Inside the Teenage Brain!!!

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Inside the Teenage Brain!!!

• Nicole Strang

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Who Am I?

• Ph. D. student at the University of
  Wisconsin-Madison
• Affiliated with the Psychology department and the
  Waisman Center
• Work in the Child Emotion Lab

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Child Emotion Lab

• Studies of typical and atypical child development
  with a focus on the effects of early experience
• Im working on an fMRI study of social stress
  investigating differences in the response of
  children and adults

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Talk Outline

• Brief explanation of Magnetic Resonance Imaging
  (MRI)
• What have we learned from MRI about the teenage
  brain?
• How do the findings about the brain relate to
  teenage behavior?

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Magnetic Resonance Imaging
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Types of Imaging

• Structural MRI
• Identify which parts of the brain are white
  matter, grey matter, and Cerebrospinal fluid
  (CSF)
• Functional MRI (fMRI)
• Identify which parts of the brain are involved in
  a task
• The regions with higher levels of oxygen in the
  blood are considered to be involved

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Structural Imaging
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Neurons Basic Building Blocks of the Brain
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Neurons to Matter
1 BILLION!!!
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Structural
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Functional Imaging (fMRI)
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Red blood cells carry oxygen
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Functional
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Why Study Teenagers

• Any parent can tell you teenagers are different
  from children and also different from adults
• The emergence of most psychiatric disorders
  occurs in the teenage years

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What can MRI tell us about the Teenage Brain?
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National Institute of Mental Health Study of
Normal Brain Development

• Dr. Jay Giedd, Child Psychiatrist
• Frontline Inside the Teenage Brain
• Began in the late-1990s
• Ongoing
• Structural scans of healthy, typically developing
  children and adolescents
• How it started
• Scans repeated every 2 years
• Longitudinal vs. Cross-Sectional
• Age range 5-25

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Everyones Brain is Different!
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Volume

• By age 6 the brain is 95 of adult size
• Peak in size occurs between 11 and 15
• Size varied by 50 within typical sample
• Bigger isnt better No relationship between IQ
  and size
• (Giedd, 2008)

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White Matter

• Can be thought of as Telephone wires of the
  brain
• Amount increases throughout teenage years
• Faster Connections

Lenroot Giedd et al., 2006
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Grey Matter

• Peaks between 11 and 12 years (around time of
  onset of puberty)
• Declines throughout teenage years
• Decline is associated with improvement in
  cognitive abilities
• (Giedd, 2008)

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If we consider a literary/linguistic metaphor,
maturation would not be the addition of new
letters but of combining earlier formed letters
into words, and then words into sentences, and
then sentences into paragraphs. Dr. Jay Giedd,
2008
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General Pattern of Brain Maturation Throughout
Adolescence
White Matter

1. Brain with fewer connections
2. Brain is quicker and more efficient

Grey Matter
BUT
There are IMPORTANT Regional Differences in the
Pattern
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Limbic System

• Limbic system
• AKA, Emotion Circuitry
• Emotion
• Arousal
• Appetitive stimuli
• Risky Behavior
• Maturation influenced by hormones
• Different for boys and girls
• Igniting the Passions!

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Prefrontal Cortex (PFC)

• Behaviors Related to PFC
• Planning, organinzing, and Perserverence
• Impulse Control
• Self-monitoring and Internal Supervision
• Problem Solving, Critical Thinking Forward
  Thinking
• Judgment, Learning from Experience and mistakes

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PFC-Limbic Systems
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Adolescent Behavior ?
Casey et al., 2008
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Some Support(Eschel et al., 2007)

• Gambling task with children, teenagers, and
  adults
• In teenagers
• Reward processing regions responds like that of
  adults
• Less PFC activity than adults

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Things to Keep in Mind

• Structural and functional MRI are relatively new
  research techniques
• Functional MRI was only discovered in 1990
• Relationship between brain and behavior still
  unclear, especially in kids and adolescents
• Not all adolescent behavior can be explained by
  an immature prefrontal cortex
• There is A LOT of inter-individual variability in
  both brain and behavior

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So How Can Brain Science Inform Practice?

• We now know that the brain is undergoing MAJOR
  changes until the mid-twenties!
• It is likely that Adolescence is just as
  important as birth to 3
• Brain changes in this period are correlated with
  improvements in cognitive abilities