8 Scientific Reasons Why Teenagers Are Completely Insane
6. Why Theyre So Selfish
Teenagers are more selfish than adults. This isn't some bitter rant by someone still coming to terms with their twenties, this is a fact of biology. In a study at UCL Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a cognitive neuroscientist, put 19 teenagers and 11 adults in an fMRI machine and asked them questions related to decision making. She found that the teens processed the questions in a completely different part of their brain from the adults. Adults tend to use the prefrontal cortex for this kind of mentalising work, which is involved in predicting outcomes and processing how decisions affect others, whereas teens use the superior temporal sulcus, a much more basic part of the brain that deals purely in visualising behavioural actions. In short, adults are using a supercomputer, teenagers are making do with a Nokia 3310. It is thought that this could be because the more complex areas of the brain are still developing, and so the teenage brain gives that precedence, running processes in simpler parts of the brain whilst the others are "upgrading". They're essentially running a skeleton crew. Evolutionarily speaking, this isn't much of a drawback as teenagers are taken care of until they are adults, meaning that they don't yet need to bother with the complex social interactions that hold human society together. The more energy they can devote to upgrading the more complex parts of the brain in their teenage years, the better it will serve them in the future.
