Word: likenesses
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Oftentimes, according to Thomas, videoconferencing can reduce the anxiety of office visits for children and adolescents. "It's much easier to talk via a screen, especially with issues like anxiety disorders and sexual abuse," he says. "Students feel safe...
...region of the brain that is involved in remembering places and integrating other kinds of learning. The change affects the GABA neurotransmitter system. GABA, which is present in all mammals, inhibits or down-regulates nerve signals, as opposed to exciting them; this calming, relaxing system is activated by tranquilizers like Valium and the popular sleep drug Ambien, which attach to GABA receptors and act similarly to GABA. But at puberty, female mice experience a 700% increase in an unusual GABA receptor that helps calm the nervous system, except when under stress. In fact, this oddball receptor does the opposite...
Sophisticated brain-scan studies by Jay Giedd at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) have shown dramatic changes throughout the teenage years as excess gray matter is pruned from the prefrontal cortex - the seat of higher-order thinking and making judgments (like not smoking weed right before your chemistry exam). Meanwhile, behavioral studies have shown what every parent already knows: teens have poor control over impulses and a tendency toward risk taking. Still, relatively little is known about how such changes affect learning or what happens at a biochemical level in the brain as teens go through their addled...
...might this relate to humans? Actually, mild stress has been shown to improve learning in people; too much does the opposite. Smith wonders whether the discovery may help explain certain learning declines, like the drop-off in the ability to learn to speak a foreign language without an accent, which occurs sometime around puberty...
Overall, remarkably little is known about the relationship between developing brain anatomy and observed behavior like learning. It's a young field, and Smith's "very good study raises a lot of intriguing questions," says Giedd of the NIMH...