Name: 【TEDx】Insight Into the Teenage Brain: Adriana Galván at TEDxYouth@Caltech
Uploaded: 2014-06-14T17:19:06.000Z
Duration: 9 min 43 s
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Adverbs of degree

Your energy and excitement is really what makes me love my job,

and my job is to study  the adolescent brain.

So scientists have studied  the brain for centuries,

but it's only been in the last 15 years or so

that we've discovered  one of the most fascinating things,

and that is that your brain  changes every single day.

your brain is changing in response to my voice,

and your experiences  and the people you affiliate with

shape the way  your brain ultimately develops.

and continues to do so past childhood and into the teenage years

if we think about  one of the functions of adolescence,

which is to establish your independence  from a caregiver,

the teenage brain is really good  at seeking out new experiences

It's also really good at recognizing social

or being sensitive to social  and emotional information.

the teenage brain is really responsive to rewards and emotions

And in my laboratory at UCLA,  and in laboratories all around the world,

we're interested in uncovering that very question:

One of the first discoveries relevant to this topic

that the part of your brain  in the very front,

which is the last brain region to develop,

because your brain develops  from the back to the front,

continues to change up until the mid-20s.

is because the prefrontal cortex is a part of your brain

that helps you think about the consequences

or potential consequences of your actions

It helps you regulate  your behavior and your emotions.

And so it makes sense that  if this part of the brain

isn't fully available until well past adolescence,

then teenagers may make more impulsive decisions

with less regard  for the potential future consequences.

are far more interesting  and complicated than that.

is think about how brain regions  that are not at the surface of your brain,

And one region we focus on  is called the striatum.

And the striatum is the key component  of the reward system.

So when you receive something that you find rewarding,

and it releases something called dopamine.

but in kids, in mice, in rats, in monkeys.

really with a lot of excitement  in their brain

So in my lab, we study this reward system across development,

And we do that by asking people  to come to the laboratory

a Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Scan, or fMRI

you can take a snapshot of the brain in motion.

So while you are experiencing  something you like,

we capture how your brain  is responding to that,

what we did is not simply  show people pictures of reward,

which is what mostly happens  in brain imaging studies,

but instead what we did  is we actually gave someone a reward

and what's something that people find rewarding?

So what we did is we asked people to come to the lab,

we asked a group of teenagers  and a group of adults,

and, while they were in the MRI,  we hooked them up to a straw

and we fed them squirts of sugar water ever so often.

And first we asked them whether they liked it.

Maybe they weren't going to like the sugar as much as we thought.

This is the rating scale asking them,  "How much do you like the sugar?"

And the average response is in red for the teenage group

but it's the teenage group that showed  this exaggerated sensitivity.

So we started to wonder whether  there was something neurobiological