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RON: All right, welcome to authors
at Google here in Los Angeles.
Normally we begin author events with reading
a short bio of the speaker downloaded from the internet
or emailed to us by a publicist.
Well, I encourage everyone to google Dr. Daniel Siegel
and read about the schools he attended
and books he published.
It is perhaps a better use of the short time allotted
for introduction to explain why it is so exciting to have
Dr. Siegel here at Google talking about adolescence.
The other day, a friend of mine said
this about his 16-year-old son.
Two years ago, he said, we were best buddies.
Now all I am to him is a driver and an a ATM machine.
Another friend offered the following pearl of wisdom.
Yes, teenagers want nothing to do with you,
and they can't wait to leave home.
But don't worry.
They'll be back when they're 23.
These two quotes are typical of how the grownup world views
adolescents as inaccessible, a great big black hole,
a terrible thing we need to get through
as best we can until a grownup emerges on the other side
and we can finally breathe a huge sigh of relief.
Grownups and adolescents find each other frustrating and
infuriating.
I suspect that some of you are parents
who came to this talk hoping for tips
on how to handle their teenagers.
And yes, Daniel Siegel's book "Brainstorm"
provides a richness of insight and practical advice
to meet that need.
But what makes this book truly revolutionary
is its insistence that adolescence is not a problem
to be tackled but an opportunity,
an amazing opportunity to be cultivated and celebrated.
Those same brain changes that can cause so much anguish
have the potential, if correctly understood,
to not only be a source of great satisfaction
but in fact to quote from the book,
"they can enable adolescents to go on and lead
great lives of adventure and purpose."
Reading the book, you discover that the aggravation normally
associated with adolescence is an unnecessary cost
of how we deal with it.
Furthermore, hallmarks of adolescence
are youthful energy, creativity, passion, original thought,
and a panache for social connectivity.
These are resources that are now wasted on a gargantuan scale.
A better understanding of the brain
can allow adolescents to make use of these gifts
towards the making of a better society and a better world.
Ladies and gentlemen, Daniel Siegel.
DANIEL SIEGEL: Thank you, Ron.
That was beautiful.
Thank you, Ron.
That was really beautiful.
Can you hear me all right?
AUDIENCE: Yep.
DANIEL SIEGEL: Great.
Well, it's an honor to be here with you at Google.
This is my fourth Google campus that I'm visiting.
And this one is local, so it's an easier trip for me.
So it's really great to be here.
What I'm going to do is give you a short overview
of the ideas in "Brainstorm: The Power
and Purpose of the Teenage Brain"
and look at some myths about adolescence
and what are the actual truths.
And by understanding the truths, we actually
empower adolescents and adults who
care for adolescents or actually any adult who
once was an adolescent to actually reclaim
a certain aspect of celebrating this period of life.
So we'll then take time for a discussion.
Because if it's like past experience I've had at Google,
it's really great to actually make
this more interactive in a discussion period.
So I'll leave time for that too.
So first let me just check with you.
How many of you have adolescents at home right at this moment?
OK, so there's probably a sense of urgency then.
How many of you have younger kids
at home and you're getting ready for them
to turn into adolescents?
Great, and how many of you once were adolescents?
Anyone?
Great, so that's pretty much everyone.
So for myself, I come from a background where
basically I trained in science and biochemistry
and then went on to medicine and then became a psychiatrist
after training initially in pediatrics and then
adult psychiatry, became a child and adolescent psychiatrist.
And then when I was trained in research,
I was really beginning at the period which
was called the decade of the brain, 1990.
And so it became an incredible opportunity
to actually take the science of the brain
and try to apply it to practical clinical use in psychiatry.
And so I worked to help create a field called
interpersonal neurobiology.
And that field basically takes all the different disciplines
of science and puts them together into one framework.
And so we have now 36 textbooks that I've
edited in that series.
And just to show you just some examples,
these are other books besides the "Brainstorm" book.
This is basically just so you know
where the science we're about to talk about comes from.
