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nowhere within the emotional feelings network of sites is any opportunity for me to make any profit from any of the 28 + sites within this network. this network of sites has been put together as a personal mission to help others by informing those who need information concerning mental health, eating disorders, lifestyle factors, and every other topic listed within.

navigational hint: all underlined link words open up a new window instead of changing your present one, taking you to another site within the emotional feelings network of sites - or to another site referencing the underlined link word!

welcome to the emotional feelings network!
remembering september eleventh
forever free: remembering september eleventh
forever & always

Your dictionary definition of:
 
ex·cite  
 tr.v. ex·cit·ed, ex·cit·ing, ex·cites
  1. To stir to activity.
  2. To call forth (a reaction or emotion, for example); elicit: odd noises that excited our curiosity.
  3. To arouse strong feeling in: speakers who know how to excite a crowd. See Synonyms at provoke.

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welcome! to feeling emotional, too!
 
after looking things over here at feeling emotional, too, try out "the layer down under," (part of the emotional feelings network of sites) & read a special "i just gotta say it" column concerning porn addiction by clicking here! Be sure to scroll down towards the bottom of the right hand column to find it!
 
Visiting the homepage is a great idea to get the complete concept of the emotional feelings network of sites!

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How this site works best for you!
 
You'll notice that there are many underlined link words in each article below. The reason for this is that you have reached not only, "feeling emotional, too," but the emotional feelings network of sites. There are many sites included within the network that'll be visited by clicking on these underlined link words.
 
The reason for this opportunity is very simple & yet you may be unnerved by all those underlined words! I've been in recovery from post traumatic stress disorder, depression & many other dysfunctional ventures & thru it all I've discovered that emotion & feeling work may be the missing link that many people miss when trying to find solutions to their problems.
 
Developing a sense of curiosity about why you feel the way you do, is essential in finding the solution you so desperately are searching for.
 
If you can't find what you came here looking for, visit the homepage for the emotional feelings network of sites by clicking above & read the options on the homepage for the networks index of sites. Try to be specific when looking for an emotion or feeling word & click on the site you need!
 
It's very simple & very interesting to follow your way thru the layers of your buried or stuffed emotions & feelings that have accumulated throughout the years!
 
when you've reached this point, or this website, you know you're making progress!!!! this part gets difficult because now is the time to look within & become emotionally honest with yourself!!!
 
Best of luck & if you're still stuck, send me an e-mail anytime, by clicking here & I'll be glad to send you an immediate personal response!
 
Sincerely,
Kathleen

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""When we are mildly excited, we may feel curious or alert. As our excitement increases, words like focused or courageous may be an appropriate answer to our "What am I feeling?" question. Intense excitement may make us feel bold, powerful, strong or even invincible. When a person is filled with excitement, we say they are passionate.""

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Excitement & Certainty

Can excitement & certainty go hand in hand?

Our lives are often a quest for excitement. Yet, they're also a quest for certainty. Can these 2 go together?

Isn't certainty the very antithesis of excitement? By seeking certainty, are we ensuring monotony & boredom?

In our quest for certainty, are we depriving ourselves of the excitement of welcoming the unknown?

Can a repetition, a certainty, have a quality of excitement that's brought about by uncertainty & the unknown?

We seek certainty because we fear the uncertain & the unknown. Our anxiety for our own survival & security makes us seek certainty. Yet, the fact is that life is an unfolding of the unknown. As we live, we're constantly called upon to encounter uncertainty & the unknown.

Life is an unfolding of the unknown amidst varying degrees of uncertainty. In this uncertainty is the excitement of seeking to receive & adapt, seeking to cope & understand, seeking to survive & overcome.

By seeking & ensuring certainty, by setting up predictable patterns of thought & action, are we putting an end to the excitement of living spontaneously?

Are we setting ourselves up for lives filled with monotony & boredom? Can a life driven by fear & defensiveness be exciting? What is excitement? What's certainty?

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Excitement makes life worth living along with pleasure, challenge, love, joy, peace & contentment.

The presence of peace & stability doesn't imply the end of excitement. To me, excitement is the unfolding of the new, the thrill & exhilaration of discovery.

To feel excitement, one needs to participate in a process of discovery. If we've built our lives on predictable patterns, if we've allowed our needs for survival & security to dominate our lives, we've reduced life to a predictable sequence of events & circumstances.

In the certainty of predictable patterns, however grand, there's no joy of discovery & therefore, no excitement. The thrill of discovery is the joy of excitement. There's an air of anticipation & uncertainty.

