended up a getting the teen brain onetoone talks which i do in high schools and then eventually getting to the point it might as well just be put into one place. Its all very new information. Cspan what are the young kid surprised that when you give them a talk . Guest there a are couple of things there surprised about. First of all this is. Makkah normal development that is one that people are inquiring about themselves. Theyre trying to figure out who they are. Its a period of some they are very selfreflective. They want to know about themselves so anything you tell them thats about them their ears perk up. They were very interesting to hear about the iq payday think they were surprised at the iq could change. They were surprised that they are more vulnerable to alcohol and addiction than adults. They didnt really think about that. I think they were just at that there was a biological basis between the differences of girls and boys, that there really was something going on there. I think they also sleep was another thing. Why are they sleeping so late . Their circadian clocks have changed. That gave them an understanding that it wasnt willful trying to be obstructionist to your parents. Its a biological thing. Cspan how long that lasts, the sleep part . Guest into your late teens and early 20s and your circadian clock which is what dictates when you want to go to sleep and all species policemen million species this happens in cats and dogs. They have this during adolescence too so it turns out one of the factors is melatonin which you can take to get over jet lag. Its her own kind of sleeping pill inside of us. Its our own sleep hormone or sleep chemical. It turns out its triggered to be released hours before you fall asleep. In adults that happens at 8 30 or 9 00 and teenagers its closer to midnight. They cant fall asleep and then the problem is we adults on our schedule wake them up at 6 00 a. M. To get baptized and they are in the equivalent is probably like 3 00 a. M. For us. So you are waking them out of midsleep which is not great at something they are dealing with. Also we do know that sleep deprivation talking about synaptic plasticity, guess what . It breaks that down. It lowers the neurochemistry responsible for building synapses. Drops when you are sleepdeprived terry at so its not very helpful, the fact that their they are timezones are not playing out with hours. Cspan you told the story and this is a little bit off topic you told the story and im old enough to remember this very well. A man named Charles Joseph whitman who went to the top of the tower at the university of texas back in the mid60s and my memory is he killed 13 people and wounded a number another 30 or Something Like that but the thing i didnt know was the connection to the brain. Whats the story . Guest for teenagers we are talking a lot about what the applications were about the frontal lobe and its lack of connectivity. This is change the way we think about how responsible they are for criminal acts . In fact while i was going through this process i got involved in a couple of 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 parole for kids between 14 and 17 that they have committed a capital crime or life in prison. We were saying that maybe would have to help but it shouldnt be without any exceptions. You shouldnt be reviewed on a casebycase basis. It was really responsible as the bulb and because of course theyre frontal lobes and they can be entered and influence any think of a case in which for instance a 13 or might be under the influence of an older sibling who has done a crime and they are standing there. They may not have reason for this. We also make another point though that they may be rehabilitated. Its all in an individual basis but because of his plasticity if they are incarcerated we may be better off trying to work on rehabilitating these kids. Cspan but on Charles Joseph whitman, after it was over i dont remember how he died, he killed himself i think, im not sure. But anyway in his note he said for an autopsy and then they found a brain tumor. In his frontal lobes. What would that have done to him . Guest this is the point. His frontal lobes were being encroached upon by a brain tumor so that they werent functioning normally. So was like he didnt have this his full set of frontal lobe is. Again leading to impulsive acts without knowledge and judgment of cause and effect. Cspan are you saying that kind of an individual, he was like 26 years old that kind of an individual should have a life sentence . Guest im not saying that at all. I think we have a long way to go around this but incidents kaliya thinking about adolescence actually made a statement. Is adolescence a 10 to mental retardation and should you think of certain age groups do they have a natural disability . Now of course a disease like a frontal tumor would be an explanation for somebody but you find that out afterthefact. This is a very controversial area of neuroscience. Cspan you told the story in the book about Terrence Graham and that was one of the cases you were involved in. And by the way before we forget that you are doing that right now . What is your job . Guest i am the chair of the Neurology Department at the university of sylvania at the Palmer School of medicine. Cspan how long have you been there . Guest about two and a half years. I was at harvard before that running a research lab and i still have that as well but it was a research lab looking at Brain Development and especially in early infancy and Early Childhood thinking about new targets for treatments because actually you think of the adolescent brain is different from the adult the baby brain is a whole different ballgame. In