This is a graduate school textbook
that I wrote called "The Developing Mind," which
basically takes all these different fields of science
and combines them into one.
If you like non-linear books, this book,
"The Interpersonal Neurobiology Pocket Guide"
is actually written in a non-linear way.
So especially if it's on a tablet,
you can bounce around wherever you feel like going
and learn all about this field.
And if you have younger kids, a book I wrote with my student
now colleague, Tina Payne Bryson,
"The Whole-Brain Child," will talk
about a lot of what we're talking
about now applied to younger children.
So in my own case, I have not just
worked in the field of interpersonal neurobiology
but also have worked at home with my partner and wife,
Caroline Welch, where we were deeply
trying to raise our kids, who are now almost 20 and 24.
In fact, our son is traveling around the world,
and just two days ago I got back from spending
two weeks with him after not seeing him for a year.
And it's true.
When they get in their mid-20s, there's this wonderful change.
And it was an incredible opportunity.
And these kids in their 20s that we have are still adolescents.
So the first myth I want identify
is that people use the term adolescents
synonymously with the term teenager.
And that's just not true.
The adolescent period can be defined
as a period between childhood and adulthood.
And there was a debate a while ago,
should we just get rid of the term adolescence?
Is it meaningless?
Is there just childhood dependency and then
adult responsibility?
But it turns out that not just in people who live on the West
Coast or people who are human beings but actually
many mammals have an adolescent period, which
is distinct from childhood and distinct from adulthood.
So it isn't just we that have this period.
Now, what is this period all about?
Well, it's not just about having a number that
begins with teen, like 19, or 18, or 17.
It turns out that there are changes
in the brain that we didn't know about before 15 years ago
that identify that the adolescent period is more
than just going through puberty, which
is *** maturation, which now begins, by the way,
much earlier than it ever has.
And the period following puberty,
which is the adolescent period generally--
it doesn't always work that way--
but this period of, if you will, a developmental time when
you're not just dependent on adults
but you're not just working with adult responsibility
of raising a family or having work.
This period between has a certain purpose and power to it
that we never really understood before.
So for many adults, even when you just
approach the teenage years, you say, oh my gosh.
My kid is going to be a teenager.
I don't know what's going to happen.
You have a lot of trepidation.
And what we're about to do is identify the myths
that when you understand them you
can have celebration, not trepidation.
And what are the basic ways that the brain
is changing that can identify these myths and clarify them?
So the first thing is that the adolescent period is not
just the teenage years.
That's the first myth.
That changes in the brain happen between around 12 years of age
more or less-- a little bit younger in girls,
a little bit older in boys, but it's around the same --
just around now before the teenagers begin.
And it ends in the mid-20s.
And the ending is of what?
It's actually of a period of brain change
that's called remodeling.
So this remodeling period is happening into the mid-20s.
And by understanding the nature of the remodeling,
we actually can understand a lot about what
adolescents go through.
So let's just review very briefly the brain in general.
Let's talk about how the brain interacts
with culture, and family life, and interaction with peers.
And let's look at then why a child's experience may be
different from an adolescent's, which may be different from
an adult's.
So Ron was really nice to actually come
early this morning and tape underneath your chair a model
of the brain that you get to take home with you.
So if you reach underneath your chair with your arm
and then pull your arm out, you'll
notice there's a hand attached to your arm.
And this is a handout for you for today.
If you fold your thumb in the middle of your hand
and fold your fingers over the top,
this brain would be oriented in your hand like that.
My daughter says, never say it's a handy model of the brain,
but it is.
It's very handy because it actually
is a pretty good example of how the brain is structured.
So before we get to the details, let's
give the first very brief overview of brain
anatomy, function, and development.
Genes play a very important role in how
the basic cells of the brain, the neurons,
will link up to each other.
And even the supportive cells, the glial cells,
oligodendrocytes and astrocytes will perform functions
that we don't even understand.
It's a big, big mystery, but the parts we do understand
are these.
That the way neurons get connected
influence how you think, how you feel, and how you behave.
So thinking, feeling, behavior is a part of our mental life.
