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TRANSCRIPT: TAI ASKS WHY - TEEN BRAIN

Tai Poole: Hello! Long time no see. Well, I guess, hear. Anyway, welcome to season three! Now, before we go any further, I just want to acknowledge that if you’ve been a long-time listener of my podcast, you may be thinking, "Hey, Tai sounds a little bit different this year." I mean, check me out in season one.

Sound Clip: [Tai Poole in season one] Doo doo doo doo, three, one, two. Hi there. I’m Tai! And this is my podcast, Tai Asks Why [Tai vocalizes]

Tai Poole: And now this. My voice is changing. Even I can hear it. As much as I may try to fight it, I’m growing up. But, don’t worry, this episode is not going to turn into some weird, super awkward body talk. No, not on my podcast. I’ve been through the health classes. I'm not doing that stuff again. But there’s something that we haven’t really talked about in class and that’s what’s happening in my brain. As it turns out, during these teen years, my brain is literally reshaping itself, which is kind of making me feel a little bit crazy, if I’m being honest. And, like, I feel like we all know to expect things like our voice changing and all that stuff, but if my brain is reshaping itself, I want to know what's happening in there. What's happening with my brain?!

[Clip of “Tai Asks Why Theme Music” by Johnny Spence]

Tai Poole: I'm Tai and this is my podcast, Tai Asks Why. There are so many good questions out there that you really want to have answered, like, what’s at the bottom of the ocean? Is it possible to predict the future? How is the universe going to end? How do I know what’s true on the internet? Why do we dance? And what’s happening in my teen brain?

Tai Poole: My parents recently said something recently that kind of got to me. They said that I was acting different lately.

Sound Clip: [Nicky Poole] I mean, I've noticed in the last year, especially, that you're becoming much more of a private person. So, I used to know who your friends were and what their names were and, like, who you were walking home from school with and who you'd talk on the phone with. And now I have no idea. And whenever I ask you, you're very, very secretive.

Sound Clip: [Tai Poole] Yeah. I do enjoy being a little bit more cryptic at times. But yeah, I mean, some of these changes seem to just be me starting to try to give myself more independence.

Sound Clip: [Minh Nguyen] Yeah. And I think that on the topic of independence, I've noticed that you are more assertive as well. And one thing I'll say, too, that I've noticed that has changed. I think most of the time, your personality, you're a pretty even-keeled person. But I've noticed that, yeah, the intensity of some of these emotions that you feel lately sometimes feel really amped up. Like, you feel things, but you really, really feel them strongly sometimes.

Sound Clip: [Nicky Poole] Have you met his mom and dad, Dad?

Tai Poole: It's a clever way of just saying I've been kind of moody, so thanks for that, but I get it. You know, before it was just kind of two-dimensional, happy, sad, angry and that was it. But now it's, you know, just getting more depth, and it's just being more broadened. So, also, sometimes I can just be like really cranky and, you know, I admit to that sometimes. I do see what they’re talking about. And my little brother Kien has also been noticing that I've been acting differently. Only, he’s more direct about it.

Sound Clip: [Kien Poole] You wake up at 12:00, you eat - you don't eat much. You're moody. You play lots of games with your friends. You stay in your room most of the time. If I step foot in your room, you're like, "Get out." And you're kind of snarky. No offense, bud.

Tai Poole: You know that hits me, like, that hi's me pretty hard. It hurts my feelings. But, no, I'm kidding. I'm aware that stuff like this has been happening but it's so weird. Like, why do you think this stuff is changing?

Sound Clip: [Kien Poole] Of course you've been changing. I mean, it's a no-brainer that your brain's been changing because you're entering one of the biggest phases of your life. So, it's like, yeah, of course. A baby's brain is different to a child's brain because it changes.

Tai Poole: When you put it that way, yeah, it does kind of make sense. My brain just kind of feels off these days - different. Like I have so much going on in there, and I’m all over the place. And it didn’t used to be this way, at least I didn't think so. If I’m to believe what I see on TV or on social media, being a teen is supposed to be this cool time where you just kind of have a lot of fun with your friends. So, is there something wrong with me that I don’t really feel like that?

Sound Clip: [Frances Jensen] I remember a lot of frustration and feeling like I didn't know what I was doing, because I didn't know what I was doing. [laughter]

Tai Poole: Hey. I can relate to that. This is Dr. Frances Jensen. She’s a neurologist at the University of Pennsylvania. She spends a lot of time looking at brains, and in particular teenage brains, to see how they’re changing at this time in our lives. She even wrote a book about it, called “The Teenage Brain”.