This is seen most clearly in little children. For a young child, every moment is a process of discovery, filled with excitement & joy. Even predictable & oft repeated games can bring excitement to a child because he meets every moment anew.

Therefore, it's not merely repetition that spells the end of excitement. Our inability to die to the previous moment, our tendency to live with the accumulated impressions of the past makes our lives burdensome & repetitive.

When we see the present moment thru the lens of past conditioning, we fall into repetitive patterns that bring monotony & boredom. A recycling of our past impressions isn't a process of discovery. Without discovery, how can there be excitement?

Our need for certainty is a survival response of an anxious child. A stable adult learns to live with the fact of uncertainty. Uncertainty is a fact of life. Our willingness to face facts also means a willingness to face uncertainty.

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This means that life is forever dynamic & we're constantly called upon to meet its challenges in various ways. This doesn't call for exceptional courage or creativity. However, it calls for a constant emptying of ourselves.

By emptying ourselves, we surrender past impressions & images; we die to the previous moment & live each moment anew. By keeping our mind empty of images & notions, we're totally receptive to life as it unfolds in the present moment.

In this total attention & receptivity to the present moment is the continuing joy of discovery. This discovery includes the joy of discovering ourselves.

Therefore, the unfolding of life is also the unfolding of our own awareness; our life in the world is a meeting with our deepest self.

By an inexplicable law of universal synchronicity, we encounter circumstances necessary for our continuing progress on the journey of discovery.

We may not get what we want but we always get what we need. This means that judgment & labelling as good & bad are merely conveniences for daily living. In an absolute sense, labels like good & bad are absurd.

Every circumstance of our life can be a discovery, a process of learning & in this discovery is joy & excitement. In this sense, the art of living is the art of being a child, unconditioned & spontaneous.

Our need for certainty expresses our need for survival & security. We can seek conditions that favor or promote our survival & security. Yet, life is full of surprises & absolute certainty of either survival or security can be elusive.

Therefore, no matter how well placed we are in terms of our own survival & security, the future is still uncertain & it's unknown. Therefore, the opportunity for discovery is forever present. So is the opportunity for self-discovery.

If we seek to lead meaningful lives, we can't deny reality; we must embrace the facts of life as they are. That the future is uncertain & unknown is a fact of life. In fully embracing this fact, we honor reality & thereby our own awareness.

For each of us, if we're willing to let go of the past & future & remain centered in the present moment, life is a process of discovery. The journey of life is simultaneously the inner journey of self-discovery. If we're receptive to each step, endless joy, excitement & ecstasy await us; we discover an unbounded awareness completely free from conditioning as the very essence of our being, as our own deepest self.

© Ashok Gollerkeri

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Stability Vs. Excitement

by Christine Kniffen, LCSW

What are you really looking for in a relationship? What do most people really want from a healthy partnership? Stability is what most people want whether they know it or not. 

Many things in life are unpredictable. Therefore, it's essential that we create some sense of stability somewhere in our lives. This is exactly what we need from a relationship. Sure, there are no guarantees that it'll last, but you don’t need to be in a relationship that constantly adds to the world’s unpredictability. 

Have you heard anyone say, “he was nice, polite, has a good job, seems stable…but I’m just not attracted to him…he’s not very exciting”? 

If you need exciting, then why don’t you take up bungee jumping?  This is your life & you need to create your own excitement.  It's not the responsibility of your partner to entertain you because you don't know how to do it yourself. 

This is the type of pressure that often drives a relationship apart. If you're not comfortable in your own skin & do know how to rejuvenate your self with things that bring you peace & joy & excitement….then you'll never be satisfied in any relationship. 

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Until you solve these things for yourself you'll always have unrealistic expectations, putting unnecessary pressure on the relationship… to give you what you can't give yourself. 

In a stable relationship you have plenty of energy to work on you. In a roller coaster relationship…your emotions are on overload & there's nothing left in the reserve tank.     

Many people in long-term relationships will describe themselves as good companions. However, they too weren't entirely comfortable with that word in the beginning. 

Have you ever met the couple that almost sounds apologetic for having a stable relationship? They'll often say things such as, “I guess we're pretty boring…we like to stay at home a have good friends over.” 

However, as time passes they become grateful for this “boring stability,” as they continue to hear horror stories from their friends cycling in & out of bad relationships. 

Most people are looking for companionship on some level. We all want a best friend to talk with & someone to wake up next to. This stable companionship is at the core of most good, solid relationships. 