So in this way, we say that the structure of the brain
influences its function, and the function of the brain
influences in part mental life.
So when we say an adolescent's mental life is changing,
right away we need to think in part that's
due to what's going on in the body
and in particular what's going on in the brain.
So for a child basically what happens is this.
In utero-- and I don't want to shock anyone--
but the *** and egg get together,
and they form a single cell being
that then becomes 2 cells, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, et cetera.
It gets bigger and bigger and bigger
until it starts to specialize in its function.
Some of those cells will come from the outside
and become the neural tube as they invaginate inward.
And that's important because the nervous system, which
is this neural tube, starts as skin cells.
And in fact the skin is the interface
of the outer world and the inner world.
And your nervous system, including your brain,
is always about the interface of the inner and the outer.
And that becomes extremely important in understanding
adolescence.
That the nervous system is basically fancy skin cells,
if you will, that are always about saying,
what's going on inside?
What's going on outside?
How do I bring those two together?
So what happens in utero is that this nervous system
within the body is developing a lot influenced by genes
and also of course the stress of the mom, chemicals
that the mother may ingest.
Smoking, drinking, different things
can affect the way this nervous system is going to grow.
At birth, when we come now to the structure of the brain,
let's take a look at it.
Basically it's oriented like this.
The neural tube, the spinal cord in your back,
will be represented by your wrist.
The clump of neurons that collects up in the head
that we'll just call the brain has three major parts
that change a lot in adolescence,
so we need to review them to understand adolescence.
If you lift up your top area-- try this out
so you can go with me.
Lift up your thumb area.
The first area is the brain stem.
And this is the area that regulates basic bodily
processes like what's going on in the heart, the lungs,
the intestines.
And it also has clusters of neurons
that control the reactive states of the four F's
that you may be familiar with.
Some of them, fight, flight, freeze, and faint.
So usually people say fight, flight,
but it's actually two other ones in addition.
Fight, flight, freeze-- tightening your muscles
when you're scared-- or fainting where
you're totally collapsing.
So those areas are regulated by the brain stem,
very old, 300 million year old.
So it's called the old reptilian brain.
And then if you come now up in evolutionary terms
and also growing in utero is the secondary area
of the brain called the old mammalian brain.
You'd have two thumbs for it to be a perfect model.
The thumb represent the limbic area.
200 million years, it has regions that you're probably
familiar with called the amygdala, the hippocampus,
the hypothalamus, and other regions as well.
The limbic area has five big functions.
And we're going to review them briefly
because to really understand adolescents,
we need to understand what's going on in the limbic area
and how it communicates with the brain stem and the body.
So here are the functions.
And I'm going to just point out how it develops
and then what changes in adolescence so you
can understand it.
The first thing to say is that this limbic area
is going to interact with what's above it, the cortex,
we'll talk about later.
And what's below it, the brain stem and the body.
So it's like a way station that allows
all these different inputs to be coordinated.
So if you're thinking about what you do at Google
and how you're influencing the sharing of energy
and information across humanity, in many ways
the limbic area is going to serve this kind of function
of pulling these different things together.
So the limbic area is important in working with the brain
stem and the body in creating emotion.
So when you feel a big feeling, a big emotion,
which adolescents feel more of, it's
coming from the body, the brain stem, and the limbic area.
And because those are all below this higher area, the cortex,
it's called the subcortical source of emotion.
Which is why when computer programmers think
about creating emotion in a computer,
I always discuss with them, well,
you probably need that computer to have a body.
Because to really really have emotions,
you need a heart, lungs, intestine, muscles, bones,
hormones to have a true experience
of what we experience as humans.
So the body comes up all sorts of channels, the first layer
of this spinal cord called lamina 1.
The 10th cranial nerve, all the body input
comes up to the brain stem and the limbic area,
and we get an emotion that way.
And then it pops up into our higher areas
where we have consciousness, the cortex.
So these subcortical things in adolescence are more robust.
There's a kind of emotional spark in adolescence.
