The Adolescent Brain

Teenagers

Trayvon Benjamin Martin was a teen ager when he was shot through the heart and died at the age of 17 years and 21 days.

Ye Mengyuan was a 16-year-old teenager when she died.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is 19 years old.

Two of these teenagers are dead.  Without doubt, Ye Mengyuan is the most “innocent.”

Henry Kissinger supposedly said, “Just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean people aren’t out to get you.”  Just because you are a teenager doesn’t mean you were misbehaving.  Ye Mengyuan was not.  Where is justice for her?

“Beautiful Brains” by David Dobbs in the Best American Science and Nature Writings in 2012 available as an e-book from Amazon explains the baffling phenomena of teen brain development.

The first full series of scans of the developing adolescent brain – a National Institutes of Health (NIH) project that studied over a hundred young people as they grew up in the 1990s—showed that our brains undergo a massive reorganization between our twelfth and twenty-fifth years.  The brain doesn’t actually grow very much during this period.  It has already reached 90 percent of its full size by the time a person is six, and a thickening skull accounts for most head growth afterward.  But as we move through adolescence, the brain undergoes extensive remodeling, into the resembling a network and wiring upgrade.

Dobbs says that the teens desire for thrills peaks at 16.  Dobbs differs with the “work in progress” view of adolescent and writes:

The resulting account of the adolescent brain –call it the adaptive-adolescent story—casts the teen less as a rough draft than as an exquisitely sensitive, highly adaptable creature wired almost perfectly for the job of moving from the safety of home into the complicated world outside.

Presented with the circumstances of February 2012, Trayvon may have yielded to teen thrill seeking tendencies.

Dzhokhar's behavior is consistent with thrill seeking.  Ye Mengyuan’s thrill seeking was to come to the United States of America as a 16 year old girl.