Teenage Brain Development

In adults, various parts of the brain work together to evaluate choices, make decisions and act
accordingly in each situation. The teenage brain doesn't appear to work like this. For comparison's
sake, think of the teenage brain as an entertainment center that hasn't been fully hooked up. There
are loose wires, so that the speaker system isn't working with the DVDplayer, which in turn hasn't
been formatted to work with thetelevision yet. And to top it all off, the remote control hasn't even
arrived!
The brain's remote control is the prefrontal cortex, a section of the brain that weighs outcomes,
forms judgments and controls impulses and emotions. This section of the brain also helps people
understand one another. If you were to walk into a sports bar full of Lakers fans wearing a Celtics
jersey, your prefrontal cortex would immediately begin firing in warning; those teams are bitter
enemies, and it might serve you to change your behavior (and your clothes). The prefrontal cortex
communicates with the other sections of the brain through connections called synapses. These are
like the wires of the entertainment system.
What scientists have found is that teenagers experience a wealth of growth in synapses during
adolescence. But if you've ever hooked up an entertainment center, you know that more wires means
more problems. You tend to keep the components you use the most, while getting rid of something
superfluous, like an out-of-date laserdisc player. The brain works the same way, because it starts
pruning away the synapses that it doesn't need in order to make the remaining ones much more
efficient in communicating. In teenagers, it seems that this process starts in the back of the brain and
moves forward, so that the prefrontal cortex, that vital center of control, is the last to be trimmed. As
the connections are trimmed down, an insulating substance called myelin coats the synapses to
protect them.
As such, the prefrontal cortex is a little immature in teenagers as compared to adults; it may not fully
develop until your mid-20s [source: Kotulak]. And if you don't have a remote control to call the shots in
the brain, using the other brain structures can become more difficult. Imaging studies have shown that
most of the mental energy that teenagers use in making decisions is located in the back of the brain,
whereas adults do most of their processing in the frontal lobe [source: Wallis]. When teenagers do
use the frontal lobe, it seems they overdo it, calling upon much more of the brain to get the job done
than adults would [source: Powell]. And because adults have already refined those communicating
synapses, they can make decisions more quickly.
Adult brains are also better wired to notice errors in decision-making. While adults performed tasks
that required the quick response of pushing buttons, their brains sent out a signal when a hasty
mistake was made. Before 80 milliseconds had passed, adult brains had noticed the blunder, but
teenage brains didn't notice any slip-up [source: Monastersky].
An area of the teenager's brain that is fairly well-developed early on, though, is the nucleus
accumbens, or the area of the brain that seeks pleasure and reward. In imaging studies that
compared brain activity when the subject received a small, medium or large reward, teenagers
exhibited exaggerated responses to medium and large rewards compared to children and adults
[source: Powell]. When presented with a small reward, the teenagers' brains hardly fired at all in
comparison to adults and children.
So what does it mean to have an undeveloped prefrontal cortex in conjunction with a strong desire for
reward? As it happens, this combination could explain a lot of stereotypical teenage behavior.

Would Astronauts Survive an Interstellar Trip

Through a Wormhole?
Well, it depends on your definition of "wormhole"
In the space opera Interstellar, astronauts seeking to save humanity have found a
lifeline: a wormhole that has mysteriously appeared next to Saturn. The tunnel
through spacetime leads to a distant galaxy and the chance to find habitable planets
that humans can colonize. The movie's wormhole is based on real physics from
retired CalTech professor Kip Thorne, an astrophysics pioneer who also helped Carl
Sagan design his wormhole for the novel Contact. The visualizations are stunning
and are being hailed as some of the most accurate simulations of wormholes and
black holes in film. But there is one aspect of plunging into an interstellar express
that the film doesn't address: How do you survive the trip? Although they didn't call it
such, the original wormhole was the brainchild of Albert Einstein and his assistant
Nathan Rosen. They were trying to solve Einstein's equations for general relativity in
a way that would ultimately lead to a purely mathematical model of the entire
universe, including gravity and the particles that make up matter. Their attempt
involved describing space as two geometric sheets connected by "bridges," which
we perceive as particles.
Another physicist, Ludwig Flamm, had independently discovered such bridges in
1916 in his solution to Einstein's equations. Unfortunately for all of them, this "theory
of everything" didn't work out, because the theoretical bridges did not ultimately
behave like real particles. But Einstein and Rosen's 1935 paper popularized the
concept of a tunnel through the fabric of spacetime and got other physicists thinking
seriously about the implications.
Princeton physicist John Wheeler coined the term "wormhole" in the 1960s when he
was exploring the models of Einstein-Rosen bridges. He noted that the bridges are
akin to the holes that worms bore through apples. An ant crawling from one side of
the apple to another can either plod all the way around its curved surface, or take a
shortcut through the worm's tunnel. Now imagine our three-dimensional spacetime is
the skin of an apple that curves around a higher dimension called "the bulk." An
Einstein-Rosen bridge is a tunnel through the bulk that lets travelers take a fast lane
between two points in space. It sounds strange, but it is a legit mathematical solution
to general relativity.
Wheeler realized that the mouths of Einstein-Rosen bridges handily match
descriptions of what's known as a Schwarzschild black hole, a simple sphere of
matter so dense that not even light can escape its gravitational pull. Ah-ha!
Astronomers believe that black holes exist and are formed when the cores of
exceedingly massive stars collapse in on themselves. So could black holes also be
wormholes and thus gateways to interstellar travel? Mathematically speaking, maybe
but no one would survive the trip.
In the Schwarzschild model, the dark heart of a black hole is a singularity, a neutral,
unmoving sphere with infinite density. Wheeler calculated what would happen if a
wormhole is born when two singularities in far-flung parts of the universe merge in
the bulk, creating a tunnel between Schwarzschild black holes. He found that such a
wormhole is inherently unstable: the tunnel forms, but then it contracts and pinches
off, leaving you once more with just two singularities. This process of growth and

