Teenage Brain

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Speaker 8 This is the BBC.

Speaker 9 Hello, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox.

Speaker 2 Today we ask: Was Brian's pop career just a phase he was going through due to the changing structures of his teenage brain before he entered the adulthood of being a particle physicist?

Speaker 10 And why did Robin remain trapped in the perpetual adolescence of being a stand-up comedian?

Speaker 2 Shut up, Brian. Though I'm not a...

Speaker 11 You're such an idiot.

Speaker 2 Anyway, so,

Speaker 2 and in fact, anyway, I am now a serious Radio 4 broadcaster somewhere between Melvin Bragg and Nicholas Parsons, which is how I got the job.

Speaker 13 So

Speaker 10 today, we discuss the science of teenagers. What physiological changes occur in the brain during the teenage years? Is there an evolutionary explanation for them?

Speaker 10 Do these changes occur in other animals? And why didn't these changes reach completion in Robinins?

Speaker 2 I have no idea what that means, but I asked some teenagers who says extra was very much the word for the moment. So now, watch me radio for this intro, right? If you don't think I've got it.

Speaker 2 Today, we explore the teenage brain.

Speaker 1 We have three eminent grown-ups, and they are.

Speaker 8 I'm Professor Matthew Cochran from the University of Manchester. And the strangest thing that I did as an adolescent was to think that I could write poetry.

Speaker 8 I'm afraid I think I actually sent a whole bundle of them off to Ted Hughes, who didn't reply, which is probably the best thing.

Speaker 14 I'm Professor Sarah Jane Blakemore from UCL. I'm a cognitive neuroscientist.

Speaker 14 And yeah, the strange, I'm not sure it's the strangest thing, but maybe one of the more risky things I did as a teenager was to hitchhike around the south of France with my friend Cath,

Speaker 14 occasionally ending up in lorries or vans, one time in the boot of someone's car, just to get to the beach.

Speaker 11 I'm Laurie Brenda, I'm a Fellow of King's College, and I have an honorary doctorate in advanced mimicry from Heriot Watt University.

Speaker 11 And the strangest thing I did as a teenager, the riskiest thing I did as a teenager, was to run through a field of wheat.

Speaker 12 Oh, sorry.

Speaker 13 And this is our panelist.

Speaker 2 Before we continue, by the way, we should make it quite clear that in no way does this show recommend you climb in the boot of anyone's car.

Speaker 2 So, Rory, first of all, what for you defines what you think of as a teenager?

Speaker 11 Moody, insecure, impulsive, impressionable, re Sorry, that's Donald Trump, isn't it?

Speaker 11 No, I would say, well, actually, a lot of those still apply.

Speaker 11 Emotional, hormonal, anxious, desperate to fit in. I think all of those are part of teenage years, or they certainly were for me.

Speaker 2 So that is that for you is the archetype or what our presumption that we would make. I think that's pretty true.

Speaker 2 That kind of that straight, you know, the mixture of attempting to be gregarious, but also at the same time that, you know, desire for loneliness, staying in your room and the...

Speaker 11 Well, I mean, there are so many contradictions. Quentin Chris got it right about this, as about so many other things.

Speaker 11 He said, the thing about teenagers is they have the same problem, how to rebel and conform at the same time. And they manage this by defying their parents and copying each other.

Speaker 11 So there's that contradiction of rebelling and conforming, but also to be an individual, but also peer pressure, which is the biggest thing.

Speaker 11 I mean, it was particularly in my school because, in fact, a lot of the children went on to become members of the House of Lords.

Speaker 11 But I can remember that the pressure to conform, all the lads, you remember as a teenager, I used to so look up to the lads because they seemed so cool and so dangerous, and I wanted to be one of them.

Speaker 11 And then the other day, I actually met one of the people who I thought was the biggest lad in the school, and he'd just left the army and become an estate agent.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I saw that. I looked up someone the other day who was the most rebellious kid, and he works for British American Tobacco.

Speaker 12 So there we are.

Speaker 11 Sarah,

Speaker 10 I suppose some of those descriptions of teenagers are almost clichéd, but in a scientific sense, is there a fundamental difference between teenager and an adult?

Speaker 14 Yes, there is.

Speaker 14 There's a lot of evidence that teenagers go through a period of their life where they're more self-conscious and more moody. That's probably the hormones.

Speaker 14 But also, things like risk-taking seems to be heightened during the teenage years in adolescence.

Speaker 14 That's in adolescent humans and in non-human species of animals as well, like rats and mice, go through a period of heightened risk-taking when they go through their adolescence.

Speaker 14 And as Rory mentioned, peer influence. That seems to peak in adolescence.
So, adolescents are more influenced by their friends than children are or adults are.

Speaker 10 And you mentioned the hormones there. That tends to be the sort of

Speaker 10 the idea that everybody puts forward: that hormonal changes in your body and that makes you more moody.

Speaker 10 But is there more than that? Are there physiological differences?

Speaker 14 Yeah, so when I was an undergraduate 25 years ago, that's what I was taught.

Speaker 14 I was taught that teenage behavior is all down to hormones, changes at home of sex hormones at puberty, and changes from going to a little primary school to a big secondary school with lots of new faces and lots of new people.

