Sarah Spinks

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"Inside the Teenage Brain"
With Sarah Spinks
Producer, "Frontline"
Friday, Feb. 1, 2002; 11 a.m. EST

What makes a teenager? Kids go through physical and emotional "phases" that may be hormones, awkwardness or just "moodiness." But is it something more?

It’s the mystery of mysteries -- especially to parents. Now experts are exploring the recesses of the brain and finding new explanations for why adolescents behave the way they do. FRONTLINE's "Inside the Teenage Brain," airing on PBS Thursday, Jan. 31, at 9 p.m. EST, explores how the new discoveries can change the way we parent, teach, or perhaps even understand, our teenagers.

Award-winning director/producer Sarah Spinks was online Friday, Feb. 1, to talk about the enigma that is the teenage brain and what she learned about it while making the film.

The transcript follows.

Spinks is an independent director and producer with her own documentary company, Spin Free Productions. A 17-year veteran of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, her documentaries garnered numerous awards, including "Father Larre," about a priest who had the Order of Canada but was abusing the children in his care, which won the Center for Investigative Journalism's Best Investigative Report on Network Television. Spinks' last documentary for FRONTLINE, "Making Babies," reported on state-of-the art infertility treatments. She is the author of "Cardiac Arrest, the Story of the Baby Deaths at Sick Children's Hospital." She lives in Toronto, Canada, and has three children.

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Harrisburg, Pa.: I read where most brain cell connections are made by the age of five. Yet, during the teenage years, for some reason, many brain connections dissolve. It has been suggested this is one of the reasons teenagers literally need to "chill out," as they say. It is a natural reaction in the development stage as brain cells themselves literally "chill out." What do you think of this explanation?

Sarah Spinks: That's not quite what happens. The brain creates cells all the time, and it prunes down certain pathways, but at the time it's doing that, it strengthens others. And while it is true that while a child is little, most of the structure of the brain is formed, there's another growth spurt just before the teenage years. Neuroscientists say it's like a house is built in the early years, and the rest of childhood and teenage years is getting the furniture in the house and in the right place.

Chicago, Ill.: Can the "teenage" brain begin to heal itself after some drug and/or alcohol abuse in order for the teenager to begin to get pleasure from things other than alcohol, etc., and how long would this process take once substance abuse is stopped?

Sarah Spinks: I think that what we've learned from science is that the brain can heal itself a lot more than we've thought before. I think I have to bow to the neuroscientists on this one. You can e-mail Dr. Giedde at the National Institute of Mental Health from the Frontline Web site.

St. Louis, Mo.: Here is a comment. Twisted brains = twisted minds = abnormal behavior. I can state with no doubt that a healthy corpus callosum is the key to normal behavior. I refer you to the work of Nancy Andreason, Ph.D., M.D. at the University of Iowa Medical School.

Kirmach Natani, Ph.D., FACFE
Pediatric Neuropsychologist
Speciality: AD/HD assessment

Sarah Spinks: Dr. Giedde has major studies going on the corpus callosum, particularly with twins. But many areas of the brain are associated with behavior, and certainly you could have a perfectly normal corpus callosum and a damaged frontal cortex, and you would get extremely poor behavior and difficulties performing many functions.

Miami, Fla.: When does "teenage" really start? For example, is it normal for an 11-year-old to want to use bad language in e-mails and talking to friends? Just to say a word like the b- or f- and nothing else?

Sarah Spinks: Well yes, obviously it is. A lot of that is in the schools. That's completely normal. I also would talk about with the child, completely straightforwardly, and say that's not something they should be doing and explain why.

Montreal, Quebec, Canada: You have said that sleep deprived teens will not do well in school. I have a 27-year-old who has gone on for his Ph.D. and has hardly slept more than four hours a night. How do you explain this?

I await your answer.

Sarah Spinks: Sheer determination. Lots of sleep deprived people do really well, because other things come in like will power. But we don't know how much better they would have done had they had a lot of sleep.

Bronx, N.Y.: When I get a little bit of sleep, I have to admit that my activity and attention span throughout the day becomes weak (I think I'm sleep deprived). When I saw the special on the teenage brain, I realized that certain behaviors are a result of the activity occurring in the frontal portion of the brain (right behind the forehead). What is going on with the neutrons in my brain and the pace in activity of this portion of the brain when I don't concentrate or "sleep with my eyes open?"

Sarah Spinks: I think they're simply firing more slowly. The connections, the messages, are firing more slowly. It's almost like they're in a sort of soup, and they're having to fire though the soup. And when you've had sleep, they're firing through clear air. So the neurotransmitters, basically the chemical connections between the brain cells, are firing more slowly -- they're being released more slowly.