So if you compare a 10-year-old to a 14-year-old,
they're very different not just that they've
accumulated four more years of life.
But these subcortical areas are just more active.
And we'll talk about why that would be a good thing soon.
OK, so emotion is number one.
Number two is motivation.
The limbic area works with the brain
stem to motivate people to do different things.
And of course, the motivation of a 14-year-old,
as any middle school teacher will tell you,
is very different from a 10-year-old.
That's because the limbic area is changing dramatically
for very important and good reasons.
Then when parents don't understand them,
they clamp down on what's happening to the adolescent
instead of supporting them.
And what the "Brainstorm" approach
that we're going to talk about can do
is change our whole cultural conversation
so we recognize what's happening in the brain and support
adolescents rather than try to imprison them.
The third thing the limbic area is involved in
is called appraisal.
Appraisal, and I don't know what the computer equivalent would
be, but appraisal is basically where
you're evaluating the significance of something
happening.
So the first layer of appraisal says,
is this thing happening something
I should invest energy and time in?
Like right now I'm appraising my voice is getting hoarse,
so I'm going to get my water bottle that my daughter gave me
before she went away to school.
And now my limbic area will appraise
how did my voice sound?
And it sounds better, so I put this down.
So that would be an appraisal.
I'm paying attention to something.
The second thing is, is the thing
I'm paying attention to good or bad?
And if it's good, how do I get more of it?
If it's bad, how do I get less of it?
And those are basic appraisal functions of the limbic area.
So that's number three.
Number four is different kinds of memory
are mediated through the limbic area.
We won't talk about that, but the hippocampus
plays an important role in creating
factual memory or autobiographical memory
rather than just kind of the visceral memory
that you have called implicit memory.
And number five is attachment.
This becomes extremely important in adolescence.
Attachment is what we have as mammals.
This is the old mammalian brain.
Attachment is where, as a kid, you rely on another person,
your parent usually, an attachment figure,
to give you four S's.
They see you.
They keep you safe.
They soothe you.
And they give you an internal feeling of security
if you have the first three.
So being seen means someone identifies
what's going on beneath your behavior.
Not just seeing your body move, but thinking
about your feelings, identifying what you're thinking about,
what has meaning for you, what your needs are.
That's what I mean by being seen.
Safe means two things.
They protect you from harm, and they aren't a source of terror.
And if they are, they repair that rupture very quickly.
Because any parent can lose it, but if you lose it as a parent,
and I talk about this in a book I wrote
called "Parenting from the Inside Out" with Mary Hartzell.
If you lose it and don't make a repair,
your child will have a very negative outcome
in their attachment category that they developed.
And that's explored in all these different books
and in "Brainstorm" too.
So safe means not being a source of terror
and also protecting your child from danger.
So if you are seen, and if you are safe,
and if when you're distressed you're soothed-- that is,
I have a really uncomfortable feeling.
I'm just a kid.
I don't know how to get this feeling to feel better.
It just feels bad, whether I'm sad,
angry, frightened, whatever it is.
I go to this other person, my attachment figure.
They do something with me.
They hug me.
They talk to me.
They just listen to me and hear my story.
And I feel better.
An attachment figure soothes the person who's attached.
OK, so what's so important about this in adolescence?
And it's what you said before, Ron.
When you're a kid and you're distressed,
who do you go to for soothing?
Your parents, your attachment figure.
But when you're an adolescent, who do you tend to go to?
Your peers, and that is a healthy, natural change
that if a parent is not aware that this is going to happen,
they start feeling left out and rejected
and think there's something wrong.
When in fact it's something right,
because overall what the adolescent is preparing to do
is to leave home.
So picture this.
Just so you can understand the attachment shift,
just imagine this scenario.
You're in bed.
You're sleeping really deeply.
The light comes streaming in through the closed blinds
of your window, and someone comes in your room.
Let's say it's your mom.
Someone who loves you like crazy gives you
a kiss on the forehead and says, good morning sweetie.
And you begin to rouse, and she goes,
what would you like for breakfast?