Speaker 14 But that was because 25 years ago we had no idea what's going on in the brains of teenagers.

Speaker 14 We didn't have the ability to look inside the living human brain to look at how it changes across the lifespan. We now do, we use MRI scanning to scan the living human brain of all ages.

Speaker 14 And for the last 20 years, lots of different labs around the world have been doing that. And we now have a really rich picture of how the teenage brain develops.
And it's com and the idea that

Speaker 14 the brain stops developing in childhood, which is another thing that I learned when I was an undergraduate, is completely wrong.

Speaker 14 And in fact, the human brain continues to develop right throughout childhood, right throughout adolescence, and even into the early 20s.

Speaker 10 It's about adult size to eight or nine years old, isn't it? So it's not size that changes, it's the what is it, the construction, the architecture of the brain itself.

Speaker 14 Yeah, so

Speaker 14 the volume of the brain, the size of the brain, reaches adult levels by about age eight or nine.

Speaker 14 It's not that that changes, it's the um the structure of the brain, how its its composition, how much grey matter it has and how much white matter it has, and also how it functions, how it becomes activated when you do a certain task, like for example, when you take a risk or you make a decision or you inhibit an inappropriate response.

Speaker 2 Matthew, do we see a period of adolescence in all animals? I mean, we always joke about the fact that you do some work on maggots.

Speaker 2 Is there a kind of a

Speaker 2 grumpy teenage fly that

Speaker 2 goes into that excrement just deliberately to then leave footprints of poo on your cake, you know, as an act of rebellion? Or do we see a cut-off point of those that don't have adolescent experience?

Speaker 8 I think basically

Speaker 8 what we find is that in mammals, in particular, then there is a period of change, hormonal change, to do with the passage into adulthood.

Speaker 8 And that is associated, as Sarah Jane says, with lots of risk-taking and changes. In particular, when we say risk-taking, we're not talking about them, you know, trying to jump off cliffs or anything.

Speaker 8 Rats and mice will be much more interested in novel objects. So if you're a rat or a mouse, it's a really dangerous thing.
Something new in your cage is worrying. So you won't go towards it.

Speaker 8 And what happens is that the rats and mice will show a much shorter latency to respond to that. They'll start going out and sniffing it and be interested in it.

Speaker 8 So you can get something which we interpret as risk-taking, but is in fact basically just a lowering of the threshold at which they're ready to move.

Speaker 8 Normally, an adult rat will take some time and be very, very wary,

Speaker 8 but a juvenile adolescent rat will be much more quick to respond.

Speaker 10 And what's the time scale there for a rat?

Speaker 10 How old are you if you want to be a teenage rat?

Speaker 14 Rats go through about 30 days of adolescence

Speaker 14 when they're about 30 days old. Right.
So 30 days of adolescence.

Speaker 13 And

Speaker 13 30 days of adolescence.

Speaker 14 And mice the same. And there was a nice study published a couple of years ago showing that adolescent mice drink more alcohol when they're with other adolescent mice.

Speaker 14 And that's not true for adult mice. Adult mice drink the same amount of alcohol whether they're on their own or with their cage mates.

Speaker 2 There are some outtakes from bagpus which really change.

Speaker 2 They are not marvellous and mechanical.

Speaker 11 But

Speaker 11 doesn't it look like, as you said before, the perfect storm, really, because you've got all the hormones, but at the same time, as we now know, all this activity that's happening in the brain, it's like a cosmic trick.

Speaker 11 How teenagers, when they're vulnerable, are exposed to all of this at the same time.

Speaker 14 Yes, I mean,

Speaker 14 it is. It's like a perfect storm.
They're going through changes in both physically with their sex hormones and their bodies change. That means that society treats them differently.

Speaker 14 You might know a lot more about that, Matthew, because it's true for non-human species too.

Speaker 14 And also, their brains are going undergoing huge amounts of change and their social environment is changing.

Speaker 14 Their social environment becomes really chaotic and unstable, where people are trying to work out where they are in social hierarchies.

Speaker 14 All these changes put together mean that adolescence is quite a vulnerable time. It's the time in life where,

Speaker 14 if you're going to develop a mental illness, it's very likely to start in your adolescence. But it's also a time of heightened, we think it's a time of heightened plasticity.

Speaker 14 So it's a time of opportunity for things like learning and rehabilitation and therapy and that kind of thing.

Speaker 10 You mentioned the ratio between grey matter and white matter in the brain changes. So what is the difference between those two things?

Speaker 14 So grey matter is found in the surface of the brain,

Speaker 14 which is called the cortex, and contains brain cells, so neurons, and the connections between neurons and various other types of cell.

Speaker 14 Whereas, white matter is the long tracts, the fibers that connect up different regions of the brain together.

Speaker 14 And what we know about how grey matter and white matter change during adolescence is that grey matter increases during childhood.

Speaker 14 It peaks, the amount of grey matter you have in your brain is at its highest in late childhood or early adolescence, and then it undergoes a very steady, slow, and substantial decline right throughout adolescence.

Speaker 14 So, in other words, during adolescence, grey matter is actually declining and then it stabilizes in the 20s. Now, that might sound like a bad thing.

