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Social Science & Medicine 74 (2012) 565e573

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Social Science & Medicine

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Rebelling against the brain: Public engagement with the ‘neurological adolescent’

Suparna Choudhury a,*, Kelly A. McKinney b, Moritz Merten c

aMax Planck Institute for the History of Science, Boltzmannstr. 22, D 14195 Berlin, Germanyb John Abbott College, Ste.-Anne-de-Bellevue, Quebec, Canadac Free University of Berlin, Germany

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:Available online 30 December 2011

Keywords:United KingdomNeuroscienceAdolescenceNeuroimagingTeenage brainPublic engagementSelf-understandingSubjectivity

* Corresponding author. Tel.: þ49 1728186392.E-mail address: schoudhury@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.d

0277-9536/$ e see front matter � 2011 Elsevier Ltd.doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2011.10.029

a b s t r a c t

The adolescent brain has become a flourishing project for cognitive neuroscience. In the mid 1990s, MRIstudies mapped out extended neuro-development in several cortical regions beyond childhood, andduring adolescence. In the last ten years, numerous functional MRI studies have suggested that functionsassociated with these brain regions, such as cognitive control and social cognition undergo a period ofdevelopment. These changes have been anecdotally and clinically used to account for behaviouralchanges during adolescence. The interpretation of these data that the “teen brain” is different has gainedincreasing visibility outside the neuroscience community, among policy makers and in the media,resonating strongly with current cultural conceptions of teenagers in Western societies. In the last twoyears, a new impetus has been placed on public engagement activities in science and in the popularscience genre of the media that specifically attempts to educate children and teenagers about emergingmodels of the developing brain. In this article, we draw on data from an adolescent focus group anda questionnaire completed by 85 teenage students at a UK school, to show how teens may holdambivalent and sometimes resistant views of cognitive neuroscience’s teen brain model in terms of theirown self-understandings. Our findings indicate that new “neuro”-identity formations are more fractured,resisted and incomplete than some of the current social science literature on neuro-subjectivities seemto suggest and that the effects of public policy and popular education initiatives in this domain will bemore uneven and complex than currently imagined.

� 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction

Beginning in the 1990s, neuroscientific explanations about the“teen brain” became central in newspaper, magazine and televisionreports that claimed to solve the “secret” or “mystery” of risky,sullen, and rebellious teenage behaviour in the UK and USA. Brainscanning studies provided salient explanations, for instance, aboutrisk-taking “suboptimal decisions” (Casey, Getz, & Galvan, 2008)and “emotional immaturity” (Koffman, 2009). Scientific argumentsabout the adolescent brain continue to penetrate the public domainin the form of public lectures, popular science books (e.g.Bainbridge, 2009; Feinstein, 2009; Strauch, 2003;Walsh, 2004) andtelevision programs, including UK-based Sky TV documentariesand US-based Discovery Channel shows, as part of a broader driveto increase “neurotalk” and engage the lay public in neuroimagingand other kinds of neuroscience research (Herculano-Houzel, 2003;Illes et al., 2010). These brain-based explanations are frequently

e (S. Choudhury).

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invoked to scientifically “confirm what parents have long known”(Freeman & Goodenough, 2009: 183) and to explain prevalencerates of drug abuse, car accidents, teenage pregnancies and thetransmission of sexual diseases published by government agenciesor non-governmental organizations in the UK and USA (whichtypically convey the impression that virtually all of these proxiesare on the rise) (Casey et al., 2008; Spear, 2000; Steinberg, 2007).This information is disseminated widely to parents, educators andteenagers themselves. Through a qualitative study with teenagersat a UK school, our study aims to address an assumption underlyingdiscourses within both neuroscience and social science about the“impact” of brain research on society: public engagement initia-tives in neuroscience, and critiques about the popularization ofneuroscience rest on the belief in the power of brain-basedvocabularies in shaping subjectivities. This study examines howaudiences of popular accounts of the brain take up these vocabu-laries, testing the assumption of the transformative potential of(popular) neuroscience. In other words, how do teenagers take upthe vocabulary of the “teen brain”?

The literature appropriating theories about the “teen brain”communicates the science of adolescent brain plasticity. The main

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message is that the brain is wired to be malleable, and sensitive toenvironmental input throughout the teen years and into thetwenties. Upuntil recently, evidenceprovidedbygovernment policydocuments, health services literature, and parentingmanuals aboutteen brain plasticity has been directed towards adults who manageadolescents in one way or another. In the last two years, however,public engagement with a newgoal of speaking to teens themselveshas emerged in the form of science lab outreach projects, popularscience writing and not least as interactive science exhibitionsgeared towards children and teenagers. During the summerof 2009,for example, there were at least three interactive exhibits in majorLondonmuseums. Such efforts are thought to help individualsmakeinformed life choices that ‘treat their brainswell’. Someof these dealwith managing the risk of substance misuse and addiction. One USwebsite, for example, explains how drugs “hijack” and “wreakhavoc” in the brain’s reward system (http://teens.drugabuse.gov/drnida/index.php), while popular science book Blame your braingeared towards teenagers, encourages its audience to use neuro-science to guide behavioural decisions that “respect the brain”(Morgan, 2007). Others deal with brain-based explanations forexistential phenomena commonly associated with teenagers. Forexample, the UK multimedia project “Teenology” allows teenagersto explore the reasons behind their emotional changes and healthwebsite “Psychology Today” uses neuroscience to explain to teen-agers as well as parents the biological basis for “chaos”, “confusion”and “identity change.” Typically, these projects sideline thehormonal account of puberty and adolescence and present thefinding of brain plasticity as the new key, or a missing piece, to theexplanation of adolescent behaviour.