And you go, I'll have some oatmeal, mom.
And she shouts down to your dad, so-and-so would like oatmeal.
And so your dad starts preparing oatmeal.
You come downstairs.
You have your pajamas on.
You have your oatmeal.
You then get dressed.
Maybe you watch a little TV or you
start getting ready for school.
Then you go off to preschool.
And at preschool, you play with friends,
and you learn how to share, and you have a snack,
and maybe you come home for lunch.
You're getting a little tired, so you take a nap.
And then you play some more out in the yard.
And then you have another snack, and then
you dance around with your mom, or your dad,
or who's ever there.
And then you get a little hungry,
so they make you dinner.
And then you're getting a little tired.
You get in the bathtub.
They scrub you down.
And then they put you in bed, give you a massage,
read you a story, and sing you a song.
And you fall off to sleep.
Now, if you kept the same child mind
that was soaking that in that the majority of kids
actually get-- maybe not everyone--
but who in their sane mind would leave that?
Right?
Now, I know a lot of adults who are trying to get that back
from their partners, which is probably a good idea.
But as an adolescent, if you think about it,
nature's got to do something to the brain to say,
I know that's a pretty good setup you got.
But I need you to go from the familiar home,
where you're comfortable and where you're safe,
to try something that's unfamiliar, that's
uncomfortable, that's uncertain instead of certain,
and that's potentially unsafe.
So what are you going to do if you're
nature to make sure that this kid when he's 55 years old
isn't still living at home?
You've got to do something to this brain.
That's what we're going to look into the details.
So part of it is you make the emotions revved up.
Because emotion in many ways is evoking motion.
It gets the being with the emotion to do something.
That's what really emotion is all about, evoking motion.
So we know that's going on.
The limbic area attachment is changing,
so it says, hey, I'm not going to turn to my parents anymore.
I'll use them as an ATM machine and a driver.
But they're not going to be my source of support.
They're not going to be my homies anymore.
I'm going to find some other people with whom
I turn to when I need support, because they're getting ready.
So this is very, very important.
Now, if you bend your fingers over the top,
this is the cortex.
This is the outer bark of the brain.
That's what cortex mean.
It's sometimes called the neo-mammalian cortex.
So the limbic area is the old mammalian brain,
200 million years old.
The cortex is the new mammalian brain.
The frontal area would be from your last knuckles forward,
is the largest in primates.
And the front of the front area is the most elaborated
in human beings.
It's called the prefrontal cortex.
It's what you hear about all the time.
It's why we have such big foreheads compared
to our ape cousins.
We have this very elaborated prefrontal cortex.
So the frontal area in general allows
you to think, conceive of things, program,
think about history, think about coming here to a meeting,
and bringing lunch, and making sure you
get to the next appointment on time, all this stuff.
So the frontal area is really important.
And this is the area that matures last.
So what happens in this adolescent brain
is basically this.
In utero, the brain stem is well developed.
The limbic area is partially developed.
The cortex is based undeveloped at birth.
What this means is that once the baby is out,
interactions with the world in addition to genes
will influence the way neurons connect to each other.
So neurons firing leads to neurons rewiring.
And Eric Kandel won the Nobel Prize for this in 2000
showing that when you get neurons to fire off,
they actually activate genes in a way that
gets them to increase their connections to each other,
increase even their myelin, which
is like a sheath that increases the speed of interconnection
among the neurons the way they communicate with each other.
100 times faster and 30 times shorter
refractory period, resting period between firings.
So 100 times 30 is 3,000.
When you've myelinated neurons, you basically
are allowing them to be coordinated and efficiently
communicating with each other 3,000 times more.
So when you watch people do the Olympics,
those Olympic athletes have been practicing something
for so many hours, they've laid down myelin.
Because skill building is based on myelin growth.
So here's what happens in childhood.
For the first dozen years, more or less, this brain
is like a sponge.
It just soaks in adult knowledge,
soaking in, soaking in, soaking in.
But then nature does something really interesting.