Speaker 14 Decline sounds like maybe it's kind of degenerating or something. It's not.

Speaker 14 We know that because, first of all, it stabilizes in the 20s for many decades.

Speaker 14 And we know that the changes in grey matter relate to really important neurodevelopmental changes that are going on in the brain that allow the brain to develop according to the environment that the animal or the child finds itself in.

Speaker 11 Is it sort of chucking out the things that it doesn't need?

Speaker 14 Yeah, well, so one of the things that's changing and contributes to this decline in grey matter during adolescence is that synapses are being pruned away.

Speaker 14 So, synapses are the connections between brain cells. What the brain does is it massively overproduces the number of synapses that you need.

Speaker 14 So, a child has many more synapses in its brain than an adult does. And so, then what has to happen is that the synapses, the connections that aren't being used, need to be whittled away.

Speaker 14 And that is done via this process called synaptic pruning. The synapses that aren't being used in a particular environment are the ones that get pruned away, they get eliminated.

Speaker 14 And the synapses that are being used in a particular environment are the ones that remain and get strengthened.

Speaker 11 So, it's a bit like a mobile phone or so that downloads all these hundreds and hundreds of apps, and they're all running away like mad in the background.

Speaker 11 And gradually, through adolescence, and particularly towards late adolescence, it's just getting rid of the apps it doesn't need.

Speaker 14 Yeah, making it probably a more, I mean, we don't tend to use the word efficient, but yes, making it a more

Speaker 14 kind of efficient network of

Speaker 14 synaptic connections.

Speaker 14 The other thing that's happening is that white matter is increasing during adolescence.

Speaker 14 So the fibers that connect up different brain regions together are increasing right throughout childhood and throughout adolescence, and you can see that as an increase in white matter.

Speaker 14 And that makes the brain more speedy, it speeds up the time it takes signals to move from one neuron to the other.

Speaker 1 Matthew, yes, you know.

Speaker 8 I think one of the things we need to think about is that we speak about teenagers, and that's got a very clear kind of temporal definition, but

Speaker 8 teenagers were invented as a term in the 1950s, I think. And if you think about what being in that age, for most people still in the world today, it's not being relatively,

Speaker 8 you know, you've got lots of pressures on you in terms of survival, in terms of working, in terms of perhaps having a family, that our adolescents don't have that pressure on them at least.

Speaker 8 So the adolescence is a, I wonder how much it is a social construct. So there's physiological things going on.

Speaker 8 But if you think about it in evolutionary terms, then I guess that for most of our existence on the planet, then the people will be having having children in their mid-teens.

Speaker 8 So, whilst they're going through this turmoil, they've also now got to start thinking about the next generation. So, Sarah Jane, how much is it?

Speaker 8 How real is it scientifically, and how much have we created it by the particular way that we organise our society at the moment?

Speaker 14 Yeah, I mean, adolescence is a social term, it's a social construct. The end of adolescence, actually, we normally define as the age at which you attain a stable, independent role in society.

Speaker 14 So, we can go on a long time. There might be one to be

Speaker 14 fifty, let's say.

Speaker 14 But and you can, yes, like as you said, you know, there are huge current, not just historical, but current cultural differences between societal expectations for this age group.

Speaker 14 In our society, it's completely acceptable to live at home and be in full-time education right into the throughout the teens and into the twenties.

Speaker 14 In other cultures, that's absolutely not the case, and young people are expected to go out and earn their own money, become independent, have babies as soon as they reach sexual maturity.

Speaker 14 Some people have argued that this suggests that this adolescent period is just a social construct invented, yeah, about a hundred years ago in the US. But I think that's not the case.

Speaker 14 I think there's really good evidence that actually adolescence represents a distinct, unique period of biological and psychological development.

Speaker 14 And that evidence comes from phenomena that we've already discussed, showing that, firstly, adolescent typical behaviours like risk-taking and socialization increase in adolescence, not just in humans, but in other species too.

Speaker 14 Also, cross-culturally, even between cultures that differ vastly in their societal expectations of this age group, you can nevertheless see similarities between adolescent typical behaviours like risk-taking, sensation-seeking, and peer influence across cultures.

Speaker 14 And also across history, you know, even as far back as, well, I've got a quote here from Socrates: the children now love luxury, they have bad manners, contempt for authority.

Speaker 14 They show disrespect for elders and love chatter in the place of exercise. He was talking about adolescence.

Speaker 2 Corey, do you think sometimes when you look back, especially when you see teenage children, you do slightly erase your own teenage experience.

Speaker 2 Think, well, yes, I know that I was, but I was never like that.

Speaker 1 We have a little trick we play.

Speaker 11 Yeah, well, I think Doug Larson said that few things are more satisfying than seeing your own children have teenagers of their own.

Speaker 11 And Robin Wynne said the same sort of thing about, you know, when he went actually when he became a parent and watching how his children dealt with their children.

Speaker 11 I think it is, it's a way that we tend to,

Speaker 11 we tend to sort of erase bits of our own childhood. And it's only sometimes, I think, when you watch our own children and then think, oh, actually, yes, I remember what that felt like.

