Osher Lifelong Learning Institute
The Amazing Teen Brain
Speaker
Professor Jay N. Giedd, MD
Coordinator
William Reiner
Adolescence is a time of dramatic changes in body, brain, and behavior. The prolonged maturation of humans, far longer than any other species, creates paradoxical adolescent profiles where the time of peaks in physical health, strength, speed, agility, immunity, and resistance to physical ailments coincides with a 300% increase in morbidity and mortality. A time of intense passions, convictions, and identify formation coincides with reckless and often puzzling behavior. And a time when great leaps in cognitive, emotional, and social abilities coincides with the emergence of 70% of all mental illness. The adolescent brain is not a broken or defective adult brain. It has been exquisitely forged by the forces of our evolutionary history to have different features compared to the brains of children or adults. The same neurobiological phenomena that underlie the positive aspects of adolescence also underlie the negative aspects making adolescence a time of vulnerability but also of great opportunity. This lecture will discuss adolescence with an emphasis on the fundamental neurobiological processes and the impacts of education, male/female differences, and interaction with digital technologies (including social media).
Speaker Bio
Jay Giedd is the Director, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at UC San Diego Health. A prominent theme of his research has been to combine brain imagining, genetics and cognitive/behavioral/environmental measures to explore the path, mechanisms, and influences on brain development in health and illness across the lifespan . He was previously Chief of Brain Imaging at the Child Psychiatry Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health (1991-2014). and then as a Co-Principal Investigator of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study at the University of California San Diego. The ABCD study is a 21-site longitudinal study of 11,875 youth followed across the second decade of life. He received his medical degree from the Univesity of North Dakota.
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