Adolescent Brain Development

She sits there, a fifteen year old ball of emotions just waiting to burst. In class she thinks as hard as she can trying to make connections between the things on the board. She does her work and turns it in, hoping for a good grade. It is hard to imagine that sixteen years later she is calm, content, and confident. Time makes a lot of differences one of which is to the brain itself. There are a lot of ways that the adolescent's brain is different from an adults. One reason that an adolescent's brain is different from an adults is that a child’s brain is not fully developed. Most adolescents have a lack of impulse control. They cannot resist things that are tempting. If one of their friends is doing something risky that may harm themselves

As an adult they are more able to resist urges and temptations as the prefrontal cortex of the brain develops more. Another way the adolescent brain is not as developed as an adults is that as teens or young adults, the brain is still making connections and reorganizing. Connections are made in brains for different things like learning math, reading or anything else learned. People get smarter by their brain pruning, or getting rid of connections that they do not use as much as others which is why information is forgotten and the connection has to be remade. This organizes information in the brain and makes sure to remember important things. As a result, other synapses, connections, strengthen which develops the brain even more. This could make teens confused and not know what to do. Their connections keep changing and they could lash out and start doing random things and an adult would obviously get mad and try to stop it. As an adult the brain is still making connections but for the most part have made the connections that they are going to have and are no longer pruning very much since they need to remember most of what they know. With the brain not being fully developed there is also a different method to

One way the young adults brain processes information differently is by breaking apart images. For example, if a picture is shown to a kid of a birthday party they will break the image down into sections they will recognize that there is a birthday cake, lots of people, presents. From that they will draw a conclusion that this could be a birthday party. If an adult is shown the same picture they do not need to break the image apart they can look at the entire image at once and know within a couple seconds that it is a birthday party. A second way that the two types of brains are different is that as adolescents, it is hard to control immediate emotional responses to things. Instances such as getting news that a family member has died would be processed differently between adolescents and adults. Most adolescents would immediately disappear in a puddle of their tears and not be able to control it. They would not process the information that they got and think about it. Parents would get upset with their kids because this is representing a lack of self-control, they can not keep composure and that is a very frustrating thing. With an adult it is heard that they “take things better”. This simply means that they are able to process the information and think on it before having a proper emotional outcome. They are more able to control their emotional