In the present discussion, we first provide a brief introduction tocognitive neuroscience’s formulation of the teen brain in the USand the UK. We then draw on preliminary results from an ongoingstudy involving a group of female adolescents in the UK to shednew light on how discourses of neuroscience can be interpretedamong the group of people under investigation: in this case, youth.While adolescents themselves have become increasingly importanttargets for brain-based narratives, our study is one of the first toexplore the potentials of neuroscience in relation to adolescents’own notions of identity and self-understanding. Further, researchon the interaction between knowledge from neuroscience andissues of identity has been centered on psychiatric diagnosticcategories and interventions (Cohn, 2010; Dumit, 2006; Martin,2009; Ortega, 2009; Singh, 2007; Vrecko, 2006). Here, instead offocussing on psychiatric identities, we contribute a perspective onthe emergence and perceptions of “the neurological adolescent” asthe model of the “normal” adolescent.

Our data enables us to then explore the implications of cognitiveneuroscience’s role in creating new ways for people to understandand experience who they are. Recently, the UK politics and culturemagazine, Prospect (Issue 168, 2010), featured a series of opinionessays that debated the extent to which insights from neuroscienceare “providing us with an image of humanity (and a new vocabu-lary)” (Fieschi, 2011, p. 62). While the extent of this “neuro-revo-lution” (Lynch, 2009) is certainly debated (Choudhury & Slaby,2011: pp. 1e22), the characteristics and social life of these newneuro-vocabularies has become a question of recent investigation(Racine, Waldman, Rosenberg, & Illes, 2010). Indeed, in the socialscience literature, metaphors such as the “neurochemical self”(Rose, 2003) and the “cerebral subject” (Ehrenberg, 2004; Ortega &Vidal, 2010) are becoming familiar shorthand expressions tocapture the reduction of personhood to “brainhood” (Vidal, 2009)implicit in neuroscientific theoriese and their lay interpretationseabout cognition and behaviour.

Echoing philosopher Ian Hacking’s claim that psychiatric cate-gories create possibilities for the formation of certain kinds of

persons (Hacking, 1998), some scholars have argued for the recentemergence of "neurological kinds" (Vrecko, 2006). Interestingethnographies of "users" of neuroscientific knowledge such asbloggers who share the diagnosis of bipolar disorder (Martin,2009), autistic advocacy groups (Ortega, 2009) and people beingtreated for alcoholism (Vrecko, 2006) have demonstrated thatneuroscientific explanations are taken up and appropriated indifferent ways. While such accounts challenge assertions thatneuroreductionist explanations of personhood necessarily give riseto a single way of being, they do imply that notions of identity inone way or another take shape around facts from neuroscience. Inour study, we will show that new identity formations are morefractured, resisted and incomplete than some of the current liter-ature seems to suggest.

The “neurological adolescent”

Today’s flourishing research program on the ‘teen brain’ foundits momentum in brain imaging studies at the National Institute forMental Health, USA, during the mid-1990s. These studies, involvinglarge numbers of child and adolescent participants, generatedsupport for smaller scale postmortem studies in the 1970s thatwere the first to suggest that ‘sensitive periods’ of development ofthe human brain may be more protracted than previously thought(Huttenlocher, 1979). Notably, this research challenged the pre-vailing wisdom that brain development more or less was solidifiedby puberty. Neuroscientists today frequently describe the adoles-cent brain as “a work in progress” to signify the structural remod-elling and neuronal reconfiguring that occurs as the child braintransitions to the mature adult structure. In the neuroscienceliterature, “work in progress” at the same time refers to the teenbrain as a promising new scientific project, currently unfolding(Feinstein, 2009; Ruder, 2011).

The availability of non-invasive neuroimaging techniques hasfuelled this rapidly expanding research program. Neuroscientistshave been using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to trackstructural changes in large groups of participants and longitudi-nally over time. The first sets of data demonstrated changes inwhite matter e thought to reflect myelin, the fatty tissuesurrounding nerve cells e and in grey matter e thought to reflectthe density of synapses, or connections between nerve cells. Whilethe actual cellular bases for the relative white and grey matterremain disputed, neuroscientists generally interpret thesechanges seen in MRI as synaptic reorganization, and increasedmyelination of nerve projections in evolutionarily ‘newer’ parts ofthe brain, especially prefrontal cortex (see Blakemore, 2008;Gogtay et al., 2004; Paus, 2005 for reviews). These changes havebeen shown to occur to a considerable degree during adolescence,continuing into early adulthood.

The association of the changing brain regions with ‘higher’executive functions and social cognition has inspired numerousstudies investigating the cognitive correlates of the anatomicaldevelopments. Functional MRI (fMRI) experiments suggest toneuroscientists that the regulation of emotions (Hare et al., 2008),understanding of intentions (Blakemore et al., 2007), risk-taking(Bjork, Smith, Danube, & Hommer, 2007), and inhibition ofimpulses (Luna & Sweeney, 2004) correlate with structural matu-ration of the brain during adolescence. Importantly, these studiesdo not suggest that adolescents lack these cognitive capacities, butindicate that the brain instantiates them differently, as compared tochildren or adults. This difference, however, is almost alwaysframed within a deficit model of development, with most studiespointing to the immaturity and ongoing development of theprefrontal cortex, the more “evolved” part of the brain, in adoles-cents compared with adults. This model accounts for adolescents’

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reduced ability to “put the brakes on” certain behaviours, especiallyhedonic behaviours (Steinberg, 2007).

