Teen Brain Essay

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Should we throw a 13 year old in jail because of something he or she did when they were a teenager? Science says that the brain develops has proof that teens should be given a little leeway. The brain isn’t fully developed until adulthood. In the article, “The Teen Brain: It’s Just Not Grown Up Yet”, written by Richard Knox, it says “The nerve cells that connect teenagers frontal lobes with the rest of their brains are sluggish”. The teenage brain is also responsive to everything in its environment. Anything a teenager does the brain responds to it in various ways. In the article, “The Teen Brain: Behavior, Problem Solving, and Decision Making”, it says “The Amugdala, which is responsible for instinctual reactions including fear and aggressive behavior, …………………………..” Teens may make decisions that are not very smart, but it may be because the way the teen brain develops.
The brain develops over many years. Therefore teens make irresponsible decisions. The protagonist in the novel, “The Adoration of Jenna Fox”, by Mary E. Pearson, is a normal teenager. Jenna was with her friends one day doing the things teenagers would normally do. Things like partying. And of course where there’s a party, there’s alcohol. So Jenna and her friends were just trying to have a good time and started to drink. Maybe because her prefrontal cortex wasn’t developed, Jenna or her friends didn’t think that drinking wasn’t a good idea since they had to drive home. In the book, Jenna’s explained to her mother that the reason she got into a coma is because she had got into an accident. Jenna said, “I was the crossing the creek. I stepped on the first stone. And then……” The brain’s frontal lobes don’t connect until adulthood. That is the part of the brain that...

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...other didn’t like her. Jenna didn’t even know if they were her real family and sometimes she had wondered about it. While she watched the videos she would start to remember things. In the book Jenna said, “There are many words and definitions I have never lost. But some I am only just beginning to truly understand.” That shows that the brain can develop in mysterious ways. I believe that because of the way the brain develops for teens, it allowed Jenna to only remember some things and not all of it. If she was an adult then maybe she would have known some of it. I know she had to reconstruct her whole brain on a hard drive and learn everything over again but obviously she didn’t have to learn everything over because she still knew how to talk and remembered some things. Scientists are trying to figure why the brain does this. They’ve figured out most of it though.

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