Brain imaging research has uncovered new details about how young brains develop through the teenage years. This ScienCentral News video reports why idle isn't better when it comes to the mind.
Long-term Learning
Summer is approaching, but that doesn't mean kids should stop using their brains. New research confirms that during the teen years, the brain is ripe for learning new things.
Scientists used to think there was a spurt of the production of gray matter, the tissue of the brain responsible for information processing, during the first eighteen months of life, and then a steady decline. But in the late 1990s, brain scientist Jay Giedd discovered a second spurt of gray matter production just before puberty, followed by a period of "pruning" during the teenage years. "The second wave increases throughout childhood, peaks at about age eleven in girls and twelve in boys, and then in the teen years it prunes or thins down," Giedd explains. "The teen brain is particularly active in terms of the growth of connections and pruning back of those connections. It's a very tumultuous time in terms of the brain development story."
The red indicates more gray matter; the blue, less gray matter. image: UCLA Laboratory of Neuroimaging and NIH
They found that the first areas of the brain to mature, the extreme front and back, are those involved with the most basic functions, such as movement. The areas involved with spatial orientation and language are next, and the last to mature are the areas like the prefrontal cortex that are involved with more advanced "higher-order" functions like reasoning. "The brain grows in fits and starts, and different parts mature at different ages," says Giedd.
This look into actual brain development confirms that the teen years are the perfect time to give brains a workout. "We think that during the times when the brain is undergoing the big changes of growing new connections and then cutting them down is the time when practicing a new instrument or doing studies my have a much greater impact than in much later years in life," Giedd says.
This look into actual brain development confirms that the teen years are the perfect time to give brains a workout. "We think that during the times when the brain is undergoing the big changes of growing new connections and then cutting them down is the time when practicing a new instrument or doing studies my have a much greater impact than in much later years in life," Giedd says.
Arthur Toga, neuroscientist and head of the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging (LONI) at UCLA, oversaw the new brain animation, and says this research may also explain why learning seems much faster and easier when we're younger. "The brain is particularly plastic in these younger ages, because the circuitry is ready for tailoring," he says. "If you were to do a functional scan of somebody trying to play the piano for the first time, then you scan them repeatedly as they took concentrated lessons over time, you would find the amount of brain that's necessary for that person to perform that piano concerto would become less as they become more proficient. The brain has the remarkable ability to capitalize on efficiency, to tune the appropriate circuitry. It may be that provides the necessary hardware to perform that task. The very same thing may be going on in maturation."
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