What’s going on inside our teenagers’ heads?
It’s a question that parents and teachers have been pondering for decades, and, according to Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, the answer is becoming clearer.
Blakemore, a professor at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, appeared on a Tes Podagogy podcast in 2018 to explain the latest research around teenagers’ brains.
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One of her main messages about understanding what teenagers are thinking is simple: be nicer to them. Or rather, show more appreciation that they are not as adult as they may appear and that the behaviours they often adopt are sometimes out of their control.
“We should be more understanding of teenagers, of this really critical period of development,” she says.
Cognitive neuroscience: Better understanding the teenage brain
“When you’re interacting with very young children, you do not expect them to act like adults. You do not expect them to be rational and you know they have a very underdeveloped brain, and you would not expect them to make their own decisions and plan their own day.
“Of course, teenagers’ brains are much more developed than young children’s brains, but they are still not fully adult yet. We need to remember that.”
Today, this message of understanding is more pertinent than ever: the pandemic, as we know, has had huge consequences for students’ mental health. Blakemore says that when it comes to the neuroscience around mental health, we are yet to fully understand the risk factors that might predict mental health challenges.
“A lot of our work is looking at predictive factors for mental health,” she explains. “One of the major reasons we are doing this is for preventative interventions. We need to understand the risk factors that precede the mental health problem. We do not have that at the moment; the interventions happen when the mental health problem has started.”
At the time of recording, Blakemore was at the beginning of a wide-scale project exploring whether or not mindfulness has benefits for mental health and wellbeing.
The research is funded by the Wellcome Trust, in collaboration with the University of Oxford, UCL, MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit and the University of Exeter, and its findings are expected in 2023.
“It will be the biggest study of mindfulness for young people. Mindfulness is already very popular, but it has not been through proper randomised controlled trials, so we do not know if it works. It really needs to be done, and that is why we are doing it,” Blakemore says.
“The thing we are looking at closely is attentional control. If you practise mindfulness a lot, [it’s about] whether you can control your attention and bring it back from the negative thought you might be having, to your breathing and your body.”
In the podcast, Blakemore also discusses how greater understanding of the teenage brain could raise important questions about how we structure schools, the curriculum and learning, delaying the start of the school day to match teenagers’ sleep rhythms, and how neuroscience may develop over the next 20 years.
