In my relentless quest to learn stuff that I am teaching about (thought it might give me the edge in letures – you know how it is), I often try to consolidate my thinking on what I am teaching in the form of a long abstract. Following a feature I heard this morning on Radio 2’s breakfast show (I’m so down with the kids), about the strange things people do in their cars when they should be driving, I remembered some notes I’d made about frontal lobe development, the frontal lobes being an area critically involved in thinking and decision making.
So, here’s the science bit…
The frontal lobes are situated at the front of neo-cortex (the mostly grey wrinkly stuff we think of as the brain) – see figure 1.
Figure 1. The brain taken from (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gray728.svg#filelinks)
At birth the human infant’s brain is massively under developed, and despite significant gains in both sensory and motor areas, during the first year (postpartum), it takes until our early 20s before it fully matures. In particular, the frontal lobes, an area associated with higher level processing, such as thinking, planning and self control,do not begin to properly develop until around 6 – 10 years of age (it’s there at birth, it’s just underdeveloped). Initially, as they begin to develop, there is an increase in the myelination of the axons and in the volume of the grey matter. This is then followed, around puberty, by a period of synaptic pruning and reduction in grey matter volume. These changes occur slightly earlier in girls than in boys. The initial physical changes in the frontal lobes are accompanied by steady increases in executive function, namely working memory (capacity and efficiency) and attention (engagement, disengagement and planning). Unsurprisingly then, there are marked improvements in children’s ability to process information and to act upon it. These improvements are further facilitated by formal schooling, where the child learns to implement both working memory and attentional strategies such as information rehearsal, elaboration, organisation and task planning. Cognitive function is therefore subject to environmental influences and some evidence suggests that more cognitively active individuals show less pruning of their axons and a decreased grey matter loss (both pruning and matter loss are quite normal). There is also improvement in emotional control as the prefrontal cortex (the portion at the front (anterior) of the frontal lobes, situated just behind the forehead) begins to mature. However, emotional control is also influence by changes in sex androgen levels (testosterone and oestrogen) at puberty: hence the dramatic shifts in emotion, associated with the teenage years. Prefrontal cortex is also involved in higher-level cognitive function (complex thinking) and decision making, orchestrating both goal directed actions (what you intend to do) and inhibiting unwanted actions (what you intend not to do). It is noticeable then, particularly in boys who tend to be more risk prone and impulsive than girls, that a number of behavioural disorders such as obsessive compulsive disorder, psycopathy and schizophrenia are associated with damage to, or atypical development in, the prefrontal cortex. That is to say boys (men) are more susceptible to developmental influences in the frontal lobes that then lead to the kinds of behaviours (sometimes strange, sometimes dangerous, sometimes both) that are associated with atypical psychologies.
I am not entirely sure this fully explains the strange things people do in cars (read, do cross words, breastfeed their child, put on their tights, I kid you not) but they do go some way to explain why (a) you should your keep instructions short for toddlers and teenagers (they only hear the ‘…poke the cat!’ bit of ‘Don’t poke the cat!’, (b) most students (particularly the younger ones) struggle to concentrate and get on with things at University, (c) why young men are car/life insurance risks, and (d) why none of this is really their (our) fault.
Adieu!
Bye!
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