Speaker 10 That's what I'm trying to approach is whether we know anything about the evolutionary reason for this change

Speaker 10 in our brains.

Speaker 8 I think what you've got underlying here, Sarah Jane's outlined, is a developmental process.

Speaker 8 You've got a childhood or an infant see in which certain develop you need to do certain things, be quiet or just grow or whatever the particular niche that you're in makes you want to do.

Speaker 8 But then you've got to become an adult, and that involves some fairly rapid developmental and hormonal changes, and that's what causes the upheaval.

Speaker 8 In our case, it's about acquiring life skills, isn't it? It's about becoming yourself.

Speaker 14 Yes, I mean, one of the well, you would ask, what's the point of this period of life? What's the point of adolescence?

Speaker 14 And one of the points is to become independent, independent from your parents and from your families. And in order to do that, you need to be a bit risk-taking.

Speaker 14 You need to experiment, explore your environment, and you need to affiliate with your peer group. You need to establish yourself in the social hierarchy.
So, from an evolutionary point of view,

Speaker 14 those kinds of adaptive needs might explain things like increased peer influence and increased risk-taking during adolescence, which we see across species.

Speaker 11 Rory. No, I was going to say, it's interesting.
So, in a way, it's not the teenagers that are the problem. They're doing what they are programmed to do.

Speaker 11 They are developing socially, hormonally, all of those things at once. It's actually the parents that are the real problem.

Speaker 11 In fact, Steve Peters, who wrote The Chimp Paradox, got a lovely view of this. He said, It's actually not the teenagers, it's the parents and their rhetorical questions.
But they say, Are you stupid?

Speaker 11 To which the answer is, yes.

Speaker 11 Yes, we're stupid because we're finding out what stupid is. We're finding out what is stupid and what is sensible.
The other question, question: don't you think?

Speaker 11 Well, no, because they're at a stage in their lives where they're finding out all those processes. So leave them alone in their bedroom and don't worry about what they're doing.

Speaker 10 I wanted to ask, Matthew talked about

Speaker 10 the different stages of our lives. And I wonder when you're putting together an impression, someone,

Speaker 10 whether you consider this person, do you see them as kind of a person? I think they're a four-dimensional object.

Speaker 11 I think Donald Trump has a very teenage brain, let me tell you.

Speaker 11 I look at that, I have a brain, I call it Semtex

Speaker 11 because it's plastic and it's explosive.

Speaker 8 So

Speaker 11 I think that deserved a better laugh.

Speaker 2 Wow, I have never seen that work before. I think that deserves a better laugh.

Speaker 12 And they just went, yes, you're right.

Speaker 11 They're going to make a film, and I am going to be played by one of the great Hollywood actors, Macaulay Kulkin.

Speaker 11 He's a little older, but I think he's got the character.

Speaker 14 Comparing Donald Trump to teenagers is just insulting to teenagers.

Speaker 15 That's true.

Speaker 2 I wanted to ask you, Sarah, in your book, you actually have, because we've talked about a lot of these ideas of the behavior of teenagers, but you're actually testing them

Speaker 2 in a scientific area.

Speaker 2 For instance, as you said, the mixture of both peer pressure and risk-taking, that you have worked on various different ways of trying to work out how much it is innate risk-taking, how much it is peer pressure risk-taking.

Speaker 2 Can you run us through at least one of the experiments that you used?

Speaker 14 Yeah, so

Speaker 14 well, if you think about the kinds of risks that we worry about teenagers taking, so things like smoking or experimenting with drugs or dangerous driving, binge drinking, these are risks that they don't tend to do when they're on their own.

Speaker 14 In fact, we don't tend to do when we're on our own generally, but teenagers particularly, it's when they're with their friends that they might experiment with these risks.

Speaker 14 And so, and it's been shown many, many times by lots of different experiments and in real-world data, which I'll come back to in a second. That's true.

Speaker 14 That if you take a teenager on their own and you get them to do a risk-taking task when they have no distractions and they can concentrate on the task at hand, they don't tend to take more risks actually, more often than not, than adults do.

Speaker 14 But if they have their friends with them, that's when they have this tendency to take risks. There was one nice experiment by a a colleague in the US called Larry Steinberg.

Speaker 14 He got teenagers and adults into his lab. They took part in a driving game, like a video arcade driving video game.

Speaker 14 And they either did this when they were on their own or they had a couple of friends standing behind them.

Speaker 14 And in the condition in which they had a couple of friends standing behind them, teenagers took about three times the number of risks that they took when they were on their own.

Speaker 14 Whereas having a couple of friends standing behind them had no effect on the number of risks adults took.

Speaker 14 So it really seems to be critical in whether teenagers take risks, is whether they have their friends with them. And it makes sense in terms of peer pressure.

Speaker 14 Because if the evolutionary pressure is to be accepted by your peer group and not to be ostracized by your peer group, then you need to be really aware of what your peer group wants you to do.

Speaker 14 And so, you're much more likely to go along with your mates and do things like experiment with things that they're experimenting with.

Speaker 14 So, for example, one example I often give is a very intelligent, say, thirteen-year-old girl who knows all about the risks of smoking.