A relationship with a stable foundation can whether many of the storms that life throws us. If you need excitement, then create it for yourself.  Be thankful if you have a “boring, stable” relationship. After all you just may still have it this time next year. 

Christine Kniffen, LCSW is a Relationship Coach and Therapist. 

What Makes Teens Tick?
By CLAUDIA WALLIS, TIME
Can Science Explain What Makes Adolescence So Exciting – and Exasperating?
 
Five young men in sneakers & jeans troop into a waiting room at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, Md. & drape themselves all over the chairs in classic collapsed -teenager mode, trailing backpacks, a CD player & a laptop loaded with computer games.
 
It's midafternoon & they are, of course, tired, but even so their presence adds a jangly, hormonal buzz to the bland, institutional setting. Fair-haired twins Corey & Skyler Mann, 16 & their burlier big brothers Anthony & Brandon, 18, who are also twins, plus eldest brother Christopher, 22, are here to have their heads examined. Literally.
 
The five brothers from Orem, Utah, are the latest recruits to a giant study that's been going on in this building since 1991.
 
Its goal: to determine how the brain develops from childhood into adolescence & on into early adulthood.

It's the project of Dr. Jay Giedd (pronounced Geed), chief of brain imaging in the child psychiatry branch at the National Institute of Mental Health. Giedd, 43, has devoted the past 13 years to peering inside the heads of 1,800 kids & teenagers using high-powered magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

For each volunteer, he creates a unique photo album, taking MRI snapshots every 2 years & building a record as the brain morphs & grows. Giedd started out investigating the developmental origins of attention-deficit / hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) & autism ("I was going alphabetically," he jokes) but soon discovered that so little was known about how the brain is supposed to develop that it was impossible to figure out where things might be going wrong.

In a way, the vast project that has become his life's work is nothing more than an attempt to establish a gigantic control group. "It turned out that normal brains were so interesting in themselves," he marvels.

"And the adolescent studies have been the most surprising of all."

Before the imaging studies by Giedd & his collaborators at UCLA, Harvard, the Montreal Neurological Institute & a dozen other institutions, most scientists believed the brain was largely a finished product by the time a child reached the age of 12.

Not only is it full-grown in size, Giedd explains, but "in a lot of psychological literature, traced back to [Swiss psychologist Jean] Piaget, the highest rung in the ladder of cognitive development was about age 12 - formal operations."

In the past, children entered initiation rites & started learning trades at about the onset of puberty. Some theorists concluded from this that the idea of adolescence was an artificial construct, a phenomenon invented in the post–Industrial Revolution years.

Giedd's scanning studies proved what every parent of a teenager knows: not only is the brain of the adolescent far from mature, but both gray & white matter undergo extensive structural changes well past puberty.

"When we started," says Giedd, "we thought we'd follow kids until about 18 or 20. If we had to pick a number now, we'd probably go to age 25."

Now that MRI studies have cracked open a window on the developing brain, researchers are looking at how the newly detected physiological changes might account for the adolescent behaviors so familiar to parents:

  • emotional outbursts
  • reckless risk taking 
  • rule breaking
  • the impassioned pursuit of sex, drugs & rock 'n' roll

Some experts believe the structural changes seen at adolescence may explain the timing of such major mental illnesses as schizophrenia & bipolar disorder.

These diseases typically begin in adolescence & contribute to the high rate of teen suicide. Increasingly, the wild conduct once blamed on "raging hormones" is being seen as the by-product of 2 factors:

  • a surfeit of hormones, yes, but also a paucity of the cognitive controls needed for mature behavior.

In recent years, Giedd has shifted his focus to twins, which is why the Manns are such exciting recruits. Although most brain development seems to follow a set plan, with changes following cues that are preprogrammed into genes, other, subtler changes in gray matter reflect experience & environment.

By following twins, who start out with identical - or, in fraternal twins, similar - programming but then diverge as life takes them on different paths, he hopes to tease apart the influences of nature & nurture.

Ultimately, he hopes to find, e.g., that Anthony Mann's plan to become a pilot & Brandon's to study law will lead to brain differences that are detectable on future MRIs. The brain, more than any other organ, is where experience becomes flesh.

Throughout the afternoon, the Mann brothers take turns completing tests of intelligence & cognitive function. Between sessions they occasionally needle one another in the waiting room.

"If the other person is in a bad mood, you've got to provoke it," Anthony asserts slyly. Their mother Nancy Mann, a sunny paragon of patience who has 3 daughters in addition to the 5 boys, smiles & rolls her eyes.

