Word: mattering
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...results challenge the accepted notion that teens make dumb decisions because their brains are immature. Although previous research has shown that most teens' gray-matter structures - including those involved in decision-making - are less advanced than those of adults, as you would expect, until now no one had studied teens' white matter, which works along with gray matter to produce decisions. The key part of white matter is called myelin, a fatty substance that coats the individual neural strands, or axons, that make up white matter. Myelination of axons begins during childhood and is completed at the end of adolescence...
...engage in behaviors such as driving without a license, having unprotected sex and using drugs. Then they had the kids undergo a relatively new kind of brain scan called diffusion tensor imaging, a type of magnetic resonance imaging that is used to look at dense tissues like white matter. After analyzing the scans, the authors found a strong correlation between how risky the students described their behavior to be and how sophisticated their white matter was. The more mature the look of the brain, the more risk-taking the teenager tended to report...
...would kids who take more risks turn out to have more adultlike white matter than other kids? The authors suggest that some risk-taking among adolescents is evidence that they are trying out more adultlike roles. Having unsafe sex and driving too fast may be mistakes, but kids often have to experiment with limits in order to learn how to live within them. Which, in turn, is a sign of maturity. "Adolescents who engage in [risky] behaviors obtain more experience in a variety of domains," the authors write. "Their more conservative peers, in contrast, do not have as much 'life...
Another possible explanation is that some teenagers whose brains develop more quickly than others become uncomfortable with the gap between their biological capabilities and the social rules they must follow as kids. "Precocious development of these [white-matter] tracts may predispose some adolescents to engage in behaviors that society considers too adult in nature for their chronological age," the authors write. In other words, having a more mature brain may actually spur some kids to seek out new and potentially harmful experiences...
...these theories are just speculation, and the researchers concede that the interaction of white and gray matter is so complex that hard conclusions remain elusive. "We have a new piece to the puzzle here," says Emory's Monica Capra, one of the study's authors. "But we don't have it all together." (Read more about the mind and body on TIME's Wellness blog...