Washington, D.C.: Are there certain chemicals, from foods, that will have an impact on the development of the frontal cortex? (Such as too much or too little glucose or other essential nutrients)

Sarah Spinks: I don't know the answer to that. People have conjectured that complex carbohydrates are not good for the frontal cortex, but I don't know that. That's where the low-carb diets come from, and sugar has an effect, but I don't know that to be a fact.

Chicago, Ill.: Greetings,

I was watching the first half of the program with my 8-year-old son last night. While the show was about teenagers, he seemed to pick up a lot about the sleep needs and the link to learning and school performance.

At 8:30 (Central), it was off to bed. You made a convert out of a kid that didn't appreciate an early bedtime.

He asked me to post a question:

"Will I end up yelling and fighting with my sister like those two kids, or is the four years between us enough that we won't argue when we are teenagers?"

I resisted the urge to answer the question with references to the yelling earlier in the evening, and agreed to pass along his query.

Sarah Spinks: Tell him that the sister and brother in the film actually get along quite well. And their way of working out conflict is at a very high volume. But they actually resolved that conflict in two minutes. So we don't suggest yelling, but it's not absolutely the worst thing if you can resolve your conflicts that quickly. Most kids his age need about 10 hours of sleep, so it's great he went to bed at that time.

North Charleston, S.C.: What time did the Minnesota schools change their opening time to and what were the results attributable to that change?

Sarah Spinks: They changed their times from 7:20 to 8:20 for high schools, and I think they changed them from 7:40 to 9:40 for middle schools to start. And they changed it because of all the sleep research that showed that middle school kids and teens were terribly tired.

Many more kids came to school and stayed at school -- their attendance was up dramatically. Children got more sleep; they didn't just stay up later because they could get to school later. They actually got more sleep. And their test scores were up slightly. The reason they think the scores didn't go up more was that some of the students who were poor in school came to school for the first time. Therefore, when their results were averaged in, it didn't show as dramatic an increase as they expected. This is a school district has a huge turnover because there is no inexpensive housing in Minneapolis, so they're always losing kids. This was seen as a big victory -- kids got to know their schools and stayed there.

Princeton Junction, N.J.: Last year my friend Michele and I led a successful effort to push back the start times of our kids' middle and high schools from 7:35 to 7:50, which is of course still too early but a step in the right direction.

The biggest resistance we met to this change came from parents who felt we were "coddling" the kids, that life was tough and teens ought to get used to having to function on insufficient sleep.

What is your advice for answering people with this attitude? Are we really so anti-teenager in this country that we cannot bear to make any accommodation to our teens' biological needs without feeling we have "given in" to them?

Deborah Hornstra, M.A.
Princeton Junction, NJ
http://homepages.wwptoday.com/advocates/laterschool/

Sarah Spinks: I would try to talk to those parents about the research that shows that there is a biological clock function. Even those teenagers who go to bed early -- even at 10 p.m., there's a part of their brain that is keeping them awake, so it's hard for them to fall asleep. That same part of the brain doesn't operate to keep them awake in the morning, so their much more sleepy than children who are 8 or 9, because they have a different biological clock. I think it's wrong to punish teenagers for the fact that we are all very sleep deprived. I think what you're tapping into is a lot of resentment and hostility toward teenagers because they don't have to work as hard as their parents.

Shippensburg, Pa.: I learned that the biological clock for teens has a "forbidden" sleep zone from about 9-10 p.m. Is there any way to counteract this forbidden sleep zone?

Raymond

Sarah Spinks: Yes. If they can get out walking early in the morning, even just around the block -- light helps set the biological clock. You need light in the morning, very dim light at night. Lots of activity early in the day. Better to eat supper early and have nothing afterwards. And be cool. Don't have a hot bath or hot shower right before going to sleep. The body wants to be cool in order to sleep properly. And have it be completely dark [to sleep] if they can. Resist stimulating activity such as going on chat rooms, TV, computer games.

East Lansing, Mich.: I am a 22-year-old psychology major at Michigan State University. I took an experimental drug called interferon for a liver condition when I was 13. One of its side effects was the disabling of my growth plates. According to this theory, I wonder if my brain stopped development at that point and if I still depend more on my emotion center for thought. I recall one test result showed that teenagers use a different region of the brain to process emotion. I have had emotional difficulties such as interpreting other's emotions. As the teenagers suggested, I often feel people are angry with me when they are actually disagreeing.

It could, however, just be fact that teenagers and young adults as myself face more opposition, have less confidence, and thus by habit assume we are disliked. We may also feel more emotion because of the stereotype which could account for the increased brain activity in the emotion center. Usually kids enter the teen years having never been shunned and having been sheltered from adversity. Then all of the sudden they are overwelmed by it. I recall myself crying for hours whenever someone identified me as a teenager. It was just so painful to know I was a part of a group that no one liked. Other strange behavior could simply be the result of unfamiliarity with being able to think and feel for one's self. Everyone is clumsy when first begining a new task.

