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Hardly a week goes by in the news without a heartfelt plea from the family of a runaway teenager. This year, the teens making the headlines are not running off to join a band or marry their holiday romance. This year’s teens are running away to ISIS as though it were district 13 in the Hunger Games.
In recent years, brain imaging studies have concluded that high-risk, rebellious behaviour is to be expected in teenagers because their prefrontal cortex (the most sensible part of the brain) is still developing while the reward pathway is totally up and running. The result has been described as ‘all gas and no brakes’. This has now become common psychological wisdom. Teenagers are just not ready for the adult world – they’re crazy and incompetent because cascading hormones are driving an under-developed brain. I’ve never been totally sold on this line of reasoning and I was therefore delighted to read Howard Sercombe’s recent paper that drives a philosophical Harley right through it.
There are several problems with this view of the teenage brain but let’s focus on the biggest one: defining risk. Something is a risk if there is a likelihood of some kind of loss. You can probably make a good estimate of the likelihood of say, losing $5000 at cards or getting pregnant without precautions. But the value of the loss is altogether a different kind of thing to measure – because there can be no universal, objective measure of something’s value. The ‘risk’ involved in teenage pregnancy depends on the value of what is lost and as Howard puts it: ‘The alternative to early parenthood might be long-term unemployment, individual isolation, or extended existential uncertainty as to the purpose of life. A teenage pregnancy cannot be dealt with universally as a high risk event.’
When scientists measure risky behaviour they are fixated on value-laden, morally-loaded activities such as drinking, drug-taking and sex. But when it suits us, society has no problem capitalising on the readiness of the adolescent brain to embrace risk. In world War 1, over quarter of a million underage boys joined the army in Britain alone – and they didn’t just sneak through with nobody noticing.
Howard makes a good case for replacing the fixation on ‘risk’ with the more valid notion: change. The capacity for change has been a driving force in human biological and cultural evolution. It’s what keeps our species in the game no matter what the environment throws at us. In a rapidly changing environment the new generation needs new solutions to new problems ‘for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow which you cannot visit, even in your dreams’.
Compared to past millennia, ‘40 is the old 80’. There were far more younger people and fewer older adults. At some point in human history selection was sufficiently brutal to reduce our numbers to 1-10,000 in total. If the adolescent brain was such a liability - the human race would have fallen under the axe of natural selection long ago.
Children wake up to the world in adolescence and see it as though they landed here from some other, better planet. They look around and it all just sucks, big time. Teens are hungry for change and it’s clearly needed. Messages that might seem extreme, if not criminally deranged, to older ears can seem vital and inspired to teens who are otherwise infantalised and over-controlled. (It doesn’t help that puberty in boys appears to temporarily supress empathy. Any movement fuelled by a desire for ‘truth’ and justice untempered by compassion or the understanding of alternative perspectives is surely a terrifying prospect.)
Adolescence is not a pathological state between childhood and adulthood. It is not a state of derangement requiring yet more constraints and increasing containment. The modern world is certainly a rapidly changing environment and the stakes are higher than ever. We just cannot afford to get this so wrong.
Postscript
This beautiful paper reminds me how essential philosophy is to science (and everything, let’s face it). I’ll just sign off with Howard’s critical comment on the use of brain imaging: ‘Currently, thoughts are not the kind of object that can be operationalised within this epistemology’. Aaahh – just makes me want to curl up and purr like my cat.