Risk-taking, cognitive control, social cognition and emotionalregulation are the sets of behaviours that have received the mostattention in fMRI studies. While some researchers acknowledge themany social, emotional and cognitive reasons that underlieadolescent risk-taking (Burnett, Sebastian, Cohen Kadosh, &Blakemore, 2010), many recent articles in the field characterizeadolescence “by suboptimal decisions and actions that give rise toan increased incidence of unintentional injuries and violence,alcohol and drug abuse, unintended pregnancy and sexuallytransmitted diseases” (Casey et al., 2008 p. 62). These neuroscien-tists use several lines of evidence, including mouse models andcross-sectional human brain imaging studies to point to theneurobiological bases of the propensity to behave recklessly, theinability to suppress impulses, the diminished capacity to regulateemotions and to manage multiple tasks (Cohen et al., 2010; Spear,2000; Steinberg, 2007). As such, new neuroscience indicates thatthe brain has a role to play in the ‘turbulence’ and ‘storm and stress’that typically characterize teenage life in psychological theoriessince the early 20th century (Hall, 1904).

Cortical plasticity, that is, the intensive and in part, experience-dependent, neural reorganization of the teenage brain has there-fore been conceptualized as a “paradoxical period in brain devel-opment” (Ruder, 2011) during which teens undergo a phase ofinevitable and normal “pathological” behaviour because of their‘disorganized’, ‘underdeveloped’ or ‘maturing’ cortex simultaneouswith increased risk for the onset of mental illness (Dahl, 2004). Thismodel of the “neurological adolescent” affords a number of prac-tical opportunities for social and medical interventions. Plasticityhas thus gained increasing currency in evidence-based approachesto early intervention and prevention of learning disabilities, mentalillness, antisocial behaviours and suicide (Singh & Rose, 2009).

Cognitive neuroscience thus tends to suggest (and this is greatlyperpetuated by the media) that despite the complex and provi-sional nature of its findings, there is a neural basis to the stereo-typical portrait of the risk-taking, moody, impulsive and self-conscious teenager, and that neuroimaging offers “ultimate proof”(Racine et al., 2010) that adolescence characterized as such isobjectively real. Coined “neuro-realism” by Racine and colleagues(2010) this epistemology powerfully supports the developmentalportrayal of the teen brain as disorganized, and in a process ofreconstruction andmaturation towards the adult brain. By doing so,neuroscience reinscribes in the brain the view of teenagers asdeficient and ‘other,’ in other words, as “incomplete being(s),” as“implicitly and sometimes explicitly measured against the criteriaof white, male, middle-class adulthood” (Stevens et al., 2007 p.108;see also Lesko, 2001) and as one neuroscientist said jokingly ina recent NPR radio broadcast, as an “alien species” (Knox, 2010). Ina reinforcing and circular fashion, neuroscience assumes theauthority to render teen brains deficient and to unlock themysteries and secrets of the so-called “primal teen.”

Study, methods and sample

This study is part of a larger ongoing research project on thehistorical development, topography and cultural functions of the‘neurological adolescent’. For this particular component of theproject, the authors conducted ethnographic research over threedays in July 2009 at an interactive science exhibition about the teenbrain in London and gathered data from participants at a secondaryschool for girls in London, UK. Here, we will focus on data from thefemale participants at the school, aged between 13 and 14 years,who comprised all of the Year 9 tutor groups. Inclusion was basedon their informed consent and willingness to participate in the

study. The ethnic composition of the students was mixed, but mostof the students were frommiddle to upper-middle income families.Although the school is public (non-fee paying), admissions arebased on high academic achievement.

We combined a questionnaire with a focus group to point toparticularlysalient topics for future research.While thequestionnaire,filled out by the 85 girls provided a larger sample of general data, thefocus group discussion offered deeper insights into the perceptions ofa few teenagers (Rivadeneyra, 2006; Wisdom & Green, 2004).

Questionnaire

The questionnaire consisted of 18 items, comprising bothmultiple-choice and open-ended questions. Along with questionsconcerning basic demographic details including age, nationalityand the nationality of parents, the questionnaire used multiple-choice, items with Likert scale responses, and open-ended ques-tions to gauge participants’ own definitions of adolescence, repre-sentations of adolescents in society, and exposure to, andperceptions of, neuroscientific research about adolescence.

Focus group

Eight pupils aged 14 years, selected from the 85 students by theco-ordinator from their year group at random, volunteered to takepart in the focus group. We have given the focus group participantsthe pseudonyms Emily, Angela, Aarti, Izzy, Kate, Nikita, Charlotteand Joya in order to differentiate them in the analysis. Thediscussion lasted 1.5 hours at their school and was facilitated by S.Cand M.M. Institutional ethical approval was obtained through theconsent of supervisory authorities at the school and by theinformed consent given by all participants to record and analyzethe focus group. We began the focus group discussion with a 5-minute presentation that described our project about the ‘teenbrain’. To stimulate a vivid discussion about these themes weshowed three short video clips, which in three different waysportrayed adolescent behaviour deemed to be “typical”.

The first clip was from the Harry Enfield UK television comedyabout “Kevin the teenager”, a portrait that has been used in sciencemedia reports about the teenage brain. This satire depicts clichésabout moods and intergenerational conflict during adolescence.The second clip was part of an American science documentaryabout the teenage brain called “Inside the Teenage Brain” producedby Frontline, a PBS program, showing neuroscientists explainingsupposedly adolescent-specific behaviours e conveyed by footageof adolescents skate-boarding without helmets and taking drugs ina nightclub e in terms of the changing brain. The clip containedstate-of-the-art science about developmental plasticity, represen-tative of current science outreachmessages. The third clip was froma short film made by teenagers themselves. The film shows a groupof adolescents replacing posters that spell out negative stereotypesof teenagers with a word that opposes it and connotes a positivecharacteristic. This clip challenges mainstream stereotypes.

The focus group discussion was prompted by questions aboutwhat the girls observed in each of the video clips. For example, inrelation to the second video clip (PBS documentary) interviewerS.C. asked:

Okay can we start by just thinking about the second video, theone with the science of the teen brain. Can anyone [0:03:58],what did you understand about the teenage brain, did you getanything from it, was there anything that you remember fromwhat was going on?