Sound Clip: [Tai Poole] I'm 13 years old, and I'm noticing that my brain is starting to get a little bit on the fritz. So, can you please try to take me through some of the stuff that's happening right now?

Sound Clip: [Frances Jensen] Sure. Well your brain is experimenting with the outside world and you're using parts of your brain that you haven't actually used during childhood, because you're building new parts of the brain during this window. All the way through for the next 10 plus years of your life, you'll be building these higher order areas of your brain. And that's what you're feeling. And guess what? They don't all build at the same time. So, it can be a little uneven, so to speak, how the brain is being built. And this is why teenagers typically feel a little out of line sometimes or not like they have complete control or feel too strongly about certain things.

Sound Clip: [Frances Jensen] So, what's happening is your brain has these, like, peaks and valleys. And those are packed with brain cells that we call neurons. And those brain cells, you have 100 billion, almost, of those brain cells in your brain. And in order for you to do anything, think anything, remember anything, anything, you have to have these brain cells talk to one another. And they talk to one another across connection points called synapses. And do you know you have about 100 trillion synapses in your brain? And you have more as a child and an adolescent. And then you prune them as an adult.

Tai Poole: You hear that grownups? I’ve got more synaptic connections than you. Ha! Take that. No wonder my brain feels so wacky all the time, because it's jam-packed with trillions of synapses firing off all the time.

Sound Clip: [Frances Jensen] And the other part that's really interesting is that the brain, it's compartmentalized. And the front of your brain is something called the frontal lobe which is where we have impulse control, organization, judgment, all those kind of really adult skills. And in the middle part of your brain, behind your ears, we have the kind of emotional parts of your brain. Things we call the limbic system. And the interesting thing is that your brain connects itself from the back to the front.

Tai Poole: Oh, woah. So like when I want to make a decision about something, I go to my emotional back brain and then later I'll connect it with my logical front brain. Feelings first, thinking later.

Sound Clip: [Frances Jensen] So that's why we sometimes see teenagers have very high emotional states, and they're really good at remembering things, by the way, because those synapses are firing all over the place. But they don't necessarily have the ability in a split second to make decisions, weigh judgments, control impulses. So, sometimes we say teenagers are feeling emotion in technicolour to adult black and white.

Sound Clip: [Tai Poole] Well, that does sound like a teenager. Yeah. And it's really interesting because, you know, I had a talk with my parents about my emotions and stuff and how I've just - my behaviour has been changing in my brain. And my dad said something that was very, very similar to the technicolour. He says that my emotions have been getting more complex or varied or something like that.

Sound Clip: [Frances Jensen] Right. And I give credit to your dad. He put it in a very good way. I think there are others that I try to explain when I give talks to adults that, that basically accuse teenagers of quote/unquote overreacting. And that's kind of not fair because if you are an adult you might be actually overreacting because you're supposed to have the equipment to suppress, you know, that level of heightened responses. But as a teenager that doesn't exist yet in your brain.

Tai Poole: OK. So, that explains why my emotions are all out of whack. Why I’m 'moody,' as Kien puts it. It’s my synapse’s fault! I'm feeling all the feelings, but my brain hasn’t quite figured out how to make them logical. So, I'm all feels and less logic. Which, yeah, makes decisions a lot harder. And I can make some questionable decisions sometimes. I’m not going to give any examples because I don’t want to embarrass myself. [whispering] And my parents are probably listening. [normal voice] But Frances says this also can be explained by the brain.

Sound Clip: [Frances Jensen] So we typically see that teenagers, sometimes in a classroom setting, might make the right decision in a very controlled setting. You know, there are no emotion. You can just reason your way through. But in a split-second panic situation, there is a tendency when your frontal lobes are not fully connecting for you to act very impulsively and not think of cause and effect. Like, well, maybe these friends are, you know, daring me to do something, but I could hurt myself if I did it. But it's more important in the moment to have the immediate gratification of the friends. So off goes the impulse, right?

Sound Clip: [Tai Poole] Yeah. It makes sense. The infrastructure that connects to the emotional component is literally just stronger and more advanced than the one for the reasoning one. So, if you're trying to think of a decision, your emotional one is going, "Do it. Do the thing." While the part of you that's trying to reason would be like, "Tai, don't jump off a building," is, you know, a lot quieter. It's like, [quiet voice] "Don't do it. Don't do it."

Sound Clip: [Frances Jensen] [laughter] Yeah, that's right.

Sound Clip: [Tai Poole] So, we keep talking about these - I'm not going to say 'flaws,' but downsides of the teenage brain. Are there advantages to having these different wirings?