Speaker 14 Nevertheless, when she's out with her friends at the weekend and they're all smoking and they offer her a cigarette, for her, what's the more risky decision?

Speaker 14 Saying yes to a cigarette, even though she knows

Speaker 14 the potential health risks of that, or saying no and risking ostracizing herself from her peer group. Or we would argue that for a teenager, that's the bigger risk.

Speaker 10 It seems to me there are almost two sciences here.

Speaker 10 There's behavioural science, observing the way that people behave, but also this rather newer area of scanning the brain and looking at the physical changes in the brain.

Speaker 10 So are those two approaches now beginning to coincide?

Speaker 14 Yeah, and in fact, what's interesting is I think one has kind of triggered the other to some extent.

Speaker 14 So like I mentioned, until about twenty years ago, we had no idea that the brain changes after childhood. We had no idea that the brain undergoes so much development during the teenage years.

Speaker 14 Because of those findings, which have now been published in hundreds of different papers, that lots of different regions of the brain are undergoing very substantial and protracted change.

Speaker 14 That has triggered a whole new field of behavioral science of teenage development. Because the idea is: well, you know, if you're, say, let's take the social brain, because that's what I work on.

Speaker 14 If your social brain is changing so much during the teenage years, then presumably all the social behaviors that rely on the social brain must be changing too.

Speaker 14 Whereas prior to that, it was assumed amongst most developmental psychologists that social behaviours like mentalizing, the ability to

Speaker 14 understand other people's minds, was pretty much fully developed by age five or six. Now, there's a whole new science of behaviour of mentalizing and how it develops during adolescence.

Speaker 10 In other animals, non-human species,

Speaker 10 do we see this complex interaction between behavior and physiology and development? Is it common really to most of the certainly higher animals?

Speaker 10 All the way down, I suppose, to insects.

Speaker 8 Well, certainly, as I said, then mammals are going to have very, very similar physiology.

Speaker 8 So, the process of becoming sexually mature, which is what is underlying all this, of course, and the passage from infancy to adulthood, there's going to be common effects, and those hormones are going to have common effects on the brain.

Speaker 8 In other vertebrates, it's going to be more complicated, but you see similar effects, for example, in in there's a species of bird called the Florida scrub jay, in which the

Speaker 8 parents are often helped by their offspring or by other young individuals to rear their babies.

Speaker 8 So there are individuals who don't reproduce for a year or two, but are effectively in this kind of limbo between being a nestling and being an adult, and they're contributing to the success of

Speaker 8 their parents, helping them, or just learning life skills about how you are, you can be a successful bird in very, very difficult environments.

Speaker 2 Rory, I wondered in terms of your risk-taking as a teenager, a little bit like the Quentin Crisp quote that you were saying, there's a strange thing where in one way teenagers appear to take great risks, but another time you won't take the risk necessarily of putting your hand up with the wrong answer because it has this clash.

Speaker 2 And I wonder, you as a performer, sometimes, as Brian mentioned in the intro, there's this idea of a perpetual adolescence, this desire to show off.

Speaker 2 In terms of risk-taking,

Speaker 2 you were very young when you, you know, you were Impressionist, you had a hit single with a 19 parody. When did you, did you, would you see yourself as a risk-taker?

Speaker 11 Well, I think looking back, and this is something I've come to understand a little bit more with my experience with ADHD more recently, looking back, because a relative of ours was diagnosed with that, and I look back at my own childhood and I realise how much of that was to do with ADHD, was to do with as a child I was sort of quite scattered-brained, forgetful, but I was very impulsive and I was very impetuous and a bit of a show-off and sort of kind of irrepressible.

Speaker 11 And you know, sometimes, as you know, ADHD itself is not about bad parents and naughty children, it's actually a neurodevelopmental thing. So, there's a big read-over into

Speaker 11 we're talking about teenage, where all these things are developing, where you're going from a brain which is regulated essentially around emotions and around

Speaker 11 the

Speaker 11 limbic structure to a brain which is regulated by analysis and being rational?

Speaker 11 And I think in the case of ADHD people that go on into adolescence and into later life, you never quite lose that impulsivity, that bit that actually regulates impulsivity is still absent.

Speaker 11 So, for a I once said to my agent, I said, you know, how many of your clients do you think actually have ADHD? She said, most of them, because it's a very useful thing for a comedian to have.

Speaker 9 If you are

Speaker 11 naturally

Speaker 11 impulsive, naturally a bit of a risk-taker, naturally a bit of a shoff, you will get to a joke more quickly. You're making those connections very quickly.

Speaker 11 Sometimes a joke is just you're saying what other people are thinking, but they haven't dared to say it, or they haven't quite got to the stage where they're going to vocalise it.

Speaker 11 And you know, a lot of that is to do

Speaker 11 with impulsivity.

Speaker 11 So, in a way, you know, the child that I was led to the adult that I was, and like a lot of people with ADHD, I found a job or I found a lifestyle where it's an asset to be impulsive.

Speaker 11 And it's an asset to to have a brain that jumps around all over the place and makes connections.

Speaker 11 The elements were there when I was a child, and I'm not sure as a child or even as a teenager I knew who I was or what I was doing.