We also allowed the discussion to evolve somewhat organically,allowing space for the girls to respond to one another. Topics

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covered included how it feels to be a teenager, how others viewteenagers, varieties of stereotypes about teenagers, the role ofneuroscience in understanding adolescence and the debates aboutself-control, risk-taking, drugs and mental health.

Data analysis

From the questionnaire, we (S.C., K.M, and M.M.) generateddescriptive statistics for closed questions. We coded the openquestions from themes that emerged from the data. Analyses of thequestionnaires partly informed how we selected the promptingmaterials for the focus group discussion and helped framed thequestions we asked the participants. For example, the question-naire responses indicated that 60% of adolescents had prior expo-sure to “teen brain” science. The second video clip provided directexposure to neuroscientific depictions of the teen brain for thoseparticipants who had not had prior exposure and allowed us todelve deeper into their perceptions and interpretations of theserepresentations. By combining the questionnaire and focus groupdata, certain themes emerged which we then coded, and fromwhich we draw to guide this analysis. In addition, our analysis isshaped by one category that was not an emergent theme per se, butin fact structured our conceptualization of the research, namely, theissue of stereotypes. Because cognitive neuroscience takes as itsstarting point culturally stereotypical characteristics of adolescentsto determine what it is seeking to measure, then discovers thenature of those attributes through the localization of their neuralcorrelates, teenagers’ perceptions of the “teen brain” cannot bediscussed without reference to those very stereotypes. Thus, we areorganizing our analysis around three conceptual domains, the firstof which is informed by an assumed category and the second andthird of which are informed by emergent themes: 1) Beingdifferent: adolescence and negative stereotypes; 2) The teen brain:Responsibility/irresponsibility; and 3) Truths of neuroscience.

Limitations of study

Because this preliminary study is qualitative and limited toacademically high-achieving females at one school in the UK, ourfindings are not representative of all teenagers. We recognize thelimitations of our findings, and allow that additional research couldtake into account, for example, gender, ethnic, racial, or classdifferences. For instance, academically high achieving females mayidentify less with (see Willis, 1977) and resist more stereotypical(and often masculine) representations of teen behaviour. We arecognizant that the content provided to our participants andparameters of this study to a certain extent assume categories, suchas teenager, that we are interrogating.

Being different: adolescence and negative stereotypes

When asked to fill in the following sentence with a few words,“Most people think that teenagers are.” questionnaire responsesfell into the following coded categories: moody, rowdy, rude,criminals, aggressive, violent, annoying, troublesome, and smoke,drink and do drugs. Negative descriptions were overwhelminglyrepresented, accounting for 194 of the 203 words or phrasesprovided. Of the remaining nine, four were coded as neutral andfive as positive. Over 76% of the participants felt they werestereotyped “often” or “a lot,” mostly by the media, followed byteachers, parents and politicians.

When asked about what they recall from prior exposure (if theyhad any) to teen brain material, one girl replied in the question-naire, “stereotypes,” a trope that wends its way through thisdiscussion. We found that participants challenged negative

stereotypes of difference that e as they described in their ownwords e they were “subhuman”; “sub-adults with violence andauthority issues and a dwindling quest for knowledge and educa-tion”; “everything you don’t like in an adult”; and “haven’t a clueabout Mozart”. Instead, they put forward counter-narratives aboutthe importance of their relationships with their friends and familyand their interest in socially-valued activities like schoolwork, artand sports. To the question, “What makes you happy?” approxi-mately 70% of teens listed family and friends. For example, as threerespondents described in their open-ended responses:

Spending time with my mother.When my friends and family are happy.Family and friends. It is important to have these strongrelationships.

And nearly all responded in their own words with answers thatindicated pleasure in hard work and achievement:

Getting involved with youth clubs is also satisfying.Playing tennis well, getting good results in tests.Success in school, well-accomplished homework.Playing piano/violin.

The media, some girls said, highlighted teenage crime andviolence making it seem that these behaviours characterizedadolescents as a whole, which participants considered to be inac-curate and “unfair.” Izzy, a focus group participant, challengedgeneralizations about teenagers during a discussion that emergedas a response to the second video clip:

It’s just a small amount of kids who are carrying knives butthey’re going to make people think, ‘oh if one in ten kids arecarrying knives and there’s a hundred kids on this bus, then tenof themmight be carrying knives so you have to be wary of whoyou might talk to and who you might look at on the bus’.

The concern expressed by participants about stereotypicalportrayals of teenagers extended to the domain of science. Duringthe discussion about stereotypes, participants challenged video clip#2, which showed neuroscientists explaining teen behaviours ina science documentary about the teenage brain:

S.C.: Did you get any sense of how those scientists in the videoviewed teenagers? We’ve talked about your teachers and we’vetalked about parents and people on the bus and so on, whatabout the scientists?Kate: I guess they’re trying to help, but it wasn’t a very balancedview, they didn’t show any teenagers whowere reading or doingtheir homework.S.C.: Okay, anyone else? I know it was just a short clip, but didanyone else have any thoughts about what they showed?Joya: I thought what they were trying to, they did show it’sa very difficult thing being teenagers, like all the parties. But Itend to agree with you on that, my view on that. Skateboardingand drinking isn’t really what I do the whole time.

Participants’ acute sensitivity to stereotypes and to homogeni-zation extended to the third video clip they viewed during the focusgroup, the one in which teens themselves held up placards withwords that negated or reversed stereotypes. Kate remarked,

At the same time they were still kind of having stereotypes,‘cause they say you will become a party animal or the straight Astudent, I think you can like to party and be a straight A student.

