happy thanksgiving 2006

I'm celebrating my 300th post by only eating one meal a day. Well, one meal plus snacking on the leftovers all day. You get the idea. My nutrition tip of the year, for those of you who think it's the chemicals in the turkey that make you sleepy, try eating less food. It's all about the calories. In fact, the meal actually counteracts the chemical because it's overwhelmed by all the other chemicals.

I ran across an article this morning trying to get myself out of bed in my cold basement looking at some other chemical reactions that get overwhelmed as we age. I found myself coming to a very different conclusion to a study regarding how teenage brains work than this guy at Newseek did. Basically, psychologists ask young people whether or not it's ok to do stupid stuff (say, light your hair on fire or drink drano or race your car to the edge of a cliff). What they found is that teenage brains are more active than adult brains.

"The results are fascinating, and unsettling. While teenagers are just as likely as adults to get the answer right (the correct answer is “No”), teens actually have to mull the question over momentarily before they answer. As summarized by psychologists Valerie Reyna of Cornell and Frank Farley of Temple in the current issue of the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, teenagers take a split second longer than adults to reject such patently inane behaviors. And more of the teenage brain lights up, suggesting that they are actually going through some kind of deliberative calculation before concluding what the rest of us assume is obvious."

Now, the middle age male author writing about this sides with the conclusion of the psychologists that this is a deficiency in the teenage brain. It is better when asked to play Russian Roulette, the study authors suggest, to act instinctively in saying no rather than to think about it for a millisecond before saying no. I cannot disagree more stongly! The willingness of teenagers to think critically about everything, to harbor fewer learned biases and socialized instinctive responses, I think, is fabulous. The idea that utilizing more of your brain (in a non-urgent situation) is bad strikes me as quite silly. I'll take teens over psychs any day.

I'll take "deliberative calculation" over blindly responding with "what the rest of us assume is obvious" any day.