Speaker 11 And even now, I'm not entirely sure who I am or what I'm doing because I've now turned it round and it's now what I am and who I'm doing.

Speaker 2 Sarah,

Speaker 2 why what do we know about why certain things you mentioned schizophrenia earlier, for instance? That's a late teenage that

Speaker 2 appears to be observable. What do we understand about why it would be at that stage that schizophrenia will become observable?

Speaker 14 Well, yeah, schizophrenia is the reason I became interested in adolescent brains in VEC because I was doing a PhD in a post-doc post-doctoral research on schizophrenia.

Speaker 14 And I got interested in the fact that all these patients I was testing in hospitals in the UK and in France, where I did my postdoc, when I asked asked them what age did you start experiencing your symptoms, which were things like hearing voices inside their heads and being paranoid,

Speaker 14 there wasn't a single exception. Every single one of the hundreds of patients I saw said some age between 18 and 25.
So I became interested in what is it in the teenage brain that

Speaker 14 developed differently in teenagers who go on to develop schizophrenia. And back then, that was about, I don't know, 17, 16, 17 years ago that I became interested in that question.

Speaker 14 very little was known about even how the typically developing brain changes, let alone

Speaker 14 in teenagers who go on to develop schizophrenia. So that's when I decided to work on that precise question.

Speaker 14 The answer is we don't really know yet.

Speaker 14 That kind of question is starting to be asked in big,

Speaker 14 large-scale studies that are scanning the brains of teenagers, for example, who are at high risk from developing schizophrenia or indeed another mental illness. And what that so the

Speaker 14 jury's out, we don't really know

Speaker 14 the precise answers, but what these studies tend to show is that the way the brain gets to its end point, so the way it develops, seems to be really critical in all of these different mental illnesses and also developmental conditions, even like ADHD and autism.

Speaker 14 It's not about the end point, but it's about how they got there.

Speaker 14 The analogy I like to use is whether you take to get to your end point, whether you drive the motorways or the A-road roads, you might get to the same point, even in the same amount of time sometimes.

Speaker 14 But

Speaker 14 the route you take is really important, and that seems to be the case for mental illnesses.

Speaker 10 So, is the suggestion that a large amount of our personality as an adult is driven very much by the physical changes that happen in these years

Speaker 10 as the brain changes through the teenage years?

Speaker 14 Yes, but the physical changes that happen in your brain during the teenage years can, of course, and are necessarily moulded by the environment that you grow up in and the experiences you have.

Speaker 14 So it's not just a biological kind of deterministic route. It is very much influenced by your social and your environmental experiences.

Speaker 10 I'm interested in this idea of an end point. You mentioned it a few times.
I mean, is that the the right way to think about it? That really my brain is pretty much fully formed by the age of 23 or 25.

Speaker 10 How much in percentage terms, how much has it changed? How much does it continue to change throughout our lives?

Speaker 14 No, actually, that's probably really r I I'm sorry if I if I've been using that word, because actually that's probably a really bad way to think about it.

Speaker 14 And I'm often asked, well, when does the brain become adult?

Speaker 14 I'm asked this question by people who are interested in things like what age we should be able to vote or the criminal age of responsibility, that kind of thing.

Speaker 14 And you know, so they ask, well, what age does the brain become adult? Because then we can use that point to determine what age people should vote or something like that.

Speaker 14 But actually, that's a it's sort of a wrong way to think about the brain because the brain never stops changing to a certain extent. Right throughout adulthood, the brain is capable of change.

Speaker 14 So, anything you learn is, and there's no age limit to learning, is because of something that's happening in your brain, a change to a few thousand synapses, say.

Speaker 2 Rory, how do you, having heard this discussion, and obviously I know it's something that interests you anyway, how do you think this changes the way that parents should interact with their teenagers?

Speaker 2 Because I mean, in one way, you could just go, oh, don't worry, darling, I know why you're behaving behaving like this. I've seen the MRI.

Speaker 2 But I don't think that I have an inkling that won't wash with them.

Speaker 11 But do you know what? I mean so many parents used to think, well, you know, you have children, but where's the instruction booklet?

Speaker 11 You know, I think this is the instruction booklet, because even just doing the preparation for this program,

Speaker 11 it made me look at my daughters in a totally different way. One is 14 and one is 16.

Speaker 11 And

Speaker 11 people say, or they, as Sarah Jane said at the very beginning, people say, oh, it's hormones and it's difficult teenagers.

Speaker 11 But now when you understand what is going on in the brain, as we said very early on, the emotional changes, the physical changes,

Speaker 11 the hormonal changes we've mentioned as well, but the speed at which the brain is developing and adapting to all these things, you know, I almost want to go back and apologise and say, No, you know,

Speaker 11 I understand, but of course, we don't understand, that's the point.

Speaker 10 Well, in the light of this research,

Speaker 10 could you see a time when we understand this developmental process better, that we change the way that we run society, we change the way that we educate children and teenagers in the light of our enhanced understanding.

Speaker 14 I think so. So, the way I see it is that we place a lot of expectations on teenagers, and I think that might be because they, you know, when they've gone through puberty, they look like adults.

