By Meagan Barrett ’15

As summer slowly approaches, the teenage stupidity hormones are practically palpable in the air. Everyone’s preparing for the big party they’re going to have while their parents are away or skateboarding off the roof or doing parkour off the neighbor’s fence, basically, anything that will likely end in negative consequences that were clearly evident beforehand.

Unfortunately, it is a common occurrence for teenagers to do something incredibly stupid, even though they can list out the reasons why they shouldn’t.  While society likes to blame it on teenagers simply being irresponsible and immature, recent research shows that teenagers, more than any other demographic, may have a legitimate, biological excuse to commit acts which they clearly shouldn’t have in the first place.

Molly Edmonds of HowStuffWorks.com compares the teenage brain to “an entertainment center that hasn’t been fully hooked up. There are loose wires, so that the speaker system isn’t working with the DVD player, which in turn hasn’t been formatted to work with the television yet.” Yes, that’s your teenage brain she’s talking about.

In most mature adult brains, the prefrontal cortex, a region of the frontal cortex of the brain, does all of the decision making–it weighs outcomes, considers options and controls impulses and emotions. It also helps people understand one another. The prefrontal cortex communicates with the rest of the brain through synapses, or the wires. These account for the transfer of any information throughout the brain, such as when you feel hungry, see images on the television or touch a fuzzy pillow.

During adolescence, the brain undergoes a process called pruning, which basically consists of getting rid of the synapses that are no longer useful. Contrary to what one would think, this process begins in the back of the brain and works forward. As a result, the frontal cortex of the brain is left with a surplus of synapses for the longest period of time – say, up into your early twenties.

In opposition to the underdeveloped prefrontal cortex, a different part of the brain does develop early on in adolescence, known as the nucleus accumbens. When tested, this section of the brain in teenagers was found to be very reactive towards large and medium rewards, and barely react when presented with a small reward.

As one can imagine, having a strong desire for reward with little ability to analyze risk and judge consequence often goes awry, and chances are, it isn’t entirely your fault … it just mostly is. So next time your mother demands to know why you let a friend come over while she wasn’t home, which resulted in a broken TV, just tell her your prefrontal cortex told you to do it. It’s not an excuse, it’s just science.