Shortly before 5 p.m., the Manns head downstairs to the imaging floor to meet the magnet. Giedd, a trim, energetic man with a reddish beard, twinkly blue eyes & an impish sense of humor, greets Anthony & tells him what to expect.

He asks Anthony to remove his watch, his necklace & a high school ring, labeled keeper. Does Anthony have any metal in his body? Any piercings? Not this clean-cut, soccer-playing Mormon. Giedd tapes a vitamin E capsule onto Anthony's left cheek & one in each ear. He explains that the oil-filled capsules are opaque to the scanner & will define a plane on the images, as well as help researchers tell left from right.

The scanning will take about 15 minutes, during which Anthony must lie completely still. Dressed in a red sweat shirt, jeans & white K-Swiss sneakers, he stretches out on the examining table & slides his head into the machine's giant magnetic ring.

MRI, Giedd points out, "made studying healthy kids possible" because there's no radiation involved. (Before MRI, brain development was studied mostly by using cadavers.) Each of the Mann boys will be scanned 3 times.

The first scan is a quick survey that lasts 1 minute. The second lasts 2 minutes & looks for any damage or abnormality. The third is 10 minutes long & taken at maximum resolution. It's the money shot.

Giedd watches as Anthony's brain appears in cross section on a computer screen. The machine scans 124 slices, each as thin as a dime. It will take 20 hours of computer time to process the images, but the analysis is done by humans, says Giedd. "The human brain is still the best at pattern recognition," he marvels.

Some people get nervous as the MRI machine clangs noisily. Claustrophobes panic. Anthony, lying still in the soul of the machine, simply falls asleep.

CONSTRUCTION AHEAD
One reason scientists have been surprised by the ferment in the teenage brain is that the brain grows very little over the course of childhood.

By the time a child is 6, it's 90% to 95% of its adult size. As a matter of fact, we're born equipped with most of the neurons our brain will ever have - & that's fewer than we have in utero.

Humans achieve their maximum brain-cell density between the 3rd & 6th month of gestation - the culmination of an explosive period of prenatal neural growth.

During the final months before birth, our brains undergo a dramatic pruning in which unnecessary brain cells are eliminated. Many neuroscientists now believe that autism is the result of insufficient or abnormal prenatal pruning.

What Giedd's long-term studies have documented is that there's a second wave of proliferation & pruning that occurs later in childhood & that the final, critical part of this second wave, affecting some of our highest mental functions, occurs in the late teens.

Unlike the prenatal changes, this neural waxing & waning alters not the number of nerve cells but the number of connections, or synapses, between them. When a child is between the ages of 6 & 12, the neurons grow bushier, each making dozens of connections to other neurons & creating new pathways for nerve signals.

The thickening of all this gray matter - the neurons & their branchlike dendrites - peaks when girls are about 11 & boys 12˝, at which point a serious round of pruning is under way.

Gray matter is thinned out at a rate of about 0.7% a year, tapering off in the early 20's. At the same time, the brain's white matter thickens. The white matter is composed of fatty myelin sheaths that encase axons & like insulation on a wire, make nerve-signal transmissions faster & more efficient.

With each passing year (maybe even up to age 40) myelin sheaths thicken, much like tree rings. During adolescence, says Giedd, summing up the process, "you get fewer but faster connections in the brain."

The brain becomes a more efficient machine, but there's a trade-off: it's probably losing some of its raw potential for learning & its ability to recover from trauma.

Most scientists believe that the pruning is guided both by genetics & by a use-it-or-lose-it principle. Nobel prizewinning neuroscientist Gerald Edelman has described that process as "neural Darwinism" - survival of the fittest (or most used) synapses.

How you spend your time may be critical. Research shows, e.g., that practicing piano quickly thickens neurons in the brain regions that control the fingers.

Studies of London cab drivers, who must memorize all the city's streets, show that they have an unusually large hippocampus, a structure involved in memory. Giedd's research suggests that the cerebellum, an area that coordinates both physical & mental activities, is particularly responsive to experience, but he warns that it's too soon to know just what drives the buildup & pruning phases.

He's hoping his studies of twins will help answer such questions: "We're looking at what they eat, how they spend their time - is it video games or sports? Now the fun begins," he says.

No matter how a particular brain turns out, its development proceeds in stages, generally from back to front. Some of the brain regions that reach maturity earliest - thru proliferation & pruning - are those in the back of the brain that mediate direct contact with the environment by controlling such sensory functions as vision, hearing, touch & spatial processing.

