Adolescent Brain Quotes

So you try to think of someone else you're mad at, and the unavoidable answer pops into your little warped brain: everyone.

My glitchy adolescent brain was desperate for causalities, for conspiracies that drenched every word, every gesture, with meaning.

All depression has its roots in self-pity, and all self-pity is rooted in people taking themselves too seriously.” At the time Switters had disputed her assertion. Even at seventeen, he was aware that depression could have chemical causes. “The key word here is roots,” Maestra had countered. “The roots of depression. For most people, self-awareness and self-pity blossom simultaneously in early adolescence. It's about that time that we start viewing the world as something other than a whoop-de-doo playground, we start to experience personally how threatening it can be, how cruel and unjust. At the very moment when we become, for the first time, both introspective and socially conscientious, we receive the bad news that the world, by and large, doesn't give a rat's ass. Even an old tomato like me can recall how painful, scary, and disillusioning that realization was. So, there's a tendency, then, to slip into rage and self-pity, which if indulged, can fester into bouts of depression.” “Yeah but Maestra—” “Don't interrupt. Now, unless someone stronger and wiser—a friend, a parent, a novelist, filmmaker, teacher, or musician—can josh us out of it, can elevate us and show us how petty and pompous and monumentally useless it is to take ourselves so seriously, then depression can become a habit, which, in tern, can produce a neurological imprint. Are you with me? Gradually, our brain chemistry becomes conditioned to react to negative stimuli in a particular, predictable way. One thing'll go wrong and it'll automatically switch on its blender and mix us that black cocktail, the ol’ doomsday daiquiri, and before we know it, we’re soused to the gills from the inside out. Once depression has become electrochemically integrated, it can be extremely difficult to philosophically or psychologically override it; by then it's playing by physical rules, a whole different ball game. That's why, Switters my dearest, every time you've shown signs of feeling sorry for yourself, I've played my blues records really loud or read to you from The Horse’s Mouth. And that’s why when you’ve exhibited the slightest tendency toward self-importance, I’ve reminded you that you and me— you and I: excuse me—may be every bit as important as the President or the pope or the biggest prime-time icon in Hollywood, but none of us is much more than a pimple on the ass-end of creation, so let’s not get carried away with ourselves. Preventive medicine, boy. It’s preventive medicine.” “But what about self-esteem?” “Heh! Self-esteem is for sissies. Accept that you’re a pimple and try to keep a lively sense of humor about it. That way lies grace—and maybe even glory.

In fact, his adult brain acted like his adolescent brain used to. It stopped functioning. All it wanted to do was wrap itself around the owner of that scent and purr.

The addict's reliance on the drug to reawaken her dulled feelings is no adolescent caprice. The dullness is itself a consequence of an emotional malfunction not of her making; the internal shutdown of vulnerability. Vulnerability is our susceptibility to be wounded. This fragility is part of our nature and cannot be escaped. The best the brain can do is to shut down conscious awareness of it when pain becomes so vast or unbearable that it threatens our ability to function. The automatic repression of painful emotion is a helpful child's prime defence mechanism and can enable the child to endure trauma otherwise be catastrophic. The unfortunate consequence is a wholesale dulling of emotional awareness.

Adolescents who are absorbing negative messages about who they are and what is expected of them may sink to that level instead of realizing their true potential. As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote, “Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them become what they are capable of being.

Well, no,” you have to say, “your brain is sometimes an explanation; it’s never an excuse.

The adolescent brain makes important new pathways and connections, but the cognitive functions of the prefrontal cortex, the seat of judgment, don’t mature until around age twenty-five. (The emotional control functions follow at around thirty-two!)

Downtime, whether it is a good night’s sleep, a nap, or simply a few quiet moments of relaxation in the middle of the day, is important for turning learning into long-term memories.

How drugs patchworked simple, banal thoughts into phrases that seemed filled with importance. My glitchy adolescent brain was desperate for causalities, for conspiracies that drenched every word, every gesture, with meaning. I wanted Russell to be a genius.

Adolescence is not a period of being “crazy” or “immature.” It is an essential time of emotional intensity, social engagement, and creativity.

An important take-home message is that it is vital to keep the lines of connection and communication open and to remember that we all—adolescents and adults—need to be members of a connected community.

...the changes during adolescence are not something to just get through; they are qualities we actually need to hold on to in order to live a full and meaningful life in adulthood.

Music was a kind of penetration. Perhaps absorption is a less freighted word. The penetration or absorption of everything into itself. I don't know if you have ever taken LSD, but when you do so the doors of perception, as Aldous Huxley, Jim Morrison and their adherents ceaselessly remind us, swing wide open. That is actually the sort of phrase, unless you are William Blake, that only makes sense when there is some LSD actually swimming about inside you. In the cold light of the cup of coffee and banana sandwich that are beside me now it appears to be nonsense, but I expect you to know what it is taken to mean. LSD reveals the whatness of things, their quiddity, their essence. The wateriness of water is suddenly revealed to you, the carpetness of carpets, the woodness of wood, the yellowness of yellow, the fingernailness of fingernails, the allness of all, the nothingness of all, the allness of nothing. For me music gives access to everyone of these essences, but at a fraction of the social or financial cost of a drug and without the need to cry 'Wow!' all the time, which is LSD's most distressing and least endearing side effects. ...Music in the precision of its form and the mathematical tyranny of its laws, escapes into an eternity of abstraction and an absurd sublime that is everywhere and nowhere at once. The grunt of rosin-rubbed catgut, the saliva-bubble blast of a brass tube, the sweaty-fingered squeak on a guitar fret, all that physicality, all that clumsy 'music making', all that grain of human performance...transcends itself at the moment of its happening, that moment when music actually becomes, as it makes the journey from the vibrating instrument, the vibrating hi-fi speaker, as it sends those vibrations across to the human tympanum and through to the inner ear and into the brain, where the mind is set to vibrate to frequencies of its own making. The nothingness of music can be moulded by the mood of the listener into the most precise shapes or allowed to float as free as thought; music can follow the academic and theoretical pattern of its own modality or adhere to some narrative or dialectical programme imposed by a friend, a scholar or the composer himself. Music is everything and nothing. It is useless and no limit can be set to its use. Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain that no torturer could ever devise. Music makes me write this sort of maundering adolescent nonsense without embarrassment. Music is in fact the dog's bollocks. Nothing else comes close.

This goes for giving instructions and directions, too. Write them down for your teens in addition to giving them orally, and limit the instructions to one or two points, not three, four, or five.

The most important part of the human brain—the place where actions are weighed, situations judged, and decisions made—is right behind the forehead, in the frontal lobes. This is the last part of the brain to develop, and that is why you need to be your teens’ frontal lobes until their brains are fully wired and hooked up and ready to go on their own.

The less he says, the colder the concrete floor gets. The cold refrigerated air brushes over my feet and curls up my ankles. The coldness turns my toes inward, and I rock uneasily. Fear makes your body do things you can’t control. In battle, soldiers experience fight-or-flight, and their blood retreats into their core, their torso, depleting the extremities—which includes the brain.

It’s important to remember that even though their brains are learning at peak efficiency, much else is inefficient, including attention, self-discipline, task completion, and emotions. So the mantra “one thing at a time” is useful to repeat to yourself. Try not to overwhelm your teenagers with instructions.

With a lack of jobs and a great deal of uncertainty about participating in contemporary society, however, the adolescent period may in many ways be even further prolonged. Because modern cultural practices do not offer transitional relationships with non-parental adults to help acknowledge and facilitate the adolescent period, we have some major challenges as adolescents in our modern times.