Speaker 14 So, we almost expect them to be like adults, to make adult decisions, to be able to plan like adults. But in fact, their brain is not adult at all.

Speaker 14 Their brain still has a long way to go in terms of development. Unlike younger children who very much look like little children, we don't expect them to plan their day or plan their week.

Speaker 14 We do that for them. We make their decisions for them, we stop them taking risks.

Speaker 14 We, in contrast, allow teenagers, we give them a lot of autonomy and we allow them freedom to make their own decisions.

Speaker 14 Perhaps we need to adjust the way we place these high pressures and high expectations on teenagers in society and in schools, for example.

Speaker 14 Also, including, I mean, I think I would have found this all this information about the teenage brain really useful when I was a teenager to try because you know, it's not that difficult to remember what it's like to be a teenager.

Speaker 14 It's a pretty hard hard time for a lot of teenagers. There's a lot of turmoil and a lot of change.

Speaker 14 And to know that this is a natural part of brain development, I think it would have been pretty useful, at least for me.

Speaker 14 And so, you know, including it in the school curriculum might not be a bad thing.

Speaker 8 I think the other thing, on a rather more serious note, is that exactly as you've been saying, that

Speaker 8 this is a crucial period where mental illness can develop, and I think both for children, teachers, and for parents, just to be aware of that and without developing a hypochondria about any slight

Speaker 8 change in behavior, that you really need to listen and think about what could be happening and to seek help if you've got the slightest doubts.

Speaker 8 Because this is a tremendously fragile and dangerous moment for

Speaker 8 children, has been all through the ages. And as I said earlier on, there may be more pressures now because of social media.

Speaker 8 And so, you can actually now get peer pressure from bazillions of people all around the planet, not just your mates in the schoolyard.

Speaker 8 So, I think that for me is the really serious lesson that parents need to think very hard, and teachers as well.

Speaker 10 It also strikes me that if you're asking people to have gone through their GCSEs and A-levels, and actually their degrees, and pretty much, for most people, completed their formal education

Speaker 10 before their brain has fully formed into an adult brain, it doesn't seem to be the most sensible way of running a society.

Speaker 11 There's a whole lot of teenagers now who are considering a class action.

Speaker 2 Maybe always enjoy that moment where Brian Cox says, I don't know. It doesn't have to be

Speaker 2 always a fun bit. I don't know.

Speaker 8 I don't know that.

Speaker 10 I think we've run out of time, but Matthew, we can never let you get away without talking about your research area, which is primarily maggots. The world expert on maggots.

Speaker 8 I was going to say something, because it struck me, you were talking, Sergeant, about the problem about the resolution there is at the moment for MRI scanner. So you can't see the fine-level

Speaker 8 cellular changes. But, of course, a maggot is simply, as you remember from reading The Hungry Caterpillar, the maggot is simply there to grow.
It is a growing machine.

Speaker 8 This brain is growing all through that time. And we can indeed

Speaker 8 resolve the maggot down to single neurons and see how they are changing and how the pruning that you described early on is taking place as well.

Speaker 8 So it may well be, in fact, that insights into the developmental processes in how the brain changes over time are going to come from very, very simple organisms like the maggot, like the fly, which are changing.

Speaker 8 They're not simply little robots. They too are influenced by the environment and their growth patterns.

Speaker 8 And understanding the cellular changes is going to be much easier in a very simple organism, even if it doesn't want to storm off into its bedroom or do anything silly like that.

Speaker 8 They are going to be similar fundamental processes taking place in a simple organism as there is in ourselves.

Speaker 10 How many neurons does the average maggot?

Speaker 8 The maggot ends up with about 100,000 in its brain. It then kind of, of course, because the maggot has turned to a fly, so it then kind of melts some of them.

Speaker 8 But basically, the maggot brain is the scaffolding around which the fly brain, which is perhaps three, four hundred thousand neurons, is then built.

Speaker 14 Then that might sound like a lot, but the human brain contains about 86 billion neurons.

Speaker 8 So we have no idea how a maggot brain functions. So

Speaker 8 there are colleagues in America at a place called Geninia Farm who have made the wiring diagram of a maggot. That's one maggot.

Speaker 8 They got a maggot, they sliced it up, and they're working out how all the cells develop. And they still haven't finished working that out yet.

Speaker 8 And then, when they actually know how the cells interact, then there'll be the possibility of modelling it.

Speaker 8 But the idea of understanding what's happening in the human brain or the mouse brain, that's decades, decades away.

Speaker 10 But we're not too far away then from modelling a maggot.

Speaker 8 I reckon maybe within 20 years, yeah, then that might be possible.

Speaker 2 Exciting times to live. Exciting times to live.

Speaker 11 And that maggot will be the Republican candidate.

Speaker 2 Rory, one very important question, I suppose, for you, really, at the end of this, is: I know you didn't have him in your repertoire, but once you found out you were coming on this, you were working on your Brian Cox voice.

Speaker 2 So now he finds. He's working in progress.
Well, mine, I'll give you a question. Because I'll do a worse version, right? This is because he always says mine's too faith.

Speaker 2 The universe is very shiny, but some of it is dark and scary.