Thus, not only did participants not feel like a “different” pop-ulation and disagree with societal stereotypes about them, but theydid not want to be lumped all together.

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The teen brain: responsibility/irresponsibility

In terms of the “teen brain,” roughly 40% of the 85 participantssurveyed reported no familiarity with the concept, while 60% re-ported some kind of exposure to it (e.g., through reading or tele-vision). Of those who had heard about the neuroscience ofadolescence, several (from both questionnaire and focus group)indicated it was “boring.” Overall, we found that the teens’ expla-nations of adolescent behaviours and of mental health issues didnot tend to incorporate the brain and with the exception ofhormones, did not incorporate biology in general, an interestingfinding that wewill address later in the discussion. Rather, themostsalient explanations among adolescents were those in the personal,familial and social realm, and they showed a commitment to thenotion of behaviours (including psychopathy) being shaped byexperience. For example, when asked in the questionnaire whya fictional teenager “Tom” is behaving moodily, the top ratedexplanation was the one that associated his behaviour with thedifficulties of teenage life, with 86.9% of the respondents rating thisexplanation as “quite good” or “good” (Fig. 1).

The second highest rating, with 78.5%, described Tom’s behav-iour in terms of hormonal changes while, the third, “Parents don’talways understand their children”, was rated by 73.8% as “quitegood” or “good”. The three lowest ranked explanations were bio-logical: 60.3% thought of brain development as “quite good”/“good”followed by evolutionary biology (50.6%) and a neurochemicalexplanation (25.9%).

Whenwe presented video clip #2 to the focus group inwhich anMRI scan was used to explain the limits of teenage self-responsibility and the capacity to make reasonable decisions

ExplanationTeenage life: Teenage life can be complicated and difficult and it's not easy to talk about it.

Hormones: Tom is a teenager and so his hormones make him moody.

Parents: Parents don't always understand their children.

Brain plasticity: Tom's synapses and myelin in his brain are ''under construction'' and not yet mature.

Evolution: Tom's moody behaviour is a necessary step of all human and animals becoming independent of their parents.

Neurochemicals: Tom doesn't have enough of the chemicals (e.g. serotonin) in his brain that can make him happy.

0%

25%

50%

75%

100%

86.9%

78.5%

64.8%60.3%

50.6%

25.9%

Fig. 1. Question: Tom is 14 years old. His mum says that he gets in a bad mood veryeasily and very often, and she can’t understand why. What is the best reason for hismoody behaviour? Please rate how good each of the following explanations are! fill ina rating number on the line to the right of each explanation. Respondents rated each ofsix explanations (that were personal, social, or biological) for how well they explainedTom’s behaviour. Each explanation was rated on a scale of very good to bad, and thetotal percentage of responses for good (including good and very good) explanationswere compared.

about risks, participants expressed confusion about how adults(including scientists) construe maturation as both a limiting factorto reasonable behaviour and an excuse for unreasonable behaviour.Using daily life examples, participants expressed frustration withthe manner in which adults e including teachers eexpected themto behave “better” simply because they had advanced in age toteenhood. At the same time, participants reported that some ofthese adult authority figures treated the teens “very badly,” had lowexpectations for teenage behaviour driven by negative stereotypes,and that the participants were “treated worse” than when theywere younger. In a short interchange about how teens are treateddifferently from children, Izzy said,

We are treated differently.’cause we’re teenagers now.

When asked for an example, Angela said, “like at school withteachers.” She explained:

I think, they think that now we’re almost adults and we shouldbe a certain way, but they want to show that they still havepower over us. They’re just, because they expect one of us to dosomething bad they don’t trust us and some teachers havecontrol over us and treat us very badly.

On the one hand, adolescents receive the message that theymust take more personal responsibility for their behaviour, whileon the other, teens believe opportunities for assuming greater self-responsibility are not offered because of the perception that teensare irresponsible. Participants communicated the desire to possessgreater autonomy and freedom that would allow them to maketheir own decisions and to learn from their own experiences, whilethey also desired to assume greater responsibility and beaccountable for whatever mistakes theymight make along the way.When asked for opinions about footage of scientists explainingteenage propensities for drug-taking and skate-boarding withouta helmet in terms of ongoing prefrontal brain development, thediscussion developed to include this remark from Emily:

Perhaps only because adults might have the experience, like, ifthey had a bad situation from what they did when they wereteenagers, but we’ve not had any bad experiences with it, thenwe might think, ‘Oh you never know. Let’s do this, nothing badhas happened tome thus far.’ Butwhenyou get to thirty-five youthink, ‘I remember when I was eighteen and that happened tome.that was really stupid.’ Butwe don’t knowat our agewhat’sgoing to happen. We do it and then find out it’s bad.

Several focus group participants wondered if the way adultstreat adolescents (“I think they treat us a bit like we are stupid”remarked Nikita) in fact had the effect of creating the teen behav-iour adults problematized. As Angela said:

I think this means that they influence how we behave, notnecessarily ’cause we’re a teenager now. Maybe they should juststart thinking about how they treat us and it would make ustreat them differently as well.

And in another instance, when S.C asked what is the differencebetween teachers they get along with and those who try to controlthem, Charlotte said.

Some teachers give us respect. And we tend to respect themback

with Joya and Nikita in agreement (“Yeah”).

These conversations pointed to the way in which many partici-pants located responsibility in interpersonal behavioural realms, notthe neurological. In this sense, participants viewed their behaviourless as a product of neural plasticity and more as a social dynamic

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between themselves and adults, one in which some adults wereperceived as unaware of their role and responsibilities in shapingteen behaviour.

Moreover, many teenagers commented that they “wouldn’t take[the brain] as an excuse” for their behaviours. Again, an examplefrom Emily:It’s not that you can say, oh it’s not my fault, it’s my brain. Youshould be taking it into your hands rather than saying ‘I can’thelp it’.

