Neuroscience 101: The Adolescent Brain

Hi, I'm Michael Hewitt Gleeson. I recently wrote a book called The Fourth Brain, and in the book we looked at the three parts of the brain, the reptile brain, the ancient ancient brain, the mammalian brain, the emotional brain, the cortex, but also the most recent part of the brain to evolve the prefrontal cortex just behind the palm of my hand. This is the decider. This is the palm of the brain where we make executive decisions, but gives us how to behave in society, how to behave appropriately. This is in society and so on. Now, this is very, very tricky.

This doesn't come  up at birth. It takes 25 years of environmental trial and error to wire our prefrontal cortex. Um, and this is a problem for the adolescent brain because the adolescent brain doesn't have the fully developed prefrontal cortex and it makes them very vulnerable. And so in this series, we are looking at the adolescent brain.

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