Myths and Truths about the Adolescent Brain by Tracey Tokuhama. 2018

Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa, Ph.D.
www.thelearningsciences.com
Myths and Truths
about the Adolescent Brain

Today
1. How do people make decisions?
2. The adolescent brain and
theories of decision-making
3. What can we do to help?
5 December 2018 Tokuhama-Espinosa 2

3-2-1
• 3: Three things you didn’t know before
• 2: Two things you will continue to research or talk about
• 1: One thing you will change in your personal or professional life
based on the information that was shared

Background
• Professor, Harvard University Extension School: Psych 1609 “The
Neuroscience of Learning: Introduction to Mind, Brain, Health and
Education science”
• OECD: Member of the expert panel on Teachers New Pedagogical
Knowledge based on contributions from Technology and Neuroscience
• Latin American Social Science Research Faculty, Ecuador: Educational
Researcher and Professor
• Interdisciplinary researcher in neuroscience, cognitive psychology and
education (cultural anthropology and linguistics).
• Associate Editor of the Nature Partner Journal Science of Learning
• Education: Boston University: BA, BS, magna cum laude; Harvard
University: Master’s in International Educational Development; Capella
University: Ph.D. In Professional Studies in Education (Mind, Brain and
Education Science)
• Former Director of the Teaching and Learning Institute at the Universidad
San Francisco de Quito Ecuador; Former Dean of Education at the
Universidad de las Américas, Quito, Ecuador
• Teacher at all levels of education (K-University, continuing education)
with more than 29 years of experience in 34 countries.
4

•Designing educational experiences without an
understanding of the brain is like designing a
glove without an understanding of the human
hand.
-attributed to Leslie Hart (1983)
5Tokuhama-Espinosa Feb 2017

How do people make decisions?
• What do people
do before they
make a
decision?

Technology and better knowledge
of the brain

Better knowledge about the brain and
learning
• Improvements in technology since The Decade of the Brain (1990s)
have yielded greater insights about healthy brain functioning. Early
models promoted neuromyths.

Refined technology
(healthy subjects)
Simple models
Replicas of connections
Actual computer enhanced connections from the Connectome Project

Phineas Gage
• Phineas P. Gage (1823 –1860) was a
railroad worker who accidently
suffered damage to his frontal lobes.
• Gage suffered a significant change in
personality and emotional stability and
was not longer able to make
decisions.
Barker, F.G. II (1995) Phineas Among the phrenologists: The American crowbar
case and nineteenth-century theories of cerebral localization. Journal
of Neurosurgery, 82,672-682.
11

Current research on the adolescent brain
• Risk and Resiliency-building during adolescence (Giedd, 2018): “adolescence is the process
of becoming ripe”.
• Puberty onset
• 8-13 girls
• 9-14 boys
• “Teens” and “adolescents” are not the same
• Fine-tuning the excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmitter system
• Early limbic system changes and late refining of frontal lobe networks.
• Casey and colleagues have suggested adolescence should be “conceptualized as a
developmental period rather than a temporal snapshot” as it is highly variable behaviourally
and developmentally (Jaworska & MacQueen, 2015)
Giedd, J. N. (2018). A ripe time for adolescent research. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 28(1), 157-159.
; Jaworska, N., & MacQueen, G. (2015). Adolescence as a unique developmental period. Journal of psychiatry & neuroscience: JPN, 40(5), 291. 12

Problems with multi-disciplinary research
• Most research is conducted in isolated
academic fields:
• Genetics
• Neuroimaging
• Neurobiology
• Animal studies
• Morphometric (e.g., brain volume)
• Social relationships
• Social-Emotional influences on behavior
• Emotion and Cognition links
• Developmental neuroscience
• Graph Theory (nodes and edges)
• Connectomics
• “Network Science” or Transdisciplinary studies

EDUCATIONAL
NEUROSCIENCE
vs.
(NEURO EDUCATION)
THE LEARNING
SCIENCES
MIND, BRAIN, AND
EDUCATION SCIENCE
The focus is not on Learning or Teaching, but rather
“THE TEACHING-LEARNING DYNAMIC”
Tokuhama-Espinosa 2017