We were bonded in our mutual hatred of our bodies, though my hatred was adolescent and hers was infinitely more developed, partly a trick of her newly sober brain, which found in food a substitute for the narcotics that had kept her lean. By the time she killed herself, she would still be eleven pounds shy of her goal.

There is a time lag between the activation of brain systems that excite our emotions and impulses and the maturation of brain systems that allow us to check these feelings and urgings—it’s like driving a car with a sensitive gas pedal and bad brakes.

As I discussed in the previous chapter, attachment researchers have shown that our earliest caregivers don't only feed us, dress us, and comfort us when we are upset; they shape the way our rapidly growing brain perceives reality. Our interactions with our caregivers convey what is safe and what is dangerous: whom we can count on and who will let us down; what we need to do to get our needs met. This information is embodied in the warp and woof of our brain circuitry and forms the template of how we think of ourselves and the world around us. These inner maps are remarkably stable across time. This doesn‘t mean, however, that our maps can‘t be modified by experience. A deep love relationship, particularly during adolescence, when the brain once again goes through a period of exponential change, truly can transform us. So can the birth of a child, as our babies often teach us how to love. Adults who were abused or neglected as children can still learn the beauty of intimacy and mutual trust or have a deep spiritual experience that opens them to a larger universe. In contrast, previously uncontaminated childhood maps can become so distorted by an adult rape or assault that all roads are rerouted into terror or despair. These responses are not reasonable and therefore cannot be changed simply by reframing irrational beliefs.

Recent research shows that fear of losing their parents’ trust and respect is the greatest deterrent to adolescents’ drug use.

That’s why we need to pay attention when an adolescent spends hours playing violent video games while his window of opportunity to develop healthy relationships is open wide.

The main neurotransmitters that are active in the adolescent brain are norepinephrine, dopamine, and serotonin.

But in reality the brain is about circuits, about the patterns of functional connectivity among regions. The growing myelination of the adolescent brain shows the importance of increased connectivity.

Even when they're not stoned, adolescents live in a world of ideation of their own making and follow trains of thought to extreme conclusions, despite overwhelming evidence that they're just plain wrong

fifteen years old is a strange thing, a real paradox. That in the middle of your adolescence, you’re the bravest you’ll ever be because of how the brain works at this age, the combination of malleability and arrogance.

researchers at the University of Minnesota have shown that the ability to successfully switch attention among multiple tasks is still developing through the teenage years. So it may not come as a surprise to learn that of the nearly six thousand adolescents who die every year in automobile accidents, 87 percent die because of distracted driving.

I don't think my adolescent brain really understood the difference between wanting to be my mom and wanting to be a mom. It was as I grew older that I had to wrestle with the realization that wanting the former did not necessarily lead to the latter.

The essence of the adolescent brain changes that are the essence of healthy ways of living throughout the life span spell the word essence itself: ES: Emotional Spark—honoring these important internal sensations that are more intense during adolescence but serve to create meaning and vitality throughout our lives. SE: Social Engagement—the important connections we have with others that support our journeys through life with meaningful, mutually rewarding relationships. N: Novelty—how we seek out and create new experiences that engage us fully, stimulating our senses, emotions, thinking, and bodies in new and challenging ways. CE: Creative Explorations—the conceptual thinking, abstract reasoning, and expanded consciousness that create a gateway to seeing the world through new lenses.

The addict’s reliance on the drug to reawaken her dulled feelings is no adolescent caprice. The dullness is itself a consequence of an emotional malfunction not of her making: the internal shutdown of vulnerability. From the latin word vulnerare, ‘to wound’, vulnerability is our susceptibility to be wounded. This fragility is part of our nature and cannot be escaped. The best the brain can do is to shut down conscious awareness of it when pain becomes so vast or unbearable that it threatens to overwhelm our capacity to function. The automatic repression of painful emotions is a helpless child’s prime defence mechanism and can enable the child to endure trauma that would otherwise be catastrophic. The unfortunate consequence is a wholesale dulling of emotional awareness. ‘Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression,’ wrote the American novelist Saul Bellow in The Adventures of Augie March; ‘if you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining.’ Intuitively we all know that it’s better to feel than not to feel. Beyond their energizing subjective change, emotions have crucial survival value. They orient us, interpret the world for us and offer us vital information. They tell us what is dangerous and what is benign, what threatens our existence and what will nurture our growth. Imagine how disabled we would be if we could not see or hear or taste or sense heat or cold or physical pain. Emotional shutdown is similar. Our emotions are an indispensable part of our sensory apparatus and an essential part of who we are. They make life worthwhile, exciting, challenging, beautiful and meaningful. When we flee our vulnerability, we lose our full capacity for feeling emotion. We may even become emotional amnesiacs, not remembering ever having felt truly elated or truly sad. A nagging void opens, and we experience it as alienation, as profound as ennui, as the sense of deficient emptiness…

Sleep isn’t a luxury. Memory and learning are thought to be consolidated during sleep, so it’s a requirement for adolescents and as vital to their health as the air they breathe and the food they eat. In fact, sleep helps teens eat better. It also allows them to manage stress.

In fact, his adult brain acted like his adolescent brain used to. It stopped functioning. All it wanted to do was wrap itself around the owner of that scent and purr. The cat in him wanted to stretch out his body and rub his face into that scent. He’d been right. She was here.

There are surprising similarities between this diary and the diary I kept during junior high school. In each, there's a stunning lack of insight and curiosity about myself. In place of deep thought, there are dozens of passages dedicated to my body (weight gain in the recovery piece and lack of breasts in the junior high journal) and silly, petty issues of the day (hating hospital food versus fighting with frenemies).

We’ve all seen “quit smoking” advertisements on buses and subways. They don’t work. We’ve heard about school programs that teach kids to say no to drugs and alcohol. In many cases drug and alcohol use go up after these programs because they pique the curiosity of the adolescent students. The only thing that has been shown to work consistently is raising taxes on these products and placing limits on where and when they can be sold. When these measures are taken, use goes down.

If a child has ‘slipped through the net’ and hasn’t done well during childhood, it’s not too late to start intervening and providing extra support in adolescence.

adolescents have a less rational version of an adult brain, one that takes more risks and has relatively poor decision-making skills.

exercise during adolescence reduces depression, anxiety, and other emotional distress.

Our best tool as they enter and move through their adolescent years is our ability to advise and explain, and also to be good role models.

This is why it is so important for teens to get more than just a good night’s sleep before an exam. They need to get that good night’s sleep right after studying for the exam.

The more you learn, the more you need to sleep, it would seem.

The most critical issue for teens is that THC disrupts the development of neural pathways.

Brain-Based Therapy with Adults and Brain-Based Therapy with Children and Adolescents.

The teenage brain sees more than meets the eye.

Adolescence shows us that the most interesting part of the brain evolved to be shaped minimally by genes and maximally by experience; that’s how we learn –context, context, context.

Encourage your adolescents to make lists—such as what they need to take home from school in the afternoon in order to do homework, or what they need to accomplish before going to bed.

Marijuana smoke, which users inhale and try to hold in their lungs for as long as possible, also contains 50 to 70 percent more cancer-causing chemicals than cigarette smoke contains.

could sit my kids down and tell them, Look, you don’t believe me when I say that you’re being irrational or impulsive or overly sensitive, but let me tell you why it’s your brain’s “fault.