I think it would be very interesting if the researchers could scan my brain to see if I resembled a teenager rather than an adult. If their growth hypothesis is correct and if the drug I took did inhibit growth, then I should still be functioning as a teenager.

Sarah Spinks: It sounds to me that you have a pretty good handle on your situation, and it's unlikely that interferon would have hurt your brain. And what you've experienced were the normal growth stages of going through teenage life. But if you really want to look into this, you could e-mail Giedde and see if you could have an MRI. Giedde is interested in all of these things.

The other thing I would say is search for "interferon" on the Internet and see if there are any clinical trials going on involving people who had interferon to treat a disease and see if there was any result not attributable to the disease state. I think there might be a study going on looking at interferon and the results later on. But you'd need the baseline of an MRI at 13 to see what was going on -- you might have had that.

New Hartford, N.Y.: Is there any way to help the teenager through this difficult time, for both them and the other members of the family?

Thank you.

Sarah Spinks: I think a lot of patience, helping them organize their work, staying connected -- talking to them a lot. And doing things with them, I guess.

Clinton, Md.: Will outside stimuli have an effect on the development of the teenage brain (such as stress or the events of Sept. 11)?

Sarah Spinks: Yes, I think stress has a big effect on the brain. And I think that's proven, through a stress hormone called cortisol -- that's how the brain mediates its reaction to stress. It slows down reaction times, and it disorganizes thought.

Frederick, Md.: As it relates to brain research, how much is real science and how much is speculation? Is it more correlation than cause?

Sarah Spinks: Yes, I would say it is more correlation than cause. While they know that these changes happen in the pre-teen brain, they don't really know that this directly causes certain behaviors. They surmise this because people that have brain injuries in certain parts of the brain act a certain way. And they've long known that the frontal cortex has certain functions. Therefore the supposition that if the frontal cortex is immature, that those functions won't operate properly, is a good one. But we don't know how other parts of the brain might interact with the frontal cortex, nor do we know how a person's environment -- the parents they had -- can change behavior. And we don't know how much a person's genetic predisposition or temperment could override the immature brain function. So I would say a child that's quite resilient emotionally is likely to handle having an immature frontal cortex much better than a child who is not resilient emotionally. I think that's all we can say really.

Charlotte, N.C.: With a great deal being said by even local neurologists about teens proclivity to want to stay up late and sleep late, why do many high schools, including those here in Charlotte, start high school classes so early? I believe that teen's overall academic performance would be vastly improved with even a one hour delay in start-up time. Could you also address the effects of puberty on the minds of ADD and ADHD teenagers? Thank you.

Sarah Spinks: Yes, it's highly likely that their performance will improve if they went to school an hour later. You could contact the Minneapolis school district to see how they brought that into effect in Minneapolis.

There is some research that is now showing that sometimes ADD and ADHD sufferers are really sleep deprived. And when they get proper sleep, their distractability goes down. But there are people for and against this -- there's research shows this is true, and there's research that actually shows that sleep deprivation actually comes from the ADD, from the Ritalin. So I think that puberty is a difficult time for lots of teenagers, and is simply more difficult if you have a disease like ADD or ADHD.

And there is a new drug that's showing great promise for ADD and ADHD -- it's a new Ritalin. And it's having less of the side effects like not being able to sleep, which a lot of kids who have ADD or ADHD experience. If you have or someone in your family has ADD or ADHD, you can find that drug by asking your family doctor, I'm sure, because most of them now know about it.

Hamilton, Ontario, Canada: I have three teens who are determined to become world leaders in online shoot-'em-up games. After watching your show, I'm considering putting their brains into intensive care for a year. Assume that I could get some leverage to gain their cooperation.

Could you describe an intensive care program that would ensure that "their brain function for the next 80 years" will be enhanced?

Thanks
Irene

Sarah Spinks: I'd monitor them -- tell them they can't do it during the week and they can do it all they want on the weekends. If you say they can have two hours a day, then you spend your whole time monitoring them.

I think the jury's out on this video game business.

West Newbury, Mass.: What are your thoughts concerning biochemical imbalances causing emotional disorders in the adolescent brain?
It seems more adolescents are diagonosed with bi-polar disorder than in the past.

Sarah Spinks: I don't know whether that is true, but I think there are a lot of biochemical disorders that come on in late adolescence, for instance schizophrenia. And adolescence is known to be a risk time for mental illnesses. So it does behoove people to watch their teenagers very carefully for those kinds of signs. They often do things that are out of character -- you'll see a kid get in trouble with the police who's never been in trouble before. So it's important to get on top of this because what the teens do can have an effect on the rest of their lives, and it's important to get them pulled out of this as early as possible.