Next are areas that coordinate those functions: the part of the brain that helps you know where the light switch is in your bathroom even if you can't see it in the middle of the night.

The very last part of the brain to be pruned & shaped to its adult dimensions is the prefrontal cortex, home of the so-called executive functions - planning, setting priorities, organizing thoughts, suppressing impulses, weighing the consequences of one's actions.

In other words, the final part of the brain to grow up is the part capable of deciding, I'll finish my homework & take out the garbage & then I'll IM my friends about seeing a movie.

"Scientists & the general public had attributed the bad decisions teens make to hormonal changes," says Elizabeth Sowell, a UCLA neuroscientist who has done seminal MRI work on the developing brain.

"But once we started mapping where & when the brain changes were happening, we could say, Aha, the part of the brain that makes teenagers more responsible isn't finished maturing yet."

RAGING HORMONES
Hormones, however, remain an important part of the teen-brain story. Right about the time the brain switches from proliferating to pruning, the body comes under the hormonal assault of puberty. (Research suggests that the 2 events aren't closely linked because brain development proceeds on schedule even when a child experiences early or late puberty.)

For years, psychologists attributed the intense, combustible emotions & unpredictable behavior of teens to this biochemical onslaught. And new research adds fresh support. At puberty, the ovaries & testes begin to pour estrogen & testosterone into the bloodstream, spurring the development of the reproductive system, causing hair to sprout in the armpits & groin, wreaking havoc with the skin & shaping the body to its adult contours.

At the same time, testosterone-like hormones released by the adrenal glands, located near the kidneys, begin to circulate. Recent discoveries show that these adrenal sex hormones are extremely active in the brain, attaching to receptors everywhere & exerting a direct influence on serotonin & other neurochemicals that regulate mood & excitability.

The sex hormones are especially active in the brain's emotional center - the limbic system. This creates a "tinderbox of emotions," says Dr. Ronald Dahl, a psychiatrist at the Univ. of Pittsburgh.

Not only do feelings reach a flash point more easily, but adolescents tend to seek out situations where they can allow their emotions & passions to run wild.

"Adolescents are actively looking for experiences to create intense feelings," says Dahl. "It's a very important hint that there's some particular hormone-brain relationship contributing to the appetite for thrills, strong sensations & excitement."

This thrill seeking may have evolved to promote exploration, an eagerness to leave the nest & seek one's own path & partner. But in a world where fast cars, illicit drugs, gangs & dangerous liaisons beckon, it also puts the teenager at risk.

That's especially so because the brain regions that put the brakes on risky, impulsive behavior are still under construction. "The parts of the brain responsible for things like sensation seeking are getting turned on in big ways around the time of puberty," says Temple Univ. psychologist Laurence Steinberg.

"But the parts for exercising judgment are still maturing throughout the course of adolescence. So you've got this time gap between when things impel kids toward taking risks early in adolescence & when things that allow people to think before they act come online. It's like turning on the engine of a car without a skilled driver at the wheel."

DUMB DECISIONS
Increasingly, psychologists like Steinberg are trying to connect the familiar patterns of adolescents' wacky behavior to the new findings about their evolving brain structure.

It's not always easy to do. "In all likelihood, the behavior is changing because the brain is changing," he says. "But that's still a bit of a leap." A critical tool in making that leap is functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI). While ordinary MRI reveals brain structure, FMRI actually shows brain activity while subjects are doing assigned tasks.

At McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., Harvard neuropsychologist Deborah Yurgelun-Todd did an elegant series of FMRI experiments in which both kids & adults were asked to identity the emotions displayed in photographs of faces.

"In doing these tasks," she says, "kids & young adolescents rely heavily on the amygdala, a structure in the temporal lobes associated with emotional & gut reactions. Adults rely less on the amygdala & more on the frontal lobe, a region associated with planning & judgment."

While adults make few errors in assessing the photos, kids under 14 tend to make mistakes. In particular, they identify fearful expressions as angry, confused or sad. By following the same kids year after year, Yurgelun-Todd has been able to watch their brain-activity pattern - & their judgment - mature.

Fledgling physiology, she believes, may explain why adolescents so frequently misread emotional signals, seeing anger & hostility where none exists. Teenage ranting ("That teacher hates me!") can be better understood in this light.

At Temple Univ., Steinberg has been studying another kind of judgment: risk assessment.

In an experiment using a driving-simulation game, he studies teens & adults as they decide whether to run a yellow light. Both sets of subjects, he found, make safe choices when playing alone. But in group play, teenagers start to take more risks in the presence of their friends, while those over age 20 don't show much change in their behavior.