People who live with ADHD are at high risk of addiction, especially adolescents, because of their poorly functioning frontal lobes. Years ago, when the illness was less well understood, doctors and parents were reluctant to give these vulnerable children addictive drugs such as Ritalin and amphetamine. It sounded reasonable: don’t give addictive substances to people at risk for addiction. But rigorous testing showed unambiguously that adolescents who were treated with stimulant drugs were less likely to develop addictions. In fact, those who started the drug at the youngest age and took the highest doses were the least likely to develop problems with illicit drugs. Here’s why: if you strengthen the dopamine control circuit, it’s a lot easier to make wise decisions. On the other hand, if effective treatment is withheld, the weakness of the control circuit is not corrected. The desire circuit acts unopposed, increasing the likelihood of high-risk, pleasure-seeking behavior.

Sometimes I think Earth has got to be the insane asylum of the universe. . . and I'm here by computer error. At sixty-eight, I hope I've gained some wisdom in the past fourteen lustrums and it’s obligatory to speak plain and true about the conclusions I've come to; now that I have been educated to believe by such mentors as Wells, Stapledon, Heinlein, van Vogt, Clarke, Pohl, (S. Fowler) Wright, Orwell, Taine, Temple, Gernsback, Campbell and other seminal influences in scientifiction, I regret the lack of any female writers but only Radclyffe Hall opened my eyes outside sci-fi. I was a secular humanist before I knew the term. I have not believed in God since childhood's end. I believe a belief in any deity is adolescent, shameful and dangerous. How would you feel, surrounded by billions of human beings taking Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the tooth fairy and the stork seriously, and capable of shaming, maiming or murdering in their name? I am embarrassed to live in a world retaining any faith in church, prayer or a celestial creator. I do not believe in Heaven, Hell or a Hereafter; in angels, demons, ghosts, goblins, the Devil, vampires, ghouls, zombies, witches, warlocks, UFOs or other delusions; and in very few mundane individuals--politicians, lawyers, judges, priests, militarists, censors and just plain people. I respect the individual's right to abortion, suicide and euthanasia. I support birth control. I wish to Good that society were rid of smoking, drinking and drugs. My hope for humanity - and I think sensible science fiction has a beneficial influence in this direction - is that one day everyone born will be whole in body and brain, will live a long life free from physical and emotional pain, will participate in a fulfilling way in their contribution to existence, will enjoy true love and friendship, will pity us 20th century barbarians who lived and died in an atrocious, anachronistic atmosphere of arson, rape, robbery, kidnapping, child abuse, insanity, murder, terrorism, war, smog, pollution, starvation and the other negative “norms” of our current civilization. I have devoted my life to amassing over a quarter million pieces of sf and fantasy as a present to posterity and I hope to be remembered as an altruist who would have been an accepted citizen of Utopia.

Adolescence is a formative period of life, when neural pathways are malleable, and passion and creativity run high. The changes that take place in the brain during this period offer us a lens through which we can begin to see ourselves anew.

Yet when adults lose the four distinguishing features of adolescence, when they stop cultivating the power of novelty seeking, social engagement, emotional intensity, and creative exploration, life can become boring, isolating, dull, and routinized.

the “work” of adolescence—the testing of boundaries, the passion to explore what is unknown and exciting—can set the stage for the development of core character traits that will enable adolescents to go on to lead great lives of adventure and purpose.

I thought of something Puppa used to say. "The human brain can only contain thirty years of memory. Ten years of childhood. Ten years of adolescence. Ten years of early adulthood. After that, it's all as one day, and that day is spent solely in reflection.

Honoring the important and necessary changes in the adolescent mind and brain rather than disrespecting them is crucial for both teens and their parents. When we embrace these needed changes, when we offer teens the support and guidance they need instead of just throwing up our hands and thinking we’re dealing with an “immature brain that simply needs to grow up,” or “raging hormones in need of taming,” we enable adolescents to develop vital new capacities that they can use to lead happier and healthier lives.

When rapid or binge drinking results in a blackout—a period of time for which the person cannot remember critical information or entire events—the hippocampal damage can be severe, impairing, in particular, a person’s ability to create new long-term memories.

they found considerable plasticity from the onset of puberty into the early twenties. Once this was discovered, it became obvious that the upheavals of adolescence and early adulthood coincide with a previously unrecognized sensitive period of brain maturation in the prefrontal cortex

Growth of the Body and the Brain. The physical growth of the human body increases in a roughly linear manner from birth through adolescence. In contrast, the brain’s physical growth follows a different pattern. The most rapid rate of growth takes place in utero, and from birth to age four the brain grows explosively. The brain of the four-year-old is 90 percent adult size! A majority of the physical growth of the brain’s key neural networks takes place during this time. It is a time of great malleability and vulnerability as experiences are actively shaping the organizing brain. This is a time of great opportunity for the developing child: safe, predictable, nurturing and repetitive experiences can help express a full range of genetic potentials. Unfortunately, however, it is also when the organizing brain is most vulnerable to the destructive impact of threat, neglect and trauma.

There is solid data to show that your IQ can change during your teen years, more than anyone had ever expected. Between thirteen and seventeen years of age, one-third of people stay the same, one-third of people decrease their IQ, and a remarkable one-third of people actually significantly raise their IQ.

I was in the car with Trace and heard his side of the conversation with you. Sounded clear enough to me.” “Apparently not, cuz I’m not sweet on her. What kind of dumb-ass thing is that to say? I like her, sure, even though she’s not the easiest lady to be around.” “No?” Jackson didn’t seem to hear her. He continued on as he pulled food from the tiny fridge and piled it on the counter. “She has her reasons for being prickly, and I know it.” “Those reasons are?” “And there isn’t a man alive who wouldn’t want her. She’s about the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen.” He shook his head. “But I’m not sweet> about anything.” He scoffed. “That sounds like some adolescent bullshit or something.” “You have a very limited vocabulary.” “My balls still hurt. It’s affecting my brain.” “Your brain is located a little low, isn’t it?” He paused, then laughed. Shaking a loaf of bread at her, he said, “Good one. I’ll have to try to remember this sharp wit of yours.

At the bottom of the box were two big fairy-tale collections our father had sent us sometime after our parents divorced in 1963. I was four and my sister was five. We never saw him again. One book was a beautifully illustrated collection of Russian fairy tales inscribed, "To Rachel, from Daddy." The other, a book of Japanese fables, was inscribed to me. It had been years since I had opened them. I stared at the handwriting. Something seemed a bit off. Then it dawned on me - both inscriptions bore my own adolescent scrawl. I had always remembered the books and our father's dedications as proof of his love for us. Yet, how malleable our memories are, even if our brains are intact. Neuroscientists now suggest that while the core meaning of a long-term memory remains, the memory transforms each time we attempt to retrieve it. In fact, anatomical changes occur in the brain every single time we remember. As Proust said, "The only paradise is paradise lost.

the adolescent period of life is in reality the one with the most power for courage and creativity. Life is on fire when we hit our teens. And these changes are not something to avoid or just get through, but to encourage. Brainstorm was born from the need to focus on the positive essence of this period of life for adolescents and for adults.