As such, the brain did not, for some of the adolescents, providea neural substrate of “moral innocence” upon which their behav-iour could be explained and judged (Ortega 2009) nor was it anentirely adequate or accurate explanation for behaviour oraccountability.

Truths of neuroscience

Participantsexpresseduncertaintyabout themotivationof adultswho produce the neuroscience on the teen brain and the purpose ofthe research. When asked in the focus group what they thought thescientists’ perspectives were in the Frontline video, Joya responded:

I get a sense that they are trying to help.

but Angela added,

I don’t know what they are doing really.perhaps it wouldn’treally help us.

In spite of some hesitancy in fully endorsing the “teen brain”model, over77%ofquestionnaire respondents thought it important toknow about the processes of the brain in adolescents. Of those teens,themajority believedneuroscience couldenhancean “understandingof teenagers” and/or help society to “avoid stereotypes.” They thussimultaneously perceived neuroscience’s potential to perpetuatestereotypes and neuroscience’s capacity to provide insights intoa reality about adolescence that can dispel those stereotypes.

When asked in what ways neuroscience could be helpful,participants answered in the questionnaire:

Teenagers are often misunderstood, and it might be helpful ifpeople knew how they think, see their point of view.It will help defeat stereotypes and help justify things teenagersdo commonly.Then people know how teenagers are and it would be easier forthem to understand teenagers.Then you can have a more overall idea of how people aredifferent, and not every teenager is the same.

And in the focus group, Charlotte spoke to how teen brainscience could be helpful:

It might help them (parents) cause like my parents would gookay, so basically you’re telling me that they (teens) are going toget annoyed about things like respect[ing] rules.

These participants believed that the brain science of adoles-cence could create new and needed opportunities for adults toobtain insights and understanding into teen behaviour without theusual load of moral judgment and stereotyping. They also thought itcould provide both understandings about them as a group anddifferentiate them as individuals. Remarkably, however, none of theparticipants said that neuroscience could offer insights or expla-nations that would actually benefit their own self-understanding orbehaviour. All responses pointed to how the neuroscience couldhelp adults, especially parents, understand teens better, whichcould benefit them in turn.

While the scientific information presented to the focus groupdepicted teen brain development as a basis or deep truth behindteen behaviours, participants tended to challenge the notion of thebrain as an ultimate explanation. For instance, when presentedwithmaterial about how the teen brain is especially driven to bingedrink, Aarti in the focus group rather impatiently remarked, “Iwould have avoided it (alcohol) anyway” implying that she hadmore agency than the teen brain model suggested. Several times,we found that participants reinserted their agency and responsi-bility into the teen brain picture:

S.C: Yeah, so you’re saying that even if it’s in the brain you stillhave to.Nikita: I think our parents know that but theywouldn’t take thatas an excuse, they’d just say you have to try harder to dosomething.

Many teens also thought that their behaviour was part ofa developmental process, that experimenting or trying new things,even if harmful, were simply part of learning and growing up, andthe teen brain model added no new insights into what was alreadysimple to explain. Angela elaborated on this:

I think it’s just alright to try everything. It’s like when you werea toddler and like you eat mud sort of thing, because you don’tknow what it tastes like so you want to try it. ..okay this is a badthing, and now I know it’s a bad thing and you’re not going to doit, cause I wouldn’t eat mud now because I had it before.withsmoking, I think I might smoke because I might like it, I mightnot, but then I will know so I wouldn’t want do it again.

For others, biological explanations did have a legitimate role toplay in explaining adolescent behaviour:

Kate: Also if there is a tendency, it’s not just the brain, it’s thebrains of a family as well, so it’s hereditary, so if like the parentsare quite heavy drinkers it is not just because the child wasbrought in that circumstance there.

Again, as with the brain, genetics could not sufficiently explainor account for adolescent behaviour. Teens insisted that behaviouris determined by factors in multiple domains, and for the most partsocial and psychological narratives dominated but did not excludebiological ones.

S.C.: But then what about like. if you’re a psychopath as inthose articles, where they say they can show it in the brain?Joya: Generally people who are psychopaths, they. Somethinghas happened to make them that way, like they might haveexperienced something.

Twenty-three percent of questionnaire respondents did notagree it was important to know about the processes in the brains ofteenagers. Some stated, consistent with fears about negative ster-eotyping, that scientific activity “would just lead to more stereo-typing.” Others worried that:

It is their own brain and it is not very nice to ask teenagers abouttheir personal matters.They are just humans. Do we want to see into adult brains? Sowhy teenage brains?Although some people may find it useful it alienates teenagersand makes us feel unimportant or an experiment.

These words convey the sense that teen brain science is intru-sive and unseemly, makes teenagers into oddities and alienatesthem, and underscores their relative powerlessness (Karp, 2006). Itis plausible that teens would feel apprehensive about any scientificendeavour that makes them into experimental objects of knowl-edge, but the first two quotations suggest that there may be

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something particular about cognitive neuroscience–that brainimaging penetrates and exposes intimate aspects of the teen self. Inany case, without a clear sense that knowledge of the teen brainwas personally important or that it could demonstrably improvetheir lives, neuroscience’s teen brain project was potentially moreharmful than helpful in the eyes of some of the participants.

Discussion

As adolescent mental health is increasingly becoming a highpriority in US and UK public health, funding bodies emphasize thatthese research programs must include a component of publicoutreach concerned with communicating findings to the various“stakeholders”. Adolescents have in this way become a new targetgroup to engage in the science of the developing brain. Part of therationale is to teach young people about the biological evidencewith which they can develop a kind of “neurologic prudence”:a responsibility for their choices and actions that takes into accountthe limits and potentials of their cognitive capacities and the healthof their brains.