Instead of just having the neurons build
their synaptic connections with each other pretty progressively
throughout childhood, once the switch happens--
and this is only something we've known for the last 15 years.
The studies at my university, UCLA,
and also National Institute of Mental Health,
we've studied kids across the developmental period
and have found the following shocking findings.
The remodeling that no one expected to be happening-- we
just thought the brain would continue to grow new stuff,
and people thought it was raging hormones
that would drive an adolescent mad, which
is a second myth we're going to bust right now.
The changes in adolescence are not due to raging hormones.
Puberty happens, and hormones rise.
But I don't even know what a raging hormone would be.
Hey, I' a hormone, and I'm really mad.
What does it mean to be raging hormones?
It's not from raging hormones, but everyone believes that.
And of course, if it is raging hormones,
there's absolutely nothing you as a parent or you
as an adolescent can do about it.
I'm walking around in this body, and I
got these hormones that are raising out of control,
so of course I don't know what I'm doing.
I've got raging hormones.
But if it's the brain, no matter how that brain is changing,
we now know what you do with your mind can change
the function and even the structure of your brain.
So the empowerment that we're about to talk about
is profound.
It clarifies what the myths are, but the truths
turn out to be liberating.
So the first thing that was found which shocked everyone
was that the brain, instead of to continue
to develop synaptic connections, actually
starts destroying them.
It's called pruning.
The brain starts to eliminate not only
the synaptic connections that were laid down, some of them,
but it actually starts destroying neurons themselves.
You get less synaptic connections, the connections
among neurons, and even less neurons.
And everyone was going, wow, what's going on?
And then as the adolescent years progressed,
a second part of remodeling happened.
Because the first is you're getting rid of basically
connections you don't need.
The second thing that's part of remodeling
besides the first part, pruning, is
that you start to lay down myelin in a big way.
So the adolescent brain is going to become
more specialized by getting rid of circuits it doesn't need
and then more efficient in its coordination and balance-- more
integrated, if you will-- by taking the remaining
connections and allowing them to be 3,000 times better
at communicating with each other.
So the second dozen years of life, of course
you continue to learn with laying down
new synaptic connections.
But you're going from being a generalist of a child
to a specialist of an adolescent.
Now, what this means for an adolescent--
and I wrote the "Brainstorm" book for both adolescents
and adults to read-- for the adolescent reading it,
I say to them directly, because there
is no book, for anybody there's no book written
about these brain changes for the general public.
There's nothing.
And I wanted something to be available for my own kids,
or their friends, or people I work with.
I'm an adolescent psychiatrist.
So an adolescent themselves could read this
and know from the inside out what's going on.
When you go around to high schools, which
I'm doing a lot lately, I say, what
have you been taught about the brain?
And this is what the kids say, whether it's
7th grade or 12th grade, nothing.
They've been taught nothing about their brain.
I mean, there are exceptions in charter schools now,
but for the most part, people are not taught anything
about their brain, which is amazing because we know a lot.
And when you know about the brain,
you can do something about its function and structure,
even if you have genetic risks going on,
as we're studying at UCLA.
So here's the deal.
Remodeling in the adolescent brain
takes place starting around 12, and it goes on to the mid-20s.
This is why I say adolescence doesn't end when the 19 year
birthday follows the year and you turn 20.
It doesn't end.
It's the mid-20s.
So this adolescent period of remodeling
is happening all through the mid-20s.
Now, that's really interesting, because it
means that they're going to be continuing changes.
So let's review some of these basic myths.
We said number one, adolescence is more than the teenage years.
Number two, we said that this period of time
is a time when the brain is changing,
and it's not raging hormones that
lead to the significant changes of adolescence.
It's actually brain remodeling.
A third myth that you may have heard,
which is what was said in the introduction,
is many adults and therefore the adolescents
who are hearing the adults say this approach
adolescence with unbelievable trepidation instead
of celebration.
And this trepidation is that, oh my god,
it's going to be a horrible period I've just
got to get through.
And what I want to urge you to consider
is that in fact, what I'm about to outline
suggests just the opposite.