Scientists have calculated that the average adolescent actually requires nine and a quarter hours of sleep. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends adolescents get eight and a half hours to nine and a half hours of sleep a night.) Only about 15 percent of all American teenagers actually get that much on a regular basis. Worse,

The major impairments of ADD — the distractibility, the hyperactivity and the poor impulse control — reflect, each in its particular way, a lack of self-regulation. Self-regulation implies that someone can direct attention where she chooses, can control impulses and can be consciously mindful and in charge of what her body is doing. Like time literacy, self-regulation is also a distinct task of development in human life, achieved gradually from young childhood through adolescence and adulthood. We are born with no capacity whatsoever to self-regulate emotion or action. For self-regulation to be possible, specific brain centers have to develop and grow connections with other important nerve centers, and chemical pathways need to be established. Attention deficit disorder is a prime illustration of how the adult continues to struggle with the unsolved problems of childhood. She is held back precisely where the child did not develop, hampered in those areas where the infant or toddler got stuck during the course of development.

CONSENSUS PROPOSED CRITERIA FOR DEVELOPMENTAL TRAUMA DISORDER A. Exposure. The child or adolescent has experienced or witnessed multiple or prolonged adverse events over a period of at least one year beginning in childhood or early adolescence, including: A. 1. Direct experience or witnessing of repeated and severe episodes of interpersonal violence; and A. 2. Significant disruptions of protective caregiving as the result of repeated changes in primary caregiver; repeated separation from the primary caregiver; or exposure to severe and persistent emotional abuse B. Affective and Physiological Dysregulation. The child exhibits impaired normative developmental competencies related to arousal regulation, including at least two of the following: B. 1. Inability to modulate, tolerate, or recover from extreme affect states (e.g., fear, anger, shame), including prolonged and extreme tantrums, or immobilization B. 2. Disturbances in regulation in bodily functions (e.g. persistent disturbances in sleeping, eating, and elimination; over-reactivity or under-reactivity to touch and sounds; disorganization during routine transitions) B. 3. Diminished awareness/dissociation of sensations, emotions and bodily states B. 4. Impaired capacity to describe emotions or bodily states C. Attentional and Behavioral Dysregulation: The child exhibits impaired normative developmental competencies related to sustained attention, learning, or coping with stress, including at least three of the following: C. 1. Preoccupation with threat, or impaired capacity to perceive threat, including misreading of safety and danger cues C. 2. Impaired capacity for self-protection, including extreme risk-taking or thrill-seeking C. 3. Maladaptive attempts at self-soothing (e.g., rocking and other rhythmical movements, compulsive masturbation) C. 4. Habitual (intentional or automatic) or reactive self-harm C. 5. Inability to initiate or sustain goal-directed behavior D. Self and Relational Dysregulation. The child exhibits impaired normative developmental competencies in their sense of personal identity and involvement in relationships, including at least three of the following: D. 1. Intense preoccupation with safety of the caregiver or other loved ones (including precocious caregiving) or difficulty tolerating reunion with them after separation D. 2. Persistent negative sense of self, including self-loathing, helplessness, worthlessness, ineffectiveness, or defectiveness D. 3. Extreme and persistent distrust, defiance or lack of reciprocal behavior in close relationships with adults or peers D. 4. Reactive physical or verbal aggression toward peers, caregivers, or other adults D. 5. Inappropriate (excessive or promiscuous) attempts to get intimate contact (including but not limited to sexual or physical intimacy) or excessive reliance on peers or adults for safety and reassurance D. 6. Impaired capacity to regulate empathic arousal as evidenced by lack of empathy for, or intolerance of, expressions of distress of others, or excessive responsiveness to the distress of others E. Posttraumatic Spectrum Symptoms. The child exhibits at least one symptom in at least two of the three PTSD symptom clusters B, C, & D. F. Duration of disturbance (symptoms in DTD Criteria B, C, D, and E) at least 6 months. G. Functional Impairment. The disturbance causes clinically significant distress or impairment in at least two of the following areas of functioning: Scholastic Familial Peer Group Legal Health Vocational (for youth involved in, seeking or referred for employment, volunteer work or job training)

An idle brain is the Devil’s workshop, they say. It is an absurdly incongruous statement. If the Devil is at work in a brain it certainly is not idle. And when one considers how brilliant a personage the Devil is, and what very fine work he turns out, it becomes an open question whether he would have the slightest use for most of the idle brains that cumber the earth.

In preparing litigation on behalf of the children we were representing, it was clear that these shocking and senseless crimes couldn't be evaluated honestly without understanding the lives these children had been forced to endure. And in banning the death penalty for juveniles, the Supreme Court had paid great attention to the emerging body of medical research about adolescent development and brain science and its relevance to juvenile crime and culpability. Contemporary neurological, psychological, and sociological evidence has established that children are impaired by immature judgment, an underdeveloped capacity for self-regulation and responsibility, vulnerability to negative influences and outside pressures, and a lack of control over their own impulses and their environment.

From countless studies of MRI scans of healthy adolescents and twentysomethings, we now know that the frontal lobe does not finish wiring up until sometime between the ages of twenty and thirty. What this means is that, in our twenties, the quick, hot, impulsive, pleasure-seeking, emotional brain is ready to go, while the slow, cool, rational, forward-thinking frontal lobe is still a work in progress.

While that sense of familiarity in a stressed life of adult responsibilities is understandable, as we’ve seen, it may also be a reason why the adult-adolescent relationship is filled at times with tension. Adults desire things to stay the same; adolescents are driven to create a new world. This is part of the source of what can become intense friction, sometimes destructively so, that can create pain in everyone, adolescent and adult alike.

Control of the pruning process is incredibly precise, and when it goes awry, neurodevelopment suffers. Children with autism, for instance, appear to have too many synaptic connections in certain parts of their brain early in life, and the usual culling that occurs in late adolescence is far less intense than that in children without the disorder. Perhaps, researchers believe, kick-starting the pruning process with a drug might help treat autism in the future.

obstacle to sleep that you should be aware of is the bright LED light of a computer screen, which should be turned off about an hour before bedtime to relax the overstimulated eyes and brain. In 2012 a study released by the Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, found that just a two-hour exposure to the self-luminous backlit displays of smartphones, computers, and other LED devices suppressed melatonin by about 22 percent.

As adolescence begins, the second genetically programmed growth of synapses is followed by a long decade of brain remodeling that involves the programmed destruction of neurons and their connections that are not being used. The parcellation process in which connections are pruned is thought to be a 'use -it-or-lose-it' neural reshaping that is exacerbated by stress. Such a period of brain change is also marked by vulnerability , as underlying neural deficits, unrealized before adolescence, may becomes exposed during the pruning process.

By the time we’re twenty-five years of age, the brain transformations of childhood and adolescence are finally over. The tectonic shifts in our identity and personality have ended, and our brain appears to now be fully developed. You might think that who we are as adults is now fixed in place, immoveable. But it’s not: in adulthood our brains continue to change. Something that can be shaped – and can hold that shape – is what we describe as plastic. And so it is with the brain, even in adulthood: experience changes it, and it retains the change.

Kincaid doesn’t want us to see him as a cliché. He also presumably doesn’t want us thinking about—or isn’t himself aware of—the gender dynamics that underpin this cliché. By this I don’t only mean the way that boys and men are socialized to find domination sexy, and girls and women to find subordination sexy; or the way that some male professors blend sexual entitlement with intellectual narcissism, seeing sex with women students as the delayed reward for suffering through an adolescence in which brawn or cool were prized more highly than brains.

Again as during fetal development, synapses that underlie cognitive and other abilities stick around if they’re used but wither if they’re not. The systematic elimination of unused synapses, and thus unused circuits, presumably results in greater efficiency for the neural networks that are stimulated—the networks that support, in other words, behaviors in which the adolescent is actively engaged. Just as early childhood seems to be a time of exquisite sensitivity to the environment (remember the babies who dedicate auditory circuits only to the sounds of their native language, eliminating those for phonemes that they do not hear), so may adolescence. The teen years are, then, a second chance to consolidate circuits that are used and prune back those that are not—to hard-wire an ability to hit a curve ball, juggle numbers mentally, or turn musical notation into finger movements almost unconsciously. Says Giedd, “Teens have the power to determine their own brain development, to determine which connections survive and which don’t, [by] whether they do art, or music, or sports, or videogames.