fact a lot of drugs that work well and adults dont work at all in the baby brain because the targets arent even there yet. An example of that is apple ups the which is an area i was studying in premature brain injury. There are so many different types of cells and different drug targets and there is disease in that window that are different from the adult. Most of it drugs for kids or handmedown drugs for the kid brain and they arent customized for the child or for the brain. Actually since we are talking about teenagers, we know for instance maybe it are nine years ago there was a big also in the news about antidepressants and adolescence. And how certain antidepressants given at doses that were great for adults increased suicidality in adolescence. We cant make assumptions about how their brain cells are working based on the adult. They would have these unusual unintended outcomes giving adult drugs to children and teenagers. Cspan go back to the Terrence Graham story. How does a meter out neurologists get involved in a court case . Guest started to do these talks are in the teen brain and id given some of the Science Museum and the different schools and somehow somebody had gotten wind that i was talking a lot about the teenage brain and was doing work on brenda bob. 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 for the Supreme Court. I got involved in that. Most of the people were psychologists and social workers and lawyers around around dealing with juvenile crimes. They needed someone to talk about the teen brain and a matching biology so that was my little contribution to it. Cspan what about mr. Graham . Guest we felt this was somebody who who is underage it couldve been under the implement and we were very sorry to think that there was no option for life without parole and we were able to argue for the reasons i just said that maybe their judgment was not being paired. It was just not present yet. And they might he rehabilitate up all and to convince the Supreme Court to at least not rule out the role for some of these individuals but not saying that everybody gets a free pass and theres parole for everyone. Cspan couple of statistics in your book every year between 12 and 17 are arrested for Violent Crimes than 100 juvenile sending the life without parole for nonmurders. In the brief time we have left the chapter on sports and concussions, you describe what happens to the brain when youre playing football or you get your head knocked in a wrestling match. Your son was an aptly . Guest they both were. They were wrestlers who wants to play football. Cspan what happens to the brain and what degree is there when it comes to concussions . Guest a concussion is be caused by rapid impact of the brain and to the school which causes the brain to sort of shift inside this bony capsule called the this gal. Our brains are more like jello so it doesnt require you fracturing her skull to cause damage so it will shift back and forth and hit the inside inside walls of the skull and can have sheer imagery because the structure can be torn. With severe brain injured injury or moderate brain injury we see this by impact and of course one of the signature injuries of the last few wars that we have been involved in have been these impact injuries from explosives nearby which is not a physical injury to the scalp itself. Its just this impact of the pressure wave goes to the brain. So concussion he can lose consciousness. You dont have to lose consciousness. You have some sort of neurological system like feeling dizzy or bad vision and what we find is there is usually a period in a concussion where people feel foggy and they certainly have amnesia right before or right after the head injury. Then they can have a period of weeks of not feeling themselves having problems with the tension, headaches and what we find, what the research is finding with repeat concussions it actually gets worse each time. Theres a lot of recent research that is continuing to be added to by the month about what happens longterm following concussions. Theres something called chronic traumatic encephalopathy which is almost like a premature alzheimers happening in brains. Actually under the microscope some of the same signaling proteins we have seen gone wrong and alzheimers are present in these brains of people that have had repeated concussions and we feel the early life you are very vulnerable. Girls tend to have more injuries than boys at this time. Its a question of whether the thickness of their school or not but this is an emerging area of intense research. Sports seems to be theres a lot of impact in sports these days. We have to remind people that you could have a cement block around your head that you are still going to have the shearing thing going so its due on the part of the job. Cspan you say there are a Million High School Football Players in this country . Guest at least. Cspan we have a minute left. There is another that when youre in the womb between three and six month, Something Like this you have more narrow and then you have for the rest of your life . Is there a billion neurons in your head that can route around the globe for times . Guest their billions and billions of neurons. We dont know the absolute number but there are billions and billions. The good news is you start off with more than you really need and we prune our brains as we go through life. Its kind of like you get lean and mean. Benaron says they are the ones that end up staying because they are being used a lot. So it makes the brain more efficient. This is all meant to happen as part of Brain Development. Cspan our guest has been Frances 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. Guest thank you