Word: brained
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...skill as Grandpa. Now we think teens are wastrels who get high on OxyContin and rouse themselves only to shoot up a school or update their MySpace profiles. But there's strong evidence that U.S. adolescents are actually getting smarter--or at least making better decisions. Could the teen brain be evolving...
Epstein's central psychobiological contention--that teens have the brain potential to make adult-level judgments--also doesn't hold up. True, teens have better reaction times and memories than adults, and most have adult-like moral-reasoning skills by adolescence. But a 2000 paper in Behavioral Sciences and the Law confirms common sense: adolescents score significantly worse than adults on assessments of their psychosocial maturity. Teens may know how to make good decisions, but they don't actually make good decisions as often as adults. Epstein points out that some teens do score higher than some adults...
...their latest study, Malhi and Lagopoulos used functional magnetic resonance imaging to see what happens in the normalized bipolar brain when subjects are asked to interpret facial expressions-specifically, of fear and disgust. While reading faces is something bipolar patients often feel they're struggling with, the study showed that the 10 patients' interpretations were as accurate and speedy as the 10 controls'. Crucially, however, their method of processing was different...
...Shown faces expressing fear, the healthy brains lit up predictably in the lozenge-shaped amygdala, an emotional center involved in recognizing expressions and tones of voice. But with the patients, the same images caused less activation of the amygdala and more of several other areas including the hippocampus, which encodes and retrieves memories. "Instead of processing a particular face in the context of right now, the brain is basically going back into its filing cabinet and picking out previous experiences, which is not an efficient way for it to work," says Malhi, chair of psychological medicine at the University...
...case - the two types of depression are quite different, they say-but Malhi adds: "No study has directly compared the two groups... and this would be the ideal experiment." For Malhi and Lagopoulos, it's a reminder that the deeper we delve into the mysteries of the brain, the more there is to learn...