In today’s safety culture we seem to swing from strictly monitoring and guiding our children from infancy through high school, and then releasing them to the absolute freedom of college (though some parents are trying to encroach there as well). We have to remember that for most of human history adolescents took on adult roles earlier and rose admirably to the challenge. Many of the problems we have with teenagers result from failing to adequately challenge their growing brains. While we now know that the brain’s decision-making areas aren’t completely wired until at least their early twenties, it is experience-making decisions that wires them, and it can’t be done without taking some risks. We need to allow children to try and fail. And when they do make the stupid, shortsighted decisions that come from inexperience, we need to let them suffer the results. At the same time we also need to provide balance by not setting policies that will magnify one mistake, like drug use or fighting, into a life-derailing catastrophe. Unfortunately, this is exactly what our current “zero tolerance” policies—that expel children from school for just one rule violation—do.

If we understand the signals they are giving us, middle school kids can be fun and adventurous. If wse can find it in our hearts to overlook some of their quirky and mysterious behaviors, we can find them to be energetic and curious about how the world works around them. If we see the world as they view it, we can take their hand and guide them across the narrow bridges and frightening valleys they see sprawling before them. And finally, if we can reveal the patience to talk with them about the issues that confuse and bedevil them, we can find a world open for discussion and journey.

Of greatest concern is the growing body of evidence linking regular marijuana use to an increased risk of developing severe psychiatric illnesses, especially during adolescence. In 2017, just over 37 percent of twelfth graders used it at least once during the year, and 5.9 percent used it every day—a huge jump over 1992, when only 1.9 percent were daily users. The more regularly a teen uses marijuana and the higher the potency, the greater his or her risk of becoming schizophrenic. Heavy users are also more likely than others to be depressed; and, what’s worse, marijuana use during depression reduces the rate of recovery.

Everything seemed possible back then. As the physical changes of adolescence took hold, I resolved to install a few changes of my own, fashion this clay into something sensational. And I had a whole stack of manuals to help me do it--such is the magic when books and naïvety collide. As far as I was concerned, if it was shelved in the nonfiction section, it was true. And it staggered me that this earth-shattering knowledge was gathering dust on a library shelf. Why did people read anything else? Didn't they realize that humans only use 10 percent of their brains? Hadn't they hard of the kid in Russia who could move salt shakers with his mind alone?

Addiction to internet pornography is a very real phenomenon with a very real impact on well-being. It is a phenomenon which has grown exponentially in the last decade, even though it has remained largely invisible and undetected by society. Tragically, its risks continue to be ignored or actively denied by all but a few enlightened medical professionals. It is a phenomenon that is not just here to stay, but also likely to increase. It is almost certainly the cause of the widespread sexual dysfunction found in recent studies of late adolescence.[1] It is a problem that is most likely impacting you, or your loved ones, without you even being aware of it.

Closing the distance between them, he had savored the modest allure of her walk and felt his body respond to the graceful sway of her hips as they approached the pool. He had envisioned her taking off her robe and showing him her slender nakedness, but instead, she had just stood there, as though searching for someone. It skipped through his mind that when he caught up to the girl, he would either apprehend or ravish her. He still wasn't sure which it would be as he stood before her, blocking her escape with a dark, slight smile. As she peered up at him fearfully from the shadowed folds of her hood, he found himself staring into the bluest eyes he had ever seen. He had only encountered that deep, dream-spun shade of cobalt once in his life before, in the stained glass windows of Chartres Cathedral. His awareness of the crowd them dimmed in the ocean-blue depths of her eyes. 'Who are you?' He did not say a word nor ask her permission. With the smooth self-assurance of a man who has access to every woman in the room, he captured her chin in a firm but gentle grip. She jumped when he touched her, panic flashing in her eyes. His hard stare softened slightly in amusement at that, but then his faint smile faded, for her skin was silken beneath his fingertips. With one hand, he lifted her face toward the dim torchlight, while the other softly brushed back her hood. Then Lucien faltered, faced with a beauty the likes of which he had never seen. His very soul grew hushed with reverence as he gazed at her, holding his breath for fear the vision would dissolve, a figment of his overactive brain. With her bright tresses gleaming the flame-gold of dawn and her large, frightened eyes of that shining, ethereal blue, he was so sure for a moment that she was a lost angel that he half expected to see silvery, feathered wings folded demurely beneath her coarse brown robe. She appeared somewhere between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two- a wholesome, nay, a virginal beauty of trembling purity. He instantly 'knew' that she was utterly untouched, impossible as that seemed in this place. Her face was proud and weary. Her satiny skin glowed in the candlelight, pale and fine, but her soft, luscious lips shot off an effervescent champagne-pop of desire that fizzed more sweetly in his veins than anything he'd felt since his adolescence, which had taken place, if he recalled correctly, some time during the Dark Ages. There was intelligence and valor in her delicate face, courage, and a quivering vulnerability that made him ache with anguish for the doom of all innocent things. 'A noble youth, a questing youth,' he thought, and if she had come to slay dragons, she had already pierced him in his black, fiery heart with the lance of her heaven-blue gaze.

Chronic abuse and neglect in childhood interfere with the proper wiring of sensory-integration systems. In some cases this results in learning disabilities, which include faulty connections between the auditory and word-processing systems, and poor hand-eye coordination. As long as they are frozen or explosive, it is difficult to see how much trouble the adolescents in our residential treatment programs have processing day-to-day information, but once their behavioral problems have been successfully treated, their learning disabilities often become manifest. Even if these traumatized kids could sit still and pay attention, many of them would still be handicapped by their poor learning skills.22

In middle school, embarrassment triggers our brains as though it’s actual danger. As adults, most of us can shake off being embarrassed because we have a pretty strong sense of self. When we were twelve, though, any little scratch to our delicate egos could become a scar we’d carry into adulthood. If the bad news is that people tend to carry adolescent pain forward, the good news is that the coping skills and strategies your kid learns in adolescence also stick with them. This is why learning about self-care at a young age is important. If your tween practices new coping skills now, they will be firmly cemented for recall later in life, potentially when your older teen or young adult needs them even more

Adolescents need to cocoon. Cocooning is a term coined in the early 1980s by Faith Popcorn, a social trend analyst with a bizarre and compelling name. (That’s neither here nor there, but it can’t go unsaid.) Popcorn describes cocooning as “the impulse to stay inside when the outside gets too tough and scary.” Since its introduction to our lexicon, it has come to be used regularly to describe adolescents and their relationship to their rooms. Tweens and teens cocoon because at a time when most things in their lives are changing—their bodies, brains, emotions, friends, and even their self-concepts—bedrooms are safe havens. There, they can think about any and all things ad nauseam, or push them aside and take a break from the mental turmoil of their busy minds.