Opportunity AND Obligation
1. One in five adolescents have a mental
illness that will persist into adulthood
2. Mental illnesses that emerge before
adulthood impose a 10-fold higher cost
than those that emerge later in life
3. Mental health costs are the highest single
source of global economic burden in the
world (Lee et al., 2014).
4. National Comorbidity Survey Replication,
three-quarters of psychiatric illnesses will
onset by age 24 years (Kessler, et al,
2005)
5 December 2018
Lee, F. S., Heimer, H., Giedd, J. N., Lein, E. S., Šestan, N., Weinberger, D. R., & Casey, B. J. (2014).
Adolescent mental health—opportunity and obligation. Science, 346(6209), 547-549. 15

Longitudinal study: ABCD

1989
5 December 2018
Mann, L., Harmoni, R., & Power, C. (1989). Adolescent
decision-making: The development of
competence. Journal of adolescence, 12(3), 265.
34

1996
5 December 2018
Steinberg, L., & Cauffman, E. (1996). Maturity of judgment
in adolescence: Psychosocial factors in adolescent
decision making. Law and Human Behavior, 20(3), 249-
272.
35

2007
Steinberg, L. (2007). Risk taking in adolescence: New perspectives from brain and behavioral science. Current directions in psychological science, 16(2), 55-59.36

2012

2012-2013
5 December 2018
Byrnes, J. P. (2013). The nature and development of
decision-making: A self-regulation model. Psychology
Press.
38
Reyna, V. F., Chapman, S. B., Dougherty, M. R., & Confrey, J.
E. (2012). The adolescent brain: Learning, reasoning, and
decision making. American Psychological Association.

2018
Morris, A. S., Squeglia, L. M., Jacobus, J., & Silk, J. S. (2018). Adolescent Brain Development: Implications for Understanding Risk and
Resilience Processes Through Neuroimaging Research. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 28(1), 4-9.
39

Myths

Myths about the teenage brain
Brain maturation in adolescence is about
restructuring parts
• “The grey matter volume of the mid-dorsolateral
frontal prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), for example,
peaks in mid-adolescence, declines and then
stabilizes in early adulthood (Paus et al., 2008).
• “White matter volumes show a more consistent
linear increase from childhood through
adolescence, with maximum volumes evident in late
adolescence/early adulthood (Pfefferbaum et al.,
1994)” (Jaworska & MacQueen, 2015, p.291).
Paus T, Keshavan M, Giedd JN. Why do many psychiatric disorders emerge during adolescence? Nat Rev Neurosci 2008;9:947-57.; Pfefferbaum A, Mathalon DH,
Sullivan EV, et al. A quantitative magnetic resonance imaging study of changes in brain morphology from infancy to late adulthood. Arch Neurol 1994;51:874-87.;
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/825636544161592189/?lp=true
41

• It’s all about the
environment

The changes in the brain
are due to growth in
overall size
• “The increasing
interconnectedness, or
communication amongst
disparate brain regions
comprising an elaborately
embedded hierarchy of
neural circuits,” (Giedd,
2015).
Giedd, J. N. (2015). Adolescent neuroscience of addiction: A new era. Dev Cogn Neurosci, 16, 192-3.

• After adolescence, it’s
all downhill.

• The amygdala has
not yet matured.
• Early face analysis
for emotion the same
in children as adults.

2012
5 December 2018
Blakemore, S. J., & Robbins, T. W. (2012). Decision-
making in the adolescent brain. Nature
neuroscience, 15(9), 1184.
46

Negative parental affect=self-perception
• “Maternal negative affect was not associated with adolescent
neural response to peer rejection.
• However, longer durations of maternal negative affect were
associated with decreased responsivity to peer acceptance in
the amygdala, left anterior insula, subgenual anterior
cingulate, and left nucleus accumbens.
• “These findings provide some of the first evidence that
maternal negative affect is associated with adolescents’
neural processing of social rewards.
• “Findings also suggest that maternal negative affect could
contribute to alterations in affective processing, specifically,
dampening the saliency and/or reward of peer
interactions during adolescence”
5 December 2018Tan, P. Z., Lee, K. H., Dahl, R. E., Nelson, E. E., Stroud, L. J., Siegle, G. J., ... & Silk, J. S. (2014). Associations between maternal negative affect and adolescent's neural
response to peer evaluation. Developmental cognitive neuroscience, 8, 28-39.
47

