Sleep
Many teenagers stay up late. Even on school nights, teens may remain awake long into the night doing homework, playing video games, or calling their friends. But teens’ inclination to go to bed late is not fully due to carelessness or immaturity, rather there are real biological factors that affect their ability to feel sleepy. Science shows that teenagers have a delayed release of melatonin, the hormone that influences feeling tired, and almost all adolescent brains just begin releasing melatonin around 11 p.m. Additionally, the secretion of melatonin does not stop until about 8 a.m., which explains why many teens also find it very difficult to wake up early. As with adults, bright lights from cellphones or consuming caffeine before bed will make falling asleep more difficult, but the reason why teens stay up late is greatly influenced by their brain’s later release of melatonin.
Memory
While it can be frustrating not to remember small details, such as the name of a show you watched or the restaurant you wanted to visit, the brain will purposefully expel certain information to create room for more valuable memories, especially during childhood and adolescence. Synaptic pruning is the brain’s natural process of removing unused neural connections; essentially, information that is stored in the brain but not being used will be forgotten. Synaptic pruning happens throughout your entire life, but it is most intense during early childhood until about 18 years of age. Without this function, children would not be able to absorb nearly as much information as they are able to; their brains would be filled with less important ideas, such as what they ate for breakfast every day for the past two weeks or what color socks they wore, and thus leave no room for learning new things. Synaptic pruning also plays a vital role in building habits and solidifying educational concepts. Habits and memories can be built all throughout life, but during childhood and adolescence, when synaptic pruning is at its peak, that is the age range where the saying “use it or lose it” really applies. Any pathways of information that are not being used will be expelled. However, new information is more likely to “stick” in children’s brains due to the rapid growth of neural connections, if that new information is consistently reinforced.
The Changing Teenage Brain:
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Sleep, Memory, and Impulsivity
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By Mia Koshefsky