It's a period you can cultivate well
if you understand what's happening in the brain.
And when you understand what's happening in the brain,
you can actually build these circuits
and make them stronger intentionally.
So it's not a period to just get through.
It's actually period to celebrate and cultivate.
So that's a third myth.
A fourth myth is that the adolescent period
is a period of risk, which is true.
That's not a myth, but only because adolescents
are impulsive.
And I want to describe one thing that nature
does beyond impulsivity.
So early teenage years, it's true.
Adolescents do not have a space between an impulse
and an action as much as they will later on.
But here's the story that is kind of shocking as a parent.
And for those you who have younger kids,
I don't want to scare you, but this is just the truth.
Adolescents are three times more likely during the period
12 to 24 to be seriously injured or die from preventable causes.
Even though their body is much stronger than any other time,
not only stronger in muscle strength,
but if you get an infection, it's
better to be an adolescent.
You can fight it better than a kid can, a child,
or better than an adult can.
So they have stronger bodies but three times
more likely to get seriously hurt or die.
Now, why is that?
Part of it is impulsivity.
That part is true.
But it turns out there's something else that
has been discovered that blew everybody away too.
And it has a weird name, but it's
called hyper-rational thinking.
And if you think about it this way,
hyper-rational thinking is driven by two processes.
One is a limbic process.
We talked about the limbic area having
an evaluative system that works.
And the evaluation of the limbic area during adolescence
is very different from adulthood and different from childhood.
And basically nature did this, said, OK,
let's say I'm an adolescent who's 19 years old.
And my parents-- and sadly this is a true story,
but I'm going to get inside the head of the kid, which we don't
know-- my parents give me a car that's really fun to drive.
And I think driving this car 100 miles an hour
down Wilshire Boulevard is going to be really cool.
Now, for me to take the risk of doing
that, which on the one hand, you could say, well,
if you're trying to get this kid ready to experience
the unfamiliar, the uncomfortable, the uncertain,
and the dangerous, to leave home,
you got to do something to the brain
to get me to do dangerous things, which
is basically true.
If I don't take risks I'm never going to leave home.
So I got to take risks.
So it takes this evaluative circuit and says,
what's the upside of doing that?
Well, the upside is my friends will think I'm cool,
which is great because I want to have friends,
because having friends will keep me alive.
So that's good.
And it'll be really exciting.
Because I was playing these video games driving
100 miles an hour.
That was fun.
So this car will be just like an elaboration
of the video game I was playing.
And what's the downside of that?
I could run into somebody.
I could get killed.
I could kill somebody.
So what happened to me when my son was one,
so a long time ago now, is my favorite professor
was pulling out of his house, and he
was run over by a 19-year-old driving
95 miles an hour on a surface street not far from here.
And he was just killed instantly.
And I felt terrible obviously for my professor,
for his family, for the whole field.
He was a major figure in our discipline.
But for the kid, he's not a bad kid.
He had what was called hyper-rational thinking.
He got the idea of driving 100 miles an hour.
He actually planned it.
This wasn't impulsive.
And he knew about the dangers.
This is the thing, another myth.
Adults say, well, adolescents just don't know.
Let's just inform them of the dangers.
But actually they know about dangers.
Their limbic area just skews the balance that says, yeah,
I know about that.
But this would be so much fun.
They just don't care about the danger.
So what I suggest in the book, and there
are exercises called mindsight exercises teaching about seeing
your own mind clearly or other people's mind,
is if that kid had had an internal compass that
wasn't driven by his limbic area and cortical
processing of information but instead--
and this is now we're just beginning to learn about
this-- literally there are Parallel Distributed
Processors-- PDP processors-- around the intestine
and around the heart.
The intrinsic nervous system of the heart
and the nervous system around the intestines
are PDP processors.
You know about PDP right?
So PDP can process information.
It doesn't do it with logical reasoning.
It's not a logical formula.
But it has a deep source of wisdom.
