When they exhibit risky behavior, what is actually happening?
One thing that happens in the brain when we’re going to get involved in any activity or initiate any activity is, we either have to decide what the consequences of that behavior are, or we’re just going to behave impulsively. And to appreciate what the consequences of a behavior are, you have to really think through what the potential outcomes of a behavior are. I think the frontal lobe, that part of the executive region that we studied, is not always functioning fully in teenagers; or least our data suggests that perhaps it’s not. That would suggest that therefore teenagers aren’t thinking through what the consequences of their behaviors are, which would lead us to believe that they’d be more impulsive, because they’re not going to be so worried about whether or not what they’re doing has a negative consequence. … Our findings suggest that what is coming into the brain, how it’s being organized, and then ultimately the response — all three of those may be different in our adolescen
