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For some reason I always end up being the lightening rod...
From a paper 44 #3 wrote on why the driving age SHOULD be raised to 18...
quote:
Then there is the science. According to Frontline, scientists used to think that teens responded differently to the world because of hormones, or attitude, or because they simply needed discpline.
However recent studies scanning teens' brains in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines have discovered that the prefrontal cortex, which makes people ''act like an adult,'' is not fully developed in a teenager until AFTER the age of 18.
It turns out that the part of the brain that drives the actions of adolescents is a structure called the amygdala. The amygdala is not home to rational through but rather to primal feelings such as fear, rage, and wild impulse.
The conclusion is that teens are not thinking like adults because they aren’t capable of it. Adolescent brains simply aren't ''hard wired'' like adult brains. And to complicate things even more, the amygdala regulates many kinds of hormones, and pumps them through teenagers’ bodies making them moody, unpredictable, and irrational.
As a result teens don't think, ''Driving recklessly is very dangerous and stupid.'' Rather, they are hardwired to think, ''Oh, boy, a race! Wouldn't it be cool if I won?'' So now there is actual scientific evidence for adolescents doing all those things that keep parents up at night: sneaking out, purple hair, binge drinking, sampling drugs, and waiting until the last minute to do that term paper. Now put these same out-of-control adolescents behind the wheel of 3,500 pounds of steel, with music blaring and you have a recipe for disaster
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