Social scientists have suggested that such dissemination ofneurological theories, treatments and policies is contributing to theemergence of a new ‘folk neurology’ e vocabularies of personhoodthat use descriptions of synapses, neurochemicals, brain regions orcortical activity to conceptualize one’s own emotional, social andclinical experiences or to relate them to other people (Vrecko,2006). Brain chemistry, for example, has been integral to neuro-science research programmes for nearly forty years, and hasimpacted on psychiatric theories and interventions for at least twodecades. As such, descriptions of serotonergic or dopaminergictransmission have entered common sense vocabularies aboutillness and mental states in Western contexts (Karp, 2006). More-over, it has been argued that we have entered the age of neuro-chemical selfhood, suggesting therefore that our self-understandings and identities are, through these developments,both transforming and making them possible (Rose, 2003).

Several psychiatrically stigmatized groups have embraced andappropriated varieties of neuroscience constructs for their ownidentity-making and social movement projects. For instance,people diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, as Ortega (2009) hasdocumented, may refer to themselves affectionately as “aspies” and“neurodivergents”, and to neurologically “normal” people as“neurotypicals”. Given the impressive media attention, publicengagement activities and policy interest in teenage brain devel-opment in the UK, one might guess that teenagers, too, wouldexpress evidence of adopting these vocabularies into their ownself-understandings. However, our empirical study, modest inscope as it is, suggests otherwise. Our findings indicate that themodel of the teen brain is seen as inadequate to explain behaviour,or resisted by teenagers when they are presented with neuro-adolescent materials, and that social and psychological determi-nants have much more salience for understanding and explainingtheir behaviour. In fact, none of our participants appropriated‘neurotalk’ or descriptions of cortical plasticity (to which they wereexposed) into their own understanding of their own behaviour. Thisfinding is consistent with research conducted in Canada, in whichadolescents taking psychiatric medications did not give neuro-chemical explanations of their distress the primacy in their self-understandings that many social commentators would lead us topredict (McKinney, Choudhury, & Kirmayer, unpublished).However, our data also showed that in spite of the perceivedinaccuracies of the “teen brain”, adolescents felt that more neuro-scientific research on adolescence is necessary and carries impor-tant potential to better understand teenagers.

Existing research has suggested that morally loaded personalexplanations (e.g. “I’m an alcoholic”) are replaced by neurologicalexplanations (e.g. “I’m endorphin challenged”) (Vrecko, 2006 p.303) because they de-stigmatize and “de-responsibilize”. In thecase of adolescents however, the brain was not seen as thefundamental explanation for teenage behaviour. In response toa questionnaire item about a mother’s concern for fictional teen,Tom, social explanations referring to the difficulty of teenage lifeand the generation gap between parents and their children wereboth rated highly relative to the biological explanations (neuro-plasticity, neurochemicals, and evolution, with the exception ofhormones). This may be explained by a reified boundary betweenthe brain and its context inherent to plastic reason about teenbrains. The “context” is discussed either in terms of special envi-ronments that can modulate brain structure or activity (Doidge,2007) or as stressors that will activate risk of certain diseases(Lakoff, 2005). Excluded from the expanding literature on therepertoire of environmental inputs to deal with the normaldeveloping brain however, is everyday adult behaviour, not leastits role in co-producing or sustaining certain kinds of behaviours.Participants in our study referred to teenage behaviours in rela-tional terms, consistently pulling adult behaviour back into thepicture, as a significant constituent of the context of their ownbehaviours.

Interestingly, the response data for this question demonstratedthat teens preferred the ‘old’ hormone paradigm over the ‘new’

brain one. However, hormones were not discussed in open-endedquestions or in the focus group. This finding raises empirical andtheoretical questions warranting future exploration. First, if weagree that biological explanations are already deeply embedded infolk theories about teen behaviour, is it possible that with time theneuro-explanation will supplant the hormonal one or that theincreasing biologization of behaviour will catapult it to higherstatus? Secondly, our data suggests that the hormonemodel residesin an assumed and implicit understanding of teen behaviour, andwith prompting, can be readily recognized and articulated, but isnot the favoured one teens prefer in framing issues of moralengagement and social responsibility. While it is possible thatrespondents preferred the more familiar and less “technical”hormonal explanation relative to the brain development option,the language of the brain development explanation would havebeen accessible to the respondents who had studied basic scienceabout the nervous system by this point in their school career.Furthermore, previous findings from a questionnaire study havedemonstrated that respondents opt for complex, technical expla-nations that involve the brain even if these explanations are poorerthan those that do not refer to the brain (Weisberg et al, 2008).Further study could reveal under what conditions different expla-nations are rhetorically deployed or privileged over others, andtheir social indexicality.

The participants’ challenge to neuroscience on the one hand andthe belief in it on the other force us to examine more closely whatmay be liberating and what may be limiting about the metaphor ofthe teen brain for teenagers. Teenage participants involved in thisstudy in a sense positioned themselves “between truth and hope”(Moreira & Palladino, 2005). For them, neuroscience had thepotential to defeat stereotypes, to de-homogenize them as a group,and to present a scientific and de-stigmatizing picture of who theyreally are “from [their] point of view”. To the extent that the teenbrain could change the perspective and behaviours of those aroundthem, especially adults, teens could benefit. Presumably, this wouldallow them to be less objectified and oppressed in their socialworlds, indirectly enabling them to have more agency. At the sametime, however, our sample also expressed contradictory reserva-tions about the metaphor, indicating that blaming the brain took

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away their full moral agency, erased their individuality and reducedthe complexity of their experience and desires. Moreover, theteenage behaviours that neuroscientists explained misrepresentedadolescence, using the model of the teen brain to explain, but at thesame time reinforce, the “unbalanced“ “negative stereotype” ofteenagers in society.