Sound Clip: [Frances Jensen] Yes. So, your brain cells are more active. You've got more of the material around to construct those synapses than you ever will again. As the brain moves into adulthood to sort of calm itself down it loses this unbelievable, basically, magical power that the adolescent and child brain has. Which is that they build synapses much faster than the adult brain. So, you can be exposed to something twice and learn it to the same degree an adult might have to practice 10, 20 times.

Sound Clip: [Frances Jensen] And you see this all the time in your daily life. You see how children and adolescents learn two and three languages flawlessly. Right? And you struggle as an adult to learn a second language, for instance, without a big accent. You watch how in memory games adolescents and children are just so much better. They're like sponges, right. So, carpe diem - and what that means in Latin, as you may know, is 'seize the day,' meaning take advantage of this skill while you have it. There is so much more potential in the adolescent years than we really thought.

Tai Poole: So, yeah, the changes in my brain mean that I might be super emotional and impulsive, but I also have this magical learning superpower! So, now I just have to figure out how I can make the most out of these abilities before I grow up and start losing the strength of my synapsis. How do I harness my mighty learnability? How do I carpe the diem?

Sound Clip: [Juliet Davidow] I think that one thing is to try new things.

Tai Poole: This is Dr. Juliet Davidow. She’s a psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist at Northeastern University. She studies how all these brain changes affect how we learn.

Sound Clip: [Tai Poole] So, if my brain seems to be, like, wired to learn right now, what can I do to try to make the most of it?

Sound Clip: [Juliet Davidow] So, in order for the brain to sort of develop, you could think of it like, sort of building up its muscles, it needs to have experiences that make it flex. So, if you're going to encounter new situations, that'll give your brain a chance to learn new things.

Sound Clip: [Tai Poole] So, do teens learn in a different way?

Sound Clip: [Juliet Davidow] So, there's not just one part of the brain that learns. There's actually several separate learning systems. 'Separate' meaning we can find examples where they work in isolation and don't rely on each other. We can also find examples where they work together and cooperate. We need to learn to do a lot of different kinds of things and this way there's sort of support for that. So, when you're an adult, whether one system dominates over the other might come more from experiences that you've had. You might be sort of more deeply ingrained in learning in certain ways. And so, adults can get kind of stuck in how they're learning things, whereas adolescents might be more flexible because they haven't had as much experience, in general, that they're getting stuck on. And also because they need to learn a whole lot more than adults do.

Sound Clip: [Tai Poole] And it kind of makes sense because, you know, in adolescence things are still changing and things are being tried out. But by the time you're a fully-fledged adult, you know, you've kind of figured out what works and you're sticking to that.

Sound Clip: [Juliet Davidow] That sounds right. Yeah. When you're an adolescent you don't necessarily know later on what's going to be useful to have remembered. The brain is storing it because it needs to know later what turned out to be useful.

Sound Clip: [Tai Poole] Yeah, it's just like, you know, I might be able to use this. I have no idea. But it's better to have it than to not have it. And then you just kind of throw it in this junk bin. And then, you know, when you're older and you're an adult and you're like, "Let's look through this." It's like, "Yeah. I'm never gonna need to know this stuff," so you can clean out a little bit more.

Sound Clip: [Juliet Davidow] Yeah.

Tai Poole: Huh, this is pretty cool. Usually adults make us feel like our lack of experience is a bad thing, but it sounds like not having too many experiences is actually what makes us such good learners. You know, we’re not used to doing stuff a certain way so we take in information in all crammed up in the brain box. We're not used to doing things a certain way, so we take in information in new cool, wacky ways that adults would never even think of.

Sound Clip: [Juliet Davidow] There's some really fun work showing that if you tell adults and adolescents bad instructions, the adolescents can actually overcome those bad instructions faster than the adults do. And one possible way that they're doing that is because they're really attending to the feedback that they're getting from the environment and in the moment, whereas, the adults kind of stick on the thing that they were told to do even if it isn't matching up with their experience of the environment at that time.

Sound Clip: [Tai Poole] Oh, my god. That is so true. Like, if I'm going to play a new board game with my family and, you know, there's a rule sheet and there's something that's not clear in the rules or some things that contradict, I'll just go and I'll say, "Well, maybe we should do this because this just is the most natural course of action." But most of the time, my parents, they just kind of want to stick to those rules and they just don't really figure it out as fast as me. So that can be kind of frustrating sometimes.

Sound Clip: [Juliet Davidow] Yeah, that's right. I think that's exactly the kind of thing that we can see evidence in the brain for that.

Tai Poole: So we don’t just listen to instructions and accept them as fact. Sometimes our teachers and parents can see that as being stubborn or not listening, but it's really, it’s just us figuring it out on our own. Juliet also reassures me that even though I feel like my brain is kind of broken, it's not. It's actually working the way that it’s supposed to.