It's all that's left,' Leon said in a suddenly weak voice. 'It's what is left of civilization. You take raw material and you transform it. That is civilization. Physical love is all raw meat. That's why everyone's so preoccupied with it now. I have been told by a colleague ten years older than myself--as if it were possible for anybody to be ten years older than I am--that salvation comes from staring at the pubic region of strangers, and freedom, from inducing in myself, by the use of a chemical, the kind of ecstatic lunacy in which I spent most of my adolescence, a condition I attribute solely to the strength of my body at that time and the conviction I had then that I would see socialism in the United States during my lifetime. Now that my bones are weak, my brain is stronger. I don't expect . . . anything. But I cannot bear the grotesque, lying piety of my own unhinged contemporaries. One man, a literary star'--and here he broke off, laughed once, choked and shook his head--'oh, yes, a star, told me he only regretted the pill had not yet been developed in his own youth. All those girls who might have been his! In this age of generalized cock, is this the whole revelation toward which my life has been directed? I would, in any case, prefer to contemplate the organ of a horse. It is handsomer, larger and more comic than anything my fellow man has to show. It is the age of baby shit, darling. Don't kid yourself. My privacy has been violated--what I've admired and thought about all my life has been debased. Poor bodies . . . poor evil-smiling gross flesh. Perhaps we're going downhill, all of us.' He reached out and pressed her shoulder. 'Do you understand me?' he asked.

One of the reasons that repetition is so important lies in your teenager’s brain development. One of the frontal lobes’ executive functions includes something called prospective memory, which is the ability to hold in your mind the intention to perform a certain action at a future time—for instance, remembering to return a phone call when you get home from work. Researchers have found not only that prospective memory is very much associated with the frontal lobes but also that it continues to develop and become more efficient specifically between the ages of six and ten, and then again in the twenties. Between the ages of ten and fourteen, however, studies reveal no significant improvement. It’s as if that part of the brain—the ability to remember to do something—is simply not keeping up with the rest of a teenager’s growth and development. The parietal lobes,

The cannabinoid receptor system matures most rapidly, not during childhood, not during adulthood, but during adolescence. So it wouldn’t be surprising if cannabinoid activity is meant to be functional during adolescence, more functional than at any other period of the lifespan. As far as evolution is concerned, adolescents might well benefit from following their own grandiose thoughts, goals, and plans. By doing so, and by ignoring the weight of evidence—or sheer inertia—piled up against them, they would greatly amplify their tendency to explore, to try things, to imbue their plans with more confidence than they deserve. The evolutionary goals of adolescents are to become independent, to make new connections, and to find new territory, new social systems, and most of all new mates. The distortions of adolescent thinking might be precisely poised to facilitate those goals.

These genetic malfunctions are unlikely to produce schizophrenia in an individual unless they are stimulated by environmental conditions. By far the most causative environmental factor is stress, especially during gestation in the womb, early childhood, and adolescence—stages in which the brain is continually reshaping itself, and thus vulnerable to disruption. Stress can take the form of a person's enduring sustained anger, fear, or anxiety, or a combination of these. Stress works its damage by prompting an oversupply of cortisol, the normally life sustaining “stress hormone” that converts high energy glycogen to glucose in liver and in muscle tissue. Yet when it is called upon to contain a rush of glycogen, cortisol can transform itself into “Public Enemy Number One,” as one health advocate put it. The steroid hormone swells to flood levels and triggers weight gain, high blood pressure, heart disease, damage to the immune system, and an overflow of cholesterol. Stress is likely a trigger for schizophrenia.

I read a lot, but what I liked was almost always written by men, not women. It seemed to me that the voice of men came from the pages, and that voice preoccupied me, I tried in every way to imitate it. Even when I was around thirteen — just to hold on to a clear memory — and had the impression that my writing was good, I felt that someone was telling me what should be written and how. At times he was male but invisible. I didn't even know if he was my age or grown up, perhaps old. More generally, I have to confess, I imagined becoming male yet at the same time remaining female. This impression, luckily, disappeared almost completely with the end of adolescence. I say "almost" because, even if the male voice had departed, there was a residual stumbling block: the impression that my woman's brain held me back, limited me, like a congenital slowness. Not only was writing difficult in itself but I was a girl and so would never be able to write books like those of the great writers. The quality of the writing in those books, their power, fired me with ambitions, dictated intentions that seemed far beyond my possibilities.

A lot goes through your mind when you’re dying. What they say about life flashing before your eyes is true. You remember things from your childhood and adolescence—specific images, vivid and real, like brilliant sparks of light exploding in your brain. Somehow you’re able to comprehend the whole of your life in that single instant of reflection, as if it were a panoramic view. You have no choice but to look at your decisions and accomplishments—or lack of them—and decide for yourself if you did all that you could do. And you panic just a little, wishing for one more chance at all the beautiful moments you didn’t appreciate, or for one more day with the person you didn’t love quite enough. You also wonder in those frantic, fleeting seconds, as your spirit shoots through a dark tunnel, if heaven exists on the other side, and if so, what you will find there. What will it look like? What color will it be? Then you see a light—a brilliant, dazzling light—more calming and loving than any words can possibly describe, and everything finally makes sense to you. You are no longer afraid, and you know what lies ahead. Sunshine and Rain

to be open and straightforward about their needs for attention in a social setting. It is equally rare for members of a group in American culture to honestly and openly express needs that might be in conflict with that individual’s needs. This value of not just honestly but also openly fully revealing the true feelings and needs present in the group is vital for it’s members to feel emotional safe. It is also vital to keeping the group energy up and for giving the feedback that allows it’s members to know themselves, where they stand in relation to others and for spiritual/psychological growth. Usually group members will simply not object to an individual’s request to take the floor—but then act out in a passive-aggressive manner, by making noise or jokes, or looking at their watches. Sometimes they will take the even more violent and insidious action of going brain-dead while pasting a jack-o’-lantern smile on their faces. Often when someone asks to read something or play a song in a social setting, the response is a polite, lifeless “That would be nice.” In this case, N.I.C.E. means “No Integrity or Congruence Expressed” or “Not Into Communicating Emotion.” So while the sharer is exposing his or her vulnerable creation, others are talking, whispering to each other, or sitting looking like they are waiting for the dental assistant to tell them to come on back. No wonder it’s so scary to ask for people’s attention. In “nice” cultures, you are probably not going to get a straight, open answer. People let themselves be oppressed by someone’s request—and then blame that someone for not being psychic enough to know that “Yes” meant “No.” When were we ever taught to negotiate our needs in relation to a group of people? In a classroom? Never! The teacher is expected to take all the responsibility for controlling who gets heard, about what, and for how long. There is no real opportunity to learn how to nonviolently negotiate for the floor. The only way I was able to pirate away a little of the group’s attention in the school I attended was through adolescent antics like making myself fart to get a few giggles, or asking the teacher questions like, “Why do they call them hemorrhoids and not asteroids?” or “If a number two pencil is so popular, why is it still number two,” or “What is another word for thesaurus?” Some educational psychologists say that western culture schools are designed to socialize children into what is really a caste system disguised as a democracy. And in once sense it is probably good preparation for the lack of true democratic dynamics in our culture’s daily living. I can remember several bosses in my past reminding me “This is not a democracy, this is a job.” I remember many experiences in social groups, church groups, and volunteer organizations in which the person with the loudest voice, most shaming language, or outstanding skills for guilting others, controlled the direction of the group. Other times the pain and chaos of the group discussion becomes so great that people start begging for a tyrant to take charge. Many times people become so frustrated, confused and anxious that they would prefer the order that oppression brings to the struggle that goes on in groups without “democracy skills.” I have much different experiences in groups I work with in Europe and in certain intentional communities such as the Lost Valley Educational Center in Eugene, Oregon, where the majority of people have learned “democracy skills.” I can not remember one job, school, church group, volunteer organization or town meeting in mainstream America where “democracy skills” were taught or practiced.

