Adult Brain vs. Teen Brain
Image: Harvard Magazine
Now that you’ve learned about the different regions of the brain and what they do, I want you to start thinking about how your brain and my brain might be different. I want you to name a lobe of the brain that you think might be different in teen brains and adult brains and give a reason why you think that.
For example (I’ll use my cats): I think that my cats’ cerebellum and brainstem are smaller (less developed) than mine (relative in size to the rest of the brain) because sometimes they are really clumsy and fall off of things and that part of the brain controls movement.
So think about how teenagers and adults act differently and make a possible connection to differences in brain development!
I think that teenagers’ frontal lobe is less developed than an adult’s would be because their decision making and judgement are typically worse than that of an adults. Teenagers usually make rash decisions, judgements based on pure emotions, and fall victim to peer pressure. This is because the frontal lobe is one of the last parts of the brain to develop in humans.