Teens' Penchant For Risk-Taking May Help Them Learn Faster, Says Study (npr.org)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: The teenage brain has been characterized as a risk-taking machine, looking for quick rewards and thrills instead of acting responsibly. But these behaviors could actually make teens better than adults at certain kinds of learning. "In neuroscience, we tend to think that if healthy brains act in a certain way, there should be a reason for it," says Juliet Davidow, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University in the Affective Neuroscience and Development Lab and the lead author of the study, which was published Wednesday in the journal Neuron. But scientists and the public often focus on the negatives of teen behavior, so she and her colleagues set out to test the hypothesis that teenagers' drive for rewards, and the risk-taking that comes from it, exist for a reason. When it comes to what drives reward-seeking in teens, fingers have always been pointed at the striatum, a lobster-claw-shape structure in the brain. When something surprising and good happens -- say, you find $20 on the street -- your body produces the pleasure-related hormone dopamine, and the striatum responds. But the striatum isn't just involved in reward-seeking. It's also involved in learning from rewards, explains Daphna Shohamy, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute at Columbia University who worked on the study. She wanted to see if teenagers would be better at this type of learning than adults would. To test this, Shohamy and her colleagues used an fMRI scanner to watch brain activity in a group of adults and teenagers. They were looking at the striatum, but also in a different part of the brain called the hippocampus. The hippocampus (which looks like, and is named after, a seahorse) helps people remember things like dates and times: the who, what, when and where. As the adults and teens had their brains scanned, they played a game that rewarded players for guessing correctly. Between questions, participants saw random pictures of neutral objects. As expected, the reward-hungry teenagers figured out the game faster than the adults did. Surprisingly, the striatum was equally active in both teenagers and adults. But in teens, it also worked closely with their hippocampus.

Comments

That's not why teenagers do that

[zifn4b]

The teenage brain has been characterized as a risk-taking machine, looking for quick rewards and thrills instead of acting responsibly

The teenage brain hasn't yet accumulated enough experience to understand the risks of their actions and therefore is naive about the consequences. In the decision making faculties of the brain specifically related to survival, we magnify negative experiences so that we avoid them in the future. The decision tree evolves over time or at least should. Those that don't inevitably have a much higher chance of winning a Darwin award.

Or maybe ...

[Calydor]

Maybe, just maybe, taking bigger risks than the other guys and still getting away with it is seen as an attractive trait when females look for a mate.

There you go, natural selection for risk-taking in the teenage years.

We let 18 year old take big risks on student loans

[Joe_Dragon]

We let 18 year old take big risks on student loans and when they mess up they are the ones stuck with the 40K+ bill.