If you’re a parent of a teenager, you know: their world revolves around their friends. If you were one of them, you surely remember: parents’ opinion took a backseat. And although it seems that it is a sign of the rebellion that we see normal at this age, the reality is that the guilt is literally found in the brain.
The culprit. But when asked what causes this indolence among adolescents? The answer comes from the magnetic resonance imaging that has been applied to the brains of some adolescents. And research shows that, during adolescence, the brain not only changes its interest, but also reconfigures your reward circuits so that the voices of strangers are more gratifying than the voice of one’s own mother.
And this is something that explains the fact that adolescents give much more importance to a friend than to their own closest family, and even go so far as to prioritize them above anything else. Although in the end he has a good excuse in his brain systems.
The study. To find this out, the researchers didn’t have the teens listen to scolding. They used a more cunning methodology by gathering 46 children and adolescents between 7 and 16 years old who were exposed to listening to recordings of nonsense words such as teebudie-shawlt.
The important thing about this investigation was that these meaningless words were spoken by two voices: that of their own mother and that of two women unknown to them.
In this way, when the recording was played, the activity of their brains began to be analyzed through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to see the parts of the brain that were lighting up with each of the voices that were playing.
The results. In the youngest children between seven and twelve years old, their mother’s voice caused a party at the reward centers of the brain, specifically in the nucleus accumbens (NAc) and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). The interesting thing here is that this activity was much greater than what was felt when hearing the voices of the strangers and it is logical because the mother is the center of her social universe that causes her greater happiness.
But things change completely in adolescents between 13 and 16 years old, where these same reward and social evaluation regions showed significantly greater activity for unfamiliar voices than for their own mother’s.
In this way, the age that we can consider as a border between them paying attention to their mother and when they are going to completely ignore what they are told will be around 13.5 years.
Because. In this case we are not talking about adolescents rejecting their parents, since in a behavioral test they were able to identify mothers’ voices in an almost perfect way. The change is precisely in the valuation of that voice.
This neurobiological turn is considered an adaptive process essential for maturity. The teenage brain is being “refreshed” for a new mission: leaving the nest. To prepare for independence, the brain must begin to find new social connections more rewarding. You have to tune in with your companions, future allies and partners.
The bibliography. This finding fits with previous models that were made to identify the differentiated stages in social and brain development, where the affective focus passes from the mother to friends and finally to romantic relationships.
Recent reviews reaffirm that the reward system in adolescence is especially sensitive to novel social stimuli, and that the maturation of frontostriatal connections modulates these changes. A previous work by the same group had already shown that in childhood the maternal voice has a privileged response in the mesolimbic circuit and the current study extends and completes that model by showing how this pattern is reversed in adolescence.
In this way, every time we see a teenager who literally tells his mother that he doesn’t even want to hear her, but spends all day talking to his friends, we already know why: his brain has changed so that he likes it more.
Images | Sebastien Mouilleau Amir Hosseini
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