Word: whiteness
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...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, around...
...paper just published in PLoS ONE - a journal of the Public Library of Science - a team led by psychiatrist Gregory Berns of Emory University in Atlanta shows that adolescents who engage in more dangerous activities have white-matter pathways that appear more mature than those of risk-averse youths. White matter is essentially the brain's wiring - the neural strands that connect the various gray-matter regions, where the actual nerve cells reside, that are otherwise independent of one another. Maturation of white matter is important because it increases the brain's processing speed; nerve impulses travel faster in mature...
...tendency to 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...
...After answering reporters' queries in Siaolin, a man named Wang Min-liang and his female friend kneeled before him offering a khata - a long white silk scarf usually given to bless a highly respected person in Tibetan culture. The Dalai Lama touched their cheeks with his hands and hugged them, and Wang, who lost fourteen family members including his parents and siblings to Siaolin's mudslides, began to cry. "I came to share their traumatic experience," the Dalai Lama said that day. "I don't want to cause any inconvenience to anybody." That anybody - President Ma - is probably glad...