Speaker 15 Ooh.

Speaker 13 How can I top that?

Speaker 11 I think it's basically Orville.

Speaker 2 Where have you got to? I'm fascinated to know.

Speaker 11 Well, what do you think, Brian?

Speaker 13 Well, I think that's rubbish.

Speaker 13 Jeering!

Speaker 1 I think that's rubbish.

Speaker 11 That was actually me doing that.

Speaker 11 You thought it was... Well, what I love is it's the Mancunian wonder of the universe.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 11 I can't top your impression. It's not like...

Speaker 11 The worst question you get as an impressionist, two things happen to an impressionist.

Speaker 11 Firstly, this happened when I went, I did the Royal Variety Show once, and I was really nervous in the wings about to go on, and somebody came up and said, Are you nervous? I said, Yeah.

Speaker 11 They just said, Don't worry, just be yourself.

Speaker 11 And the other question is, is there anybody you can't do? And you go, Yes.

Speaker 12 And they're not going to go, do them, because no, I can't do them.

Speaker 11 So, yeah, that's, I'm afraid, yes, that'll work out. See, the part of the part of the purpose of doing this, John Fortune once said, you know, you're like David Attenborough with the politicians.

Speaker 11 And he said, nobody ever accused David Attenborough of getting too close to the animals. So really, my purpose on this programme is to study up close.

Speaker 11 And I'll pronounce maybe in the next series on my findings.

Speaker 2 You know what you've got, though, that Mancunion thing, because when we had John Ronson on the show as well, people wrote in and complained that they couldn't tell the difference.

Speaker 2 Because John Bunsen has a voice like that. When I was working on an Ian Paisley show, so it's quite, and then they couldn't tell the difference between him and Brian.
It was a lovely moment.

Speaker 12 So good, isn't it?

Speaker 11 So what is it?

Speaker 11 Because it's different from Yorkshire, because you're inside Yorkshire and it's all wines, and then you get a bit nasal and all, and it's just getting, you know, there's something about that Manchester accent, and it's just, you know,

Speaker 11 it's an upward inflection and it's gentle and it's, oh,

Speaker 9 it's fascinating.

Speaker 2 What do you have there as well? It's just that little inkling there of the cricket commentating, Brian, as well.

Speaker 2 This is, we had a question from the audience, not a question from the audience, we don't allow that kind of thing.

Speaker 2 We gave the audience a question. We asked them, what did you do as a teenager that you wish you hadn't?

Speaker 2 And looking at the fact we've got fewer answers that have been handed to us than normal, I imagine many of you were tremendously honest. And our producer went, well, we can't give that to them.

Speaker 12 So

Speaker 2 I'm still a teenager and I think I've done everything I've done is right.

Speaker 10 Turn the fire hose on at school to see how long it would take for water to come through the coils.

Speaker 2 Tried to drunk email Brian Cox at 3 a.m. asking for work experience.
P.S., you never got back to me. Harry Willis.

Speaker 10 So, yeah, the question: what do you do as a teenager that you wish you hadn't? This is looking like John Lennon in brackets for the record, I'm a woman.

Speaker 2 Paid full price for a D-Ream ticket.

Speaker 2 So, next week we're going to broaden out the peculiar behaviour of teenage humans to doing the peculiar behaviour of all animals with a panel that includes a head of zoology and the founder of the Sloth Appreciation Society.

Speaker 2 So, they're bound to be late.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 we still have a question which I read about this from a sloth expert once, which is, can sloths really survive a nuclear war?

Speaker 2 So, we'll find that out next week if the Ethics Ethics Committee give us permission.

Speaker 10 I don't see a problem with it, actually.

Speaker 10 Well, cruise missiles are really accurate, aren't they? Should we just put it on a Pacific atoll, take it out?

Speaker 11 It could happen any moment now, don't joke.

Speaker 15 Little Rocket Man, Cox, he's going to launch that missile.

Speaker 10 This is a simple experiment, Don.

Speaker 11 I like the simple ones.

Speaker 2 Thank you very much to our panel. Matthew Cobb, Sarah, Jane Blakemell, Rory Bremner.
Thank you very much for listening.

Speaker 13 Bye-bye. In the infinite

Speaker 1 Now Nice again.

Speaker 8 Well, Adam Rutherford, that was a marvellous episode of the Infinite Monkey Cage, wasn't it? It was, Hannah Fry.

Speaker 8 Not necessarily the best ones, because I think the best ones are the ones that you were on.

Speaker 8 I like the ones that you were on. Yes.
But if you enjoyed those episodes of The Infinite Monkey Cage that I, Adam Rutherford, and you, Hannah Frye, were on, it turns out

Speaker 8 that we've got a whole eight series worth of just us. We do.
The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry,

Speaker 8 our very own science podcast in which we investigate your questions. Questions like, does Kate Bush have a secret sonic weapon that she's trying to use to kill all of humanity?

Speaker 8 We did answer that question. What about what would happen to Hannah if we threw her into a black hole? Specifically me.
I wasn't particularly happy about that episode.

Speaker 8 That's the curious cases of Rutherford and Fry, which you can download from your podcast providers.

Speaker 8 This is the BBC.

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