As a nine-year-old, the circadian rhythm would have the child asleep by around nine p.m., driven in part by the rising tide of melatonin at this time in children. By the time that same individual has reached sixteen years of age, their circadian rhythm has undergone a dramatic shift forward in its cycling phase. The rising tide of melatonin, and the instruction of darkness and sleep, is many hours away. As a consequence, the sixteen-year-old will usually have no interest in sleeping at nine p.m. Instead, peak wakefulness is usually still in play at that hour. By the time the parents are getting tired, as their circadian rhythms take a downturn and melatonin release instructs sleep—perhaps around ten or eleven p.m., their teenager can still be wide awake. A few more hours must pass before the circadian rhythm of a teenage brain begins to shut down alertness and allow for easy, sound sleep to begin. This, of course, leads to much angst and frustration for all parties involved on the back end of sleep. Parents want their teenager to be awake at a “reasonable” hour of the morning. Teenagers, on the other hand, having only been capable of initiating sleep some hours after their parents, can still be in their trough of the circadian downswing. Like an animal prematurely wrenched out of hibernation too early, the adolescent brain still needs more sleep and more time to complete the circadian cycle before it can operate efficiently, without grogginess. If this remains perplexing to parents, a different way to frame and perhaps appreciate the mismatch is this: asking your teenage son or daughter to go to bed and fall asleep at ten p.m. is the circadian equivalent of asking you, their parent, to go to sleep at seven or eight p.m. No matter how loud you enunciate the order, no matter how much that teenager truly wishes to obey your instruction, and no matter what amount of willed effort is applied by either of the two parties, the circadian rhythm of a teenager will not be miraculously coaxed into a change. Furthermore, asking that same teenager to wake up at seven the next morning and function with intellect, grace, and good mood is the equivalent of asking you, their parent, to do the same at four or five a.m. Sadly, neither society nor our parental attitudes are well designed to appreciate or accept that teenagers need more sleep than adults, and that they are biologically wired to obtain that sleep at a different time from their parents. It’s very understandable for parents to feel frustrated in this way, since they believe that their teenager’s sleep patterns reflect a conscious choice and not a biological edict. But non-volitional, non-negotiable, and strongly biological they are. We parents would be wise to accept this fact, and to embrace it, encourage it, and praise it, lest we wish our own children to suffer developmental brain abnormalities or force a raised risk of mental illness upon them.

That’s exactly a summary of what it does. To get more jargony: it does impulse control, emotional regulation, long-term planning, gratification postponements, executive function. It’s the part of the brain that attempts to tell you, “You know, this seems like a good idea right now, but trust me, you’ll regret it. Don’t do it.” It’s the most recently evolved part of our brains. Our frontal cortex is proportionately bigger and more complex than that of any other primate. And, most interesting, it’s the last part of the brain to get fully wired up. The frontal cortex is not fully online until people are, on average, about a quarter century old. It’s boggling, but it also tells you a lot about why adolescents act in adolescent ways; it’s because the frontal cortex isn’t very powerful yet. And that has an interesting implication, which is that if the frontal cortex is the last part of the brain to fully mature, by definition it’s the part least constrained by genes and most shaped by experience. So the frontal cortex is your moral barometer, if that’s the right metaphor. It’s the Calvinist voice whispering in your head. So, for example, the frontal cortex plays a central role if you’re tempted to lie about something; and if you manage to avoid that temptation, your frontal cortex had something to do with it. But at the same time, if you do decide to lie, your frontal cortex helps you to do so: “Okay, control my voice, don’t make eye contact, don’t let my face do something funny.” That’s a frontal task too. This is a very human, very complicated part of our brains.

Making matters worse, the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that governs so much of our higher executive function—the ability to plan and to reason, the ability to control impulses and to self-reflect—is still undergoing crucial structural changes during adolescence and continues to do so until human beings are in their mid- or even late twenties. This is not to say that teenagers lack the tools to reason. Just before puberty, the prefrontal cortex undergoes a huge flurry of activity, enabling kids to better grasp abstractions and understand other points of view. (In Darling’s estimation, these new capabilities are why adolescents seem so fond of arguing—they can actually do it, and not half-badly, for the first time.) But their prefrontal cortexes are still adding myelin, the fatty white substance that speeds up neural transmissions and improves neural connections, which means that adolescents still can’t grasp long-term consequences or think through complicated choices like adults can. Their prefrontal cortexes are also still forming and consolidating connections with the more primitive, emotional parts of the brain—known collectively as the limbic system—which means that adolescents don’t yet have the level of self-control that adults do. And they lack wisdom and experience, which means they often spend a lot of time passionately arguing on behalf of ideas that more seasoned adults find inane. “They’re kind of flying by the seat of their pants,” says Casey. “If they’ve had only one experience that’s pretty intense, but they haven’t had any other experiences in this domain, it’s going to drive their behavior.

Jung’s remarks about how in North Africa he “felt cast back many centuries to an infinitely more naïve world of adolescents who were preparing, with the aid of a slender knowledge of the Koran, to emerge from their original state of twilight consciousness” may seem politically incorrect from our oversensitive perspective, but they highlight the core insight of the trip. Although Jung knew a great deal about mythology and mythological thinking, his own thinking was decidedly Western and rational—he described himself as a “thorough Westerner”26—and in many ways, Jung was a typical “left-brainer,” with his detestation of “fantasy,” his formality and punctuality, his precision and need to be “scientific.” In his travels in North Africa, and later Taos and Central Africa, Jung was looking for signs of a consciousness not as differentiated from the unconscious matrix—what in the Seven Sermons he called “the Pleroma”—as ours, with its sharp distinction between conscious and unconscious. What Jung found in places such as Tunis, Sousse, Sfax, and the oasis city of Tozeur was a completely different sense of time. Coming from the land of cuckoo clocks and appointment books, this must have been a shock. Jung had entered a “dream of a static, age-old existence,” a kind of perpetual now, a condition associated with the right brain, which lacks a sense of time; there was none of the incessant activity that characterized even a relatively small city like Zürich. Jung enjoyed the contrast, which gave him an opportunity to entertain criticisms of modernity, a practice that would become something of a habit in later years, but he also felt this timelessness was threatened. Thinking of his pocket watch, “the symbol of Europe’s accelerated tempo,” Jung worried that the “god of time” and its demon, progress, would soon “chop into bits and pieces”—hours, minutes, seconds—the “duration” he sensed here and which was the “closest thing to eternity.

The addict’s reliance on the drug to reawaken her dulled feelings is no adolescent caprice. The dullness is itself a consequence of an emotional malfunction not of her making: the internal shutdown of vulnerability. From the Latin word vulnerare, “to wound,” vulnerability is our susceptibility to be wounded. This fragility is part of our nature and cannot be escaped. The best the brain can do is to shut down conscious awareness of it when pain becomes so vast or unbearable that it threatens to overwhelm our capacity to function. The automatic repression of painful emotion is a helpless child’s prime defence mechanism and can enable the child to endure trauma that would otherwise be catastrophic. The unfortunate consequence is a wholesale dulling of emotional awareness. “Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression,” wrote the American novelist Saul Bellow in The Adventures of Augie March; “if you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining.” Intuitively, we all know that it’s better to feel than not to feel. Beyond their energizing subjective charge, emotions have crucial survival value. They orient us, interpret the world for us and offer us vital information. They tell us what is dangerous and what is benign, what threatens our existence and what will nurture our growth. Imagine how disabled we would be if we could not see or hear or taste or sense heat or cold or physical pain. Emotional shutdown is similar. Our emotions are an indispensable part of our sensory apparatus and an essential part of who we are. They make life worthwhile, exciting, challenging, beautiful and meaningful. When we flee our vulnerability, we lose our full capacity for feeling emotion. We may even become emotional amnesiacs, not remembering ever having felt truly elated or truly sad. A nagging void opens, and we experience it as alienation, as profound ennui, as the sense of deficient emptiness described above. The wondrous power of a drug is to offer the addict protection from pain while at the same time enabling her to engage the world with excitement and meaning. “It’s not that my senses are dulled — no, they open, expanded,” explained a young woman whose substances of choice are cocaine and marijuana. “But the anxiety is removed, and the nagging guilt and — yeah!” The drug restores to the addict the childhood vivacity she suppressed long ago.