Myths about teenage brains
The home can make or break a teen.
• “These findings suggest that reflected social
self-evaluations, made from the inferred
perspective of a close peer, may be
especially self-relevant, salient, or rewarding
to adolescent self-processing – particularly
during the progression through adolescence –
and this feature persists into adulthood.”
• Assessments of peer evaluations and
assessments of parental evaluations use
different neural mechanisms.
• Peers matter more than parents.

• All teenagers take stupid risks.
• “Risk taking that declines monotonically from
childhood to adulthood occurs primarily under
conditions of known risks and reflects increases in
executive function as well as aversion to risk
based on increases in gist-based reasoning.
• We propose an alternative Lifespan Wisdom
Model that highlights the importance of
experience gained through exploration during
adolescence.
• We propose, therefore, that brain models that
recognize the adaptive roles that cognition and
experience play during adolescence provide a
more complete and helpful picture of this period of
development.
5 December 2018
Romer, D., Reyna, V. F., & Satterthwaite, T. D. (2017). Beyond stereotypes of adolescent risk taking: Placing the adolescent brain in developmental
context. Developmental cognitive neuroscience, 27, 19-34. 49

All teens are thrill seekers.
• “Adolescence is associated with quickly
changing environmental demands which
require excellent adaptive skills and high
cognitive flexibility.
• “Feedback-guided adaptive learning and cognitive
flexibility are driven by reward prediction error
(RPE) signals, which indicate the accuracy of
expectations and can be estimated using
computational models.”
• “In summary, our findings indicate that decision
making in adolescence goes beyond merely
increased reward seeking behavior and provides
a developmental perspective to the behavioral
and neural mechanisms underlying cognitive
flexibility in the context of reinforcement learning.”
5 December 2018
Hauser, T. U., Iannaccone, R., Walitza, S., Brandeis, D., & Brem, S. (2015). Cognitive flexibility in adolescence: neural and behavioral mechanisms of
reward prediction error processing in adaptive decision making during development. Neuroimage, 104, 347-354. 50

Neurobiological mechanisms underlying
risky behavior?
• Theory 1: Asynchronous development of neural
systems (self-regulation [pre-frontal] and reward
seeking [striatal] circuitries).
• Theory 2: Decision making circuitry (anterior
insular cortex)
• “…engagement of adolescents in risk taking may
be linked in part to the maturation of the AIC and
its connectivity to the broader brain networks in
which it participates” (Smith, Steinberg & Chein,
2014, p.196)

What can we do to help adolescents learn to
make better decisions?
Steps:
1. Identify the decision to be made
2. Gather relevant information
3. Identify alternatives
4. Weigh evidence
5. Choose among alternatives
6. Take action
7. Review decision and consequences

Tools
• Decision Trees
• Decision matrix
• T-Chart
• Pros-Cons-Interesting
• SWOT analysis
• Scenarios (best, worst-case,
most likely)

Tools
• Decision Trees
• Decision matrix
• T-Chart
• SWOT analysis
most likely)

Tools
• Decision Trees
• Decision matrix
• T-Chart
• SWOT analysis
• Scenarios (best, worst-
case, most likely)

Big ideas
• The brain adapts to what it does most
• A transdisciplinary vision would be more
beneficial than the multi-disciplinary view
currently in place
• Supporting safe experimentation and the
development of good decision making
skills are key protective factors
5 December 2018
Kessler RC, Berglund P, Demler O, et al. Lifetime prevalence and age-of-onset distributions of DSM-IV disorders in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication. Arch Gen Psychiatry 2005;62:593-602.;
https://www.healthguidance.org/entry/17134/1/your-fantastic-malleable-brain-what-is-brain-plasticity.html 64

Contact information:
Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa, Ph.D.
tracey.tokuhama@gmail.com
www.thelearningsciences.com

Myths and Truths about the Adolescent Brain by Tracey Tokuhama. 2018

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