The recent efforts in public engagement in neuroscience activ-ities are frequently heralded as empowering, and characterised bya future-oriented discourse of promises to uncover facts that willenable understanding of the self and awareness about how to livein accordancewith these discoveries of the brain (Hartmann, 2011).Notions of enlightenment and personal responsibility permeate themessages about the adolescent brain in popular accounts e at lastwe know why; so we should or shouldn’t do. Furthermore, efforts toeducate lay audiences about the adolescent brain are frequentlywritten to promote evidence-based compassionate, de-stigmatising treatment of teenagers in the law, in schools, or athome. However, as we have shown, teens may not readily adoptthese discourses into their own self-understandings, and theresponsibilizing project of neuro-selfhood that is currently beingpromoted may not be so readily realized.

Since the early 1900s with psychologist G. Stanley Hall’s nowlegendary description of adolescent “storm and stress” (Hall, 1904),Western psychology has viewed and intervened upon teenagers asboth vulnerable and dangerous. Although contemporary develop-mental psychologists have attempted to modify the “storm andstress” model taking into account individual and cultural variation(Arnett, 1999), representations of current neuroscience of adoles-cence e among journalists, doctors, teachers, parents and someneuroscientists e is continuous with this historical tradition.Although neuroscience is moving in the direction of interactionaldiscourses that acknowledge individual differences (such asculture, environment, genetics) fitting with the logic of riskprediction, the model of the teen brain available to young people isunderstood to lump teens together through the depiction ofa distinctive brain in relation to other age groups. It is important tostress however that actual neuroscience research does not simplyequate brain development with inevitability of adolescent stress;while this “depth ontology” (Rose, 2007: p. 130), is over-represented in public media, neuroscientists increasingly employexplanatory schemas that emphasize interactions within thebrain’s many networks and between genetics, the brain and theenvironment, and the consequent individual variation (Pickersgill,2009). Nonetheless, the model of the “teen brain”, as communi-cated to young people, lacks this complexity, and while inscribedwith a construct of adolescence that is heavily gendered andracialized, persists to present teens as universally adrift on turbu-lent seas, and in need of adult direction and guidance (Hirsch, 1993;Lesko, 2000). To what extent the characteristics of our sampledetermined the challenge to this stereotype of turbulence remainsto be explored: male teenagers or those closer in behaviour to theteens typified by the presented videos may be motivated torespond differently to the “teen brain”.

Neuroplasticity as a way to interpret behaviour and anticipatefutures seems to offer a sense of possibility, in contrast to rigiddeterminations of personhood that have been associated with thelocalization logic of the fixed and static brain (Rees, 2010).Certainly, explanations of the dynamic brain that can alter its owndevelopment in response to inputs from the environment, that canbe optimized and that can explain susceptibilities to, or protectitself from, mental illness have fuelled an expanding genre ofpopular science that explains recovery from diseases such asstroke, or substantiates self-help manuals, with (versions of)evidence from neuroscience. Popular literatures about theadolescent brain promote a whole range of ways to manipulate,

boost or alter the environment of the growing adolescent brain soas to nurture it, optimize it or protect it, such as novel forms ofeducation (Clavier, 2005; Healy, 2004). Adolescents interviewedhere, however, did not take up the language of plasticity to makesense of their thoughts and actions, in spite of their exposure tothe concept.

The plastic brain that is unprepared for the complexities of theadolescent social world, may not be an empowering way forteenagers to talk about teen identity, not simply because it rein-forces unwanted stereotypes but because the model threatens theiragency and responsibility, providing a scientific basis to prolong themoratorium before adulthood. The motto “blame the brain”echoing through various outreach literatures reflects neurosci-ence’s role in confronting existing cultural contradictions betweenadolescent immaturity and criminal responsibility. For example,neuroscientific data related to cognitive control formed part of theevidence provided to the US Supreme Court prior to the 2005decision to overturn the death penalty for criminals under the ageof 18. While the potential for neuroscience to be used for mens rearemains controversial, (Maroney, 2009), neuroscientists argue thatteen brain development is itself a mitigating factor that shouldreduce culpability e not only in relation to criminal offences butalso in making sense of harmful or poor personal decisions. But ina more everyday health policy sense, youth-geared scientificengagement simultaneously aims to “responsibilize” individuals byteaching them how to treat their brains well and optimize theirfunction. As such, while diminishing their capacity for self-responsibility, it also encumbers them with the responsibility toknow andmanage the implications of their plastic brains. However,the developmental stage of teenagers places them as passivesubjects of this neuroscientific expertise, lacking in the socialpower to make active choices based on this knowledge, other thanin choosing not to do certain things (e.g. drinking alcohol, havingsex). In this way, neuroscience ultimately reproduces the contra-dictions of adolescent immaturity and responsibility.

Our findings lead us to suggest that further ethnographic studiesof lay interpretations of neuroscience can highlight a diversepicture among groups being defined by neuroscience. Contrary tothe expectation that neuroscience must be transforming self-understanding, closer analysis may reveal instances of resistance.Ambivalence, such as that demonstrated by adolescents, also raisesquestions for public outreach. If engagement in science is meant tomake room for lay participation in science-based policy-making(Kerr et al., 1998), these instances of resistance and ambivalenceforce us to examine the categories that are operationalized inneuroscience, often categories ascribed to the epistemic objects e

in this case, it is adults’ conceptions of what the adolescent life-world entails that become reified through neuroimaging experi-ments. One question that remains to be explored, then, is to whatextent such participation can open up new research questions andchallenge existing categories.

Acknowledgements

We thank the Year 9 students for participating in the focusgroup, and the school for facilitating the study. We also gratefullyacknowledge the Minerva Program of the Max Planck Society forfunding this research.

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