Closing the distance between them, he had saved the modest allure of her walk and felt his body respond to the graceful sway of her hips as they approached the pool. He had envisioned her taking off her robe and showing him her slender nakedness, but instead, she had just stood there, as though searching for someone. It skipped through his mind that when he caught up to the girl, he would either apprehend or ravish her. He still wasn't sure which it would be as he stood before her, blocking her escape with a dark, slight smile. As she peered up at him fearfully from the shadowed folds of her hood, he found himself staring into the bluest eyes he had ever seen. He had only encountered that deep, dream-spun shade of cobalt once in his life before, in the stained glass windows of Chartres Cathedral. His awareness of the crowd them dimmed in the ocean-blue depths of her eyes. 'Who are you?' He did not say a word nor ask her permission. With the smooth self-assurance of a man who has access to every woman in the room, he captured her chin in a firm but gentle grip. She jumped when he touched her, panic flashing in her eyes. His hard stare softened slightly in amusement at that, but then his faint smile faded, for her skin was silken beneath his fingertips. With one hand, he lifted her face toward the dim torchlight, while the other softly brushed back her hood. Then Lucien faltered, faced with a beauty the likes of which he had never seen. His very soul grew hushed with reverence as he gazed at her, holding his breath for fear the vision would dissolve, a figment of his overactive brain. With her bright tresses gleaming the flame-gold of dawn and her large, frightened eyes of that shining, ethereal blue, he was so sure for a moment that she was a lost angel that he half expected to see silvery, feathered wings folded demurely beneath her coarse brown robe. She appeared somewhere between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two- a wholesome, nay, a virginal beauty of trembling purity. He instantly 'knew' that she was utterly untouched, impossible as that seemed in this place. Her face was proud and weary. Her satiny skin glowed in the candlelight, pale and fine, but her soft, luscious lips shot off an effervescent champagne-pop of desire that fizzed more sweetly in his veins than anything he'd felt since his adolescence, which had taken place, if he recalled correctly, some time during the Dark Ages. There was intelligence and valor in her delicate face, courage, and a quivering vulnerability that made him ache with anguish for the doom of all innocent things. 'A noble youth, a questing youth,' he thought, and if she had come to slay dragons, she had already pierced him in his black, fiery heart with the lance of her heaven-blue gaze.

Correlation and causality. Why is it that throughout the animal kingdom and in every human culture, males account for most aggression and violence? Well, what about testosterone and some related hormones, collectively called androgens, a term that unless otherwise noted, I will use simplistically as synonymous with testosterone. In nearly all species, males have more circulating testosterone than do females, who secrete small amounts of androgens from the adrenal glands. Moreover, male aggression is most prevalent when testosterone levels are highest; adolescence and during mating season in seasonal breeders. Thus, testosterone and aggression are linked. Furthermore, there are particularly high levels of testosterone receptors in the amygdala, in the way station by which it projects to the rest of the brain, the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, and in its major targets, the hypothalamus, the central gray of the mid-brain, and the frontal cortex. But these are merely correlative data. Showing that testosterone causes aggression requires a subtraction plus a replacement experiment. Subtraction, castrate a male: do levels of aggression decrease? Yes, including in humans. This shows that something coming from the testes causes aggression. Is it testosterone? Replacement: give that castrated individual replacement testosterone. Do pre-castration levels of aggression return? Yes, including in humans, thus testosterone causes aggression. Time to see how wrong that is. The first hint of a complication comes after castration. When average levels of aggression plummet in every species, but crucially, not to zero, well, maybe the castration wasn't perfect, you missed some bits of testes, or maybe enough of the minor adrenal androgens are secreted to maintain the aggression. But no, even when testosterone and androgens are completely eliminated, some aggression remains, thus some male aggression is testosterone independent. This point is driven home by castration of some sexual offenders, a legal procedure in a few states. This is accomplished with chemical castration, administration of drugs that either inhibit testosterone production or block testosterone receptors. Castration decreases sexual urges in the subset of sex offenders with intense, obsessive, and pathological urges. But otherwise, castration doesn't decrease recidivism rates as stated in one meta-analysis. Hostile rapists and those who commit sex crimes motivated by power or anger are not amenable to treatment with the anti-androgenic drugs. This leads to a hugely informative point. The more experience the male had being aggressive prior to castration, the more aggression continues afterward. In otherwise, the less his being aggressive in the future requires testosterone and the more it's a function of social learning.

Burbank's power of love, reported Hall, "greater than any other, was a subtle kind of nourishment that made everything grow better and bear fruit more abundantly. Burbank explained to me that in all his experimentation he took plants into his confidence, asked them to help, and assured them that he held their small lives in deepest regard and affection." Helen Keller, deaf and blind, after a visit to Burbank, wrote in Out­ look for the Blind: "He has the rarest of gifts, the receptive spirit of a child. When plants talk to him, he listens. Only a wise child can understand the language of flowers and trees." Her observation was particularly apt since all his life Burbank loved children. In his essay "Training of the Human Plant," later published as a book, he an­ticipated the more humane attitudes of a later day and shocked authori­tarian parents by saying, "It is more important for a child to have a good nervous system than to try to 'force' it along the line of book knowledge at the expense of its spontaneity, its play. A child should learn through a medium of pleasure, not of pain. Most of the things that are really useful in later life come to the children through play and through association with nature." Burbank, like other geniuses, realized that his successes came from having conserved the exuberance of a small boy and his wonder for everything around him. He told one of his biographers: 'Tm almost seventy-seven, and I can still go over a gate or run a foot race or kick the chandelier. That's because my body is no older than my mind-and my mind is adolescent. It has never grown up and I hope it never will." It was this quality which so puzzled the dour scientists who looked askance at his power of creation and bedeviled audiences who expected him to be explicit as to how he produced so many horticultural wonders. Most of them were as disappointed as the members of the American Pomological Society, gathered to hear Burbank tell "all" during a lecture entitled "How to Produce New Fruits and Flowers," who sat agape as they heard him say: In pursuing the study of any of the universal and everlasting laws of nature, whether relating to the life, growth, structure and movements of a giant planet, the tiniest plant or of the psychological movements of the human brain, some conditions are necessary before we can become one of nature's interpreters or the creator of any valuable work for the world. Preconceived notions, dogmas and all personal prejudice and bias must be laid aside. Listen patiently, quietly and reverently to the lessons, one by one, which Mother Nature has to teach, shedding light on that which was before a mystery, so that all who will, may see and know. She conveys her truths only to those who are passive and receptive. Accepting these truths as suggested, wherever they may lead, then we have the whole universe in harmony with us. At last man has found a solid foundation for science, having discovered that he is part of a universe which is eternally unstable in form, eternally immutable in substance.