"With this manipulation," says Steinberg, "we've shown that age differences in decision making & judgment may appear under conditions that are emotionally arousing or have high social impact." Most teen crimes, he says, are committed by kids in packs.

Other researchers are exploring how the adolescent propensity for uninhibited risk taking propels teens to experiment with drugs & alcohol. Traditionally, psychologists have attributed this experimentation to peer pressure, teenagers' attraction to novelty & their roaring interest in loosening sexual inhibitions.

But researchers have raised the possibility that rapid changes in dopamine-rich areas of the brain may be an additional factor in making teens vulnerable to the stimulating & addictive effects of drugs & alcohol. Dopamine, the brain chemical involved in motivation & in reinforcing behavior, is particularly abundant & active in the teen years.

Why is it so hard to get a teenager off the couch & working on that all important college essay? You might blame it on their immature nucleus accumbens, a region in the frontal cortex that directs motivation to seek rewards.

James Bjork at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse & Alcoholism has been using FMRI to study motivation in a challenging gambling game. He found that teenagers have less activity in this region than adults do.

"If adolescents have a motivational deficit, it may mean that they're prone to engaging in behaviors that have either a really high excitement factor or a really low effort factor, or a combination of both." Sound familiar?

Bjork believes his work may hold valuable lessons for parents & society. "When presenting suggestions, anything parents can do to emphasize more immediate payoffs will be more effective," he says. To persuade a teen to quit drinking, e.g., he suggests stressing something immediate & tangible - the danger of getting kicked off the football team, say - rather than a future on skid row.

Persuading a teenager to go to bed & get up on a reasonable schedule is another matter entirely. This kind of decision making has less to do with the frontal lobe than with the pineal gland at the base of the brain. As nighttime approaches & daylight recedes, the pineal gland produces melatonin, a chemical that signals the body to begin shutting down for sleep.

Studies by Mary Carskadon at Brown Univ. have shown that it takes longer for melatonin levels to rise in teenagers than in younger kids or in adults, regardless of exposure to light or stimulating activities. "The brain's program for starting nighttime is later," she explains.

PRUNING PROBLEMS
The new discoveries about teenage brain development have prompted all sorts of questions & theories about the timing of childhood mental illness & cognitive disorders. Some scientists now believe that ADHD & Tourette's syndrome, which typically appear by the time a child reaches age 7, may be related to the brain proliferation period.

Though both disorders have genetic roots, the rapid growth of brain tissue in early childhood, especially in regions rich in dopamine, "may set the stage for the increase in motor activities & tics," says Dr. Martin Teicher, director of developmental biopsychiatry research at McLean Hospital. "When it starts to prune in adolescence, you often see symptoms recede."

Schizophrenia, on the other hand, makes its appearance at about the time the prefrontal cortex is getting pruned. "Many people have speculated that schizophrenia may be due to an abnormality in the pruning process," says Teicher. "Another hypothesis is that schizophrenia has a much earlier, prenatal origin, but as the brain prunes, it gets unmasked." MRI studies have shown that while the average teenager loses about 15% of his cortical gray matter, those who develop schizophrenia lose as much as 25%.

WHAT'S A PARENT TO DO?
Brain scientists tend to be reluctant to make the leap from the laboratory to real-life, hard-core teenagers. Some feel a little burned by the way earlier neurological discoveries resulted in Baby Einstein tapes & other marketing schemes that misapplied their science. It is clear, however, that there are implications in the new research for parents, educators and lawmakers.

In light of what has been learned, it seems almost arbitrary that our society has decided that a young American is ready to:

  • drive a car at 16
  • to vote & serve in the Army at 18 
  • to drink alcohol at 21

Giedd says the best estimate for when the brain is truly mature is 25, the age at which you can rent a car. "Avis must have some pretty sophisticated neuroscientists," he jokes.

Now that we have scientific evidence that the adolescent brain is not quite up to scratch, some legal scholars & child advocates argue that minors should never be tried as adults & should be spared the death penalty.

Last year, in an official statement that summarized current research on the adolescent brain, the American Bar Association urged all state legislatures to ban the death penalty for juveniles. "For social & biological reasons," it read, "teens have increased difficulty making mature decisions & understanding the consequences of their actions."

Most parents, of course, know this instinctively. Still, it's useful to learn that teenage behavior isn't just a matter of willful pigheadedness or determination to drive you crazy - though these, too, can be factors.

"There's a debate over how much conscious control kids h