The Passion Within

The Primal Teen: What the New Discoveries About the Teenage Brain Tell Us About Our Kids
by Barbara Strauch

(Page 2 of 3)

Chapter 2

The Passion Within

Peering into the Living Brain in Search of Normal

Nora loped through the clinic door, her long brown hair with a wide purple streak flowing behind her. In recent years, Nora Berenstain had survived a move from Sacramento to Washington, D.C., her parents' divorce, and a horrific seventh grade when her best friend moved away.

Now sixteen, Nora was confident and instantly likable. She volunteered at NOW headquarters and helped edit the school paper. Wearing faded jeans and a flowered shirt, she flopped her tall, thin body down on a chair and burst out: "How ya doin', Dr. Giedd?"

David and Matthew Goldstein, thirteen-year-old twins, came next, bounding in like matching soccer balls. It was their first time at the clinic and they blurted nervous questions. "This machine, what exactly is it going to do, Dr. Giedd?" asked Matthew.

Dr. Jay Giedd, the forty-year-old neuroscientist at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) who they'd come to see, is one of a small group of scientists who have recently discovered that the brains of regular, average teenagers like Nora and David and Matthew are far different from what anyone had imagined.

A child psychiatrist, a neuroscientist, and the father of four young kids himself, Giedd is originally from North Dakota. He has an open, round face, a short red beard, and he grinned broadly as each teenager arrived at his clinic trying, with one of his corny North Dakota jokes, to get them to laugh." Oh, I love your hair," he told Nora when he saw her purple streak. He patted his own balding head. "I wish I had enough to do that."

Tuesdays are brain-scanning nights at the National Institutes of Health. Giedd, one of the country's top brain scanners, had come to the basement room of Building 10 on the NIH campus, as he had every Tuesday from five to midnight, to engage in his latest passion: Trying to understand the normal teenager.

Teenagers usually come to the big brick buildings of the National Institutes of Health because they're sick. On the third floor of Building 10, there are beds filled with glassy-eyed children diagnosed with schizophrenia. But the teenagers who come down the long, white corridors to the basement room of Building 10 on Tuesday nights are not sick. Purpled-haired and baggy-panted, they're as normal and ordinary and healthy as possible. Volunteered by parents, lured by the $60 per visit they're paid, they arrive and, in the name of science, stick their heads into a big, noisy MRI brain-scanning machine.

Giedd has been putting kids' heads in this machine for ten years, scanning and rescanning the brains of hundreds of children and teenagers. It's the world's first such long-term study of brain development in normal kids and it has produced extraordinary results, the ripples of which extend far beyond any individual teenager and any individual brain and-for parents and neuroscientists alike-are likely to change the way we think about teenagers forever.

One big stumbling block in studying the brains of teenagers has been that relatively few of them die. As far as studying human brains go, it's far easier for scientists to get their hands on the brain of a baby or a grandmother than that of a fourteen-year-old. Studying the development of the adolescent animal brain, too, has not been easy. Unlike in humans, adolescence in animals is often, as one biologist put it, "over in an eye blink," making serious long-term study difficult.

Beyond that, there's been the overreaching issue of boredom. Teenage brains were thought to be largely finished, as far as serious, interesting neural development went. The only big thing happening in adolescence, as far as anyone knew, involved those pesky hormones, hair and pimples, all that.

Excerpted from The Primal Teen by Barbara Strauch Copyright © 2004 by Barbara Strauch. Excerpted by permission of Anchor, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Barbara Strauch is the medical science and health editor of the New York Times. She previously covered science and medical issues in Boston and Houston and directed Pulitzer Prize-winning news at Newsday. She is the mother of two teenagers and lives in Westchester County, New York.