Aberdeen, N.J.: My sons are 14 and 17 years old and suffer from many of the problems identified during the special -- difficulty sleeping, poor memory and mathematics skills and moroseness -- to name a few. Since they are quickly passing the critical stage for adolescent brain growth, what can we do to make the most of the time left?

Sarah Spinks: You really need to connect with them and talk with them, and see if they [the kids] can see things that you can help them with. And usually they'll come up with a fairly long list.

Laurel, Md.: Good Morning. I have a wonderful 13-year-old boy. So far, he has been very easy-going, fun, and basically honest. Should I be preparing myself for turbulent times in the next few years? I must say, raising him has been such a delight that I feel the other shoe has to drop at some time.

Sarah Spinks: I think that the other shoe doesn't have to drop. Many, many teenagers sail through the teenage years as happy as clams. My own daughter did. So I don't think you need to prepare yourself, but keep doing what you're doing. That's helped your kid.

Mt. Lebanon, Pa.: Sorry I missed the show last night. Did you find anything in the modern teenage brain except for a vacuum, of course? And, did you find that the old adage: "The apple doesn't fall too far from the tree," to be mostly true where associations between children and their progenitors are concerned? Thanks much.

Sarah Spinks: We did mostly find that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, to tell the truth. Parents who showed a lot of emotional stability tended to have emotionally stable. There's a lot going on in the teenage brain -- it's the second most important time in our lives. Some of the attitude comes when the teens feel that adults aren't listening anyway -- that they're making a show of listening or that the parents really don't care about them.

Washington, D.C.: Ms. Spinks, this is an excellent idea for a documentary. I just wanted to make the comment that one of the big challenges of being a parent of a teenager is not so much putting up with whatever moodiness or behavior that happens, but how not to take all this to heart and feel personally dejected. I wonder if other parents agree that if we get too involved, it seems to backfire.

Sarah Spinks: I really think that a lot of the intrusive parents whose day is completely wrecked by the fight in the morning need to take a big breath of air and go and do something that will give themselves some sustenance. Because it's very likely that the teenager will have had the whole thing blow over almost instantly.

Montclair, N.J.: During the making of this documentary, what most surprised you? Additionally, what most frustrated you? I note that many comments in the response page indicate a frustration at the "lack of discipline and respect" demonstraed by those featured. Do you think more authoritarian parents help or hinder brain development in teens by forcing them to adhere to "adult" rules?

Sarah Spinks: I think that's a complicated question because I would say the most successful parents in our documentary were the most liberal. But I would say that Charlie O'Donnell, who was most combative with his parents, will be a successful adult. Because despite all the attitude he was giving them, and the bratty behavior, he knows that he's very loved, as difficult as it may have been for the parents sometimes.

I myself wouldn't have allowed that much talking back in my own house. And every parent has to parent at the level of their comfort too -- they can't allow really disrespectful behavior to eat at them. On the other hand, parents provide a safety zone for children to act out some of these behaviors, and I think that's what Bev Hufnander, who's Britney's mom, does -- who gives her children a lot of space, and all of the teens in the area want to come to her house because of that. She's a good mother and her children are doing very well in school because of that.

What surprised me was the level of alienation that many teenagers feel from adults -- I was surprised how negatively teenagers feel they are viewed. I was surprised by how little sleep most teenagers were getting. And I guess I'm just frustrated, like many parents, with not being able to put forth the values that I believe in and have the family act on them. Because there is so much material coming in from outside the house, from outside the family, that forms children's wants -- the pressure of commercialism, the pressure to take drugs, and the pressure to eat sugar and drink caffeine. It's hard to withstand those kinds of pressures in a family. You can take the TV away, you can take the computers away, you can take the sugar and the caffeine away, but unless you do that from early on, they're going to feel like they're being punished all the time. We're being barraged, teens are being barraged, by this culture that tells us that if you don't have a certain logo on your sweatshirt, you're no good. And it's difficult for parents to keep up with all this.

Bloomington, Ind.: There is an underlying assumption that adolescents in all cultures experience the same phenomena as American adolescents of the core culture (conflict with parents, mood disruptions, risk behaviors). Is there evidence that adolescents from other cultures do not experience this stage in such ways, and if so, does this not cast doubt on biological explanations for the ways our teens behave (be it horomones or rapid brain development)? My concern is that biological explanations allow us to easily throw up our hands and say, "there's nothing to be done."

Sarah Spinks: The biology does dictate certain behaviors. For instance, the circadian clock that moves forward just before adolescence is true of adolescence the world over. The changes in the frontal cortex are likely to be true the world over. But we know that the culture and the environment impinges a great deal on the way teenagers act. So a poor black teenager in a township in South Africa, no, is not going to act like a rich black teenager in San Francisco. The environment has a great deal to do with how teenagers behave.

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