Sound Clip: [Juliet Davidow] The teen brain is not broken. There is nothing wrong with it. All of the changes that happen and the way it sort of grows up into adult brain is part of normal development. But it is definitely a system that is different than an adult brain. So rather than using the adult as kind of the benchmark for how the adolescent should behave, I think a little bit more about what are the goals of this time of life. I think one of the reasons that we have this sort of long period of development called adolescence, or at least humans have it, is to give time to learn all the things that we need to learn how to do in order to sort of be successful adults who can navigate our environment and take care of ourselves. Including things like forming relationships with friends and learning about who we are and what we're interested in doing.

Sound Clip: [Tai Poole] So, in a time like this where the brain is just - it's able to kind of sponge, like absorb a lot more stuff, you just, you know, you'd want to give it more stuff to absorb.

Sound Clip: [Juliet Davidow] That's right. Mm-hm.

Sound Clip: [Tai Poole] Even if it's bad, even if it's good, just throw whatever it is at it so you can just - this is my time to like fast learn so I can get a, you know, like a little bit of a prep for adulthood.

Sound Clip: [Juliet Davidow] [laughter] Yeah. I mean, I definitely think this is a really important time of life to be experiencing lots of things because your brain will benefit from having those experiences. And also you will benefit from having those experiences because you need to learn about the world and learn about what's exciting and important and interesting to you.

Tai Poole: Frances pretty much says the same thing.

Sound Clip: [Frances Jensen] Yes. And I think that if you ask any adult, they will remember their teenage years vividly - vividly. And it's because we are laying down memories in such a strong way in that window. I would say that the seven years that you're a teenager is some of the most important seven years of your life. More than say, my last seven years aren't as memorable as those seven years between 13 and 20 where you're really beginning to figure out who you are.

Tai Poole: OK. So, my brain is, right now, primed for learning, to learn as much as possible before I go out into the real world. And it’s only by challenging the rules and learning as much as we can - and, yes, that includes making mistakes along the way, that we turn into successful adults. No, my brain’s not broken. No, it’s not on the fritz. And we’re not overreacting or being stubborn or any of that stuff. We’re teens. It's what a teen brain does. So, grownups out there need to stop expecting us to act like adults and give us a bit of space to figure things out on our own. You hear that teens? The next time your parents give you grief, just play them this podcast. And hopefully they’ll be able to learn a thing a two - if they’re still able to learn that is. Really, though, I think this whole teen time would be a whole lot easier if everyone knew more about the brain and what's going on in it. So, I decided to tell my little bro Kien what’s up.

Sound Clip: [Tai Poole] Do you know that my brain is literally reshaping itself right now?

Sound Clip: [Kien Poole] Pretty cool. I wish I could make my brain into a cucumber.

Sound Clip: [Tai Poole] Mmm, well, it might not. I'm not necessarily changing into a cucumber yet, but do you think it's a little bit scary that you know that yours is going to change too?

Sound Clip: [Kien Poole] No. Because it will. That’s fate. And adolescence, although you may become a bummer, it could be pretty cool yourself. You know, going through changes? Although one thing I will not be happy about is the mood swings and not wanting to give my mom any more hugs.

Sound Clip: [Tai Poole] OK. I love to give her hugs. You stole her from me. But, you know, now is not the time for that, but how do you feel about the fact that you're going to change and you're going to, you know, become kind of a different person?

Sound Clip: [Kien Poole] Happy. I'm pretty excited. I have some pretty big stuff coming my way. I would like to just kind of like jump ahead five years and be 15. You know? See what it's like.

[Clip of “Tai Asks Why Theme Music” by Johnny Spence]

Sound Clip: [Tai Poole] Thank you guys so much for listening. I'm Tai Poole. This show was produced by Amanda Buckiewicz and Judy Ziyi Gu. Judy's also our digital producer. This podcast was created by Veronica Simmonds, and she is also our editor and sound designer. The theme music is by Johnny Spence. Sound engineer is my dad, Minh Nguyen, and our location manager is my mom, Nicky Poole. Thanks, guys, for guiding me through this crazy stage of life.

Today my guests were Frances Jensen and Juliet Davidow. If you want to know more about teen brain science, check out Frances’ book, “The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults”.

Special thanks to Austin Pomeroy for his assistance, and to Kien, I guess, for insulting me on my own podcast. Well, whatever. Our senior producer is Tina Verma and Executive Producer of CBC Podcasts is Arif Noorani.

Till next time, I’m Tai, keep asking why.

Transcript: Tai Asks Why - Season 3: What's Happening In My Teen Brain?

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