contraction happens so fast that not even light makes it through the tunnel, and an
astronaut trying to pass through would encounter a singularity. That's sudden death,
as the immense gravitational forces would rip the traveler apart.
"Anything or anyone that attempts the trip will get destroyed in the pinch-off!" Thorne
writes in his companion book to the movie, The Science of Interstellar.
There is an alternative: a rotating Kerr black hole, which is another possibility
in general relativity. The singularity inside a Kerr black hole is a ring as opposed to a
sphere, and some models suggest that a person could survive the trip if they pass
neatly through the center of this ring like a basketball through a hoop. Thorne,
however, has a number of objections to this notion. In a 1987 paper about travel via
wormhole, he notes that the throat of a Kerr wormhole contains a region called a
Cauchy horizon that is very unstable. The math says that as soon as anything, even
light, tries to pass this horizon, the tunnel collapses. Even if the wormhole could
somehow be stabilized, quantum theory tells us that the inside should be flooded
with high-energy particles. Set foot in a Kerr wormhole, and you will be fried to a
crisp.
The trick is that physics has yet to marry the classical rules of gravity with the
quantum world, an elusive bit of mathematics that many researchers are trying to pin
down. In one twist on the picture, Juan Maldacena at Princeton and Leonard
Susskind at Stanford proposed that wormholes may be like the physical
manifestations of entanglement, when quantum objects are linked no matter how far
apart they are.
Einstein famously described entanglement as "spooky action at a distance" and
resisted the notion. But plenty of experiments tell us that entanglement is realit's
already being used commercially to protect online communications, such as bank
transactions. According to Maldacena and Susskind, large amounts on entanglement
change the geometry of spacetime and can give rise to wormholes in the form
of entangled black holes. But their version is no interstellar gateway.
"They are wormholes which do not allow you to travel faster than light," says
Maldacena. "However, they can allow you to meet somebody inside, with the small
caveat that they would both then die at a gravitational singularity."
OK, so black holes are a problem. What, then, can a wormhole possibly be? Avi
Loeb at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics says our options are wide
open: "Since we do not yet have a theory that reliably unifies general relativity with
quantum mechanics, we do not know of the entire zoo of possible spacetime
structures that could accommodate wormholes." There's still a hitch. Thorne found in
his 1987 work that any type of wormhole that is consistent with general relativity will
collapse unless it is propped open by what he calls "exotic matter" with negative
energy. He argues that we have evidence of exotic matter thanks to experiments
showing how quantum fluctuations in a vacuum seem to create negative
pressure between two mirrors placed very close together. And Loeb thinks our
observations of dark energy are further hints that exotic matter may exist.
"We observe that over recent cosmic history, galaxies have been running away from
us at a speed that increases with time, as if they were acted upon by repulsive

gravity," says Loeb. "This accelerated expansion of the universe can be explained if
the universe is filled with a substance that has a negative pressure just like the
material needed to create a wormhole." Both physicists agree, though, that you'd
need too much exotic matter for a wormhole to ever form naturally, and only a highly
advanced civilization could ever hope to gather enough of the stuff to stabilize a
wormhole.
But other physicists are not convinced. "I think that a stable, traversable wormhole
would be very confusing and seems inconsistent with the laws of physics that we
know," says Maldacena. Sabine Hossenfelder at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical
Physics in Sweden is even more skeptical: "We have absolutely zero indication that
this exists. Indeed it is widely believed that it cannot exist, for if it did the vacuum
would be unstable." Even if exotic matter was available, traveling through it may not
be pretty. The exact effects would depend on the curvature of spacetime around the
wormhole and the density of the energy inside, she says. "It is pretty much as with
black holes: too much tidal forces and you get ripped apart."
Despite his ties to the film, Thorne is also pessimistic that a traversable wormhole is
even possible, much less survivable. "If they can exist, I doubt very much that they
can form naturally in the astrophysical universe," he writes in the book. But Thorne
appreciates that Christopher and Jonah Nolan, who wrote Interstellar, were so keen
to tell a story that is grounded in science.
The story is now essentially all Chris and Jonah's, Thorne told Wired in an
exclusive interview. But the spirit of it, the goal of having a movie in which science is
embedded in the fabric from the beginningand it's great sciencethat was
preserved.