Teenage Brain: A work in progress

After the last SNBL on the brain...I have become very interested in the developement of the frontal lobe and the emergent phenomenon within the brain. While researching this topic, I found this article about the teenage brain. It says that "advancements in MRI image analysis are providing new insights into how the brain develops". It talks about how ages 6-13 are the primary ages to learn languages, because "growth spurts can be seen from theses ages in areas connecting brain regions specialized for language and understanding spatial relations, the temporal and parietal lobes". After age 12, the growth drops basically stops resulting in the end of a period to learn languages. It also said they did a test where they scanned subjects' brain activity while they identified emotions on pictures of faces displayed on a computer. Young teens, who did bad on the the test, used the "amygdala, a brain center that mediates fear and other "gut" reactions, more than the frontal lobe". They noticed that as teenagers get older their brain activity during this test shifts to the frontal lobe, leading to more rationale observations. So maybe young teens really are incapable of making rational decisions in tough situations...

http://www.nimh.nih.gov/Publicat/teenbrain.cfm