And what initial findings suggest
is that kids who are in touch with literally what
their gut is telling them and what their heart is telling
them would choose not to drive a car that fast.
Even though their cortex would say,
yeah, that sounds like a great idea.
What's wrong with it?
And their limbic area skew would say, yeah, that sounds cool.
100 miles an hour, you can do it.
You did it in the video game.
Why can't you do it in a car?
It's the same thing really.
Steering wheel, gas pedal, what's the problem?
Your gut would tell you something
doesn't feel right about this.
And I am choosing not to do it.
Because adolescents have a natural, as you can see,
push against the status quo of adults.
So if an adult policeman says, the law is
you have to go 35 miles an hour down Wilshire,
or to your parent says, hey, you could have this car,
but don't drive fast.
There's a part of an adolescent brain which
is literally programmed from millions of years of evolution
to say, I don't care about that.
I know about what they said, but I don't care about it.
Even to the point where you probably know this study,
but let's say kids who are going to pick up smoking.
They learn to smoke usually during adolescence.
So they figured out, how can we get adolescents not to smoke?
And what did they do?
They showed them pictures of graveyards
to scare them and say, look, if you smoke,
this is what your lung is going to look like.
It's going to have big holes in it, cancer, black,
all this stuff.
No drop in smoking.
They said, look, it's not good.
It's not even so cool to smoke, no drop in smoking.
So what would you do if you're a creative advertisement person
to try to make adolescents not pick up smoking
or if they picked it up stop it?
You could have the parents smoke and they'd say I wouldn't.
It's like that.
It's just like that, exactly.
So they did something like that.
They said, hey, hey, did you know
that those really rich adults who own the cigarette companies
know it's going to get your body addicted,
and they're stealing your money and laughing all the way
to the bank because they want to get
you to be addicted to this crap?
And the kids stopped smoking.
They said, I'm not going to let the adults do that to me.
It was brilliant, absolutely brilliant.
Because they understood the whole thing.
Now, speaking of addiction we've talked
about hyper-rational functioning of the cortex and limbic area.
The second reason kids are doing risky behavior
is really important to identify, and it
relates to addiction too, is there's
a circuit that's distributed up from the brain
stem, the limbic area of the cortex called the reward
circuit.
You've probably heard about this because it's in the news a lot.
It's driven by a neurotransmitter.
The chemical allows the neurons to communicate
with each other called dopamine.
And what nature has done with the reward circuit
is basically some studies suggest
dropped the baseline levels of dopamine
and raised the release level.
And you could say, why would you do that?
Well, partly the reason to do that is
one of the major things that gets dopamine to be released,
which this adolescent would be more driven to
because they're kind of bored because their baseline is low
and they want to do something, one
of the major things that releases it is novelty.
Novelty, doing something new gets the dopamine released.
So you want to do something new and create something new,
always be challenged.
That's fantastic.
So that's another way that nature
gets a kid who's now an adolescent to do risky things
and feel kind of, let's see, without trying something.
And when parents realize this, and the beautiful thing
about the book is now that it's out, is when parents read this
and they have their adolescents read it,
people are going to understand, OK,
there's a natural drive to push toward novelty.
And you can do it in a constructive way
or just say, oh, that's bad.
And then the adolescent will do things
that are really dangerous.
So there's a way of building in healthy novelty exploration.
So those are the two ways, hyper-rational cortical limbic
functioning and changes in the dopamine reward circuitry.
Now, sadly, just to make sure we talk about some downsides
here, because the dopamine system
is the number one system involved in anything that you
can get addicted to, whether it's video games, or gambling,
or high sugar content foods, or ***, or ***, or alcohol,
every single one of those things that you
can get addicted to captures your dopamine circuit.
This is why we believe adolescents are absolutely
the most vulnerable to become addicted.
If you're going to become addicted to something
in your life, it's most likely to happen during this period,
likely because of this dopamine change.
So we want to try to understand that, not just ignore it,
and do something positive to support it.
So let me summarize all these brain
changes in the following four elements.
We're going to look at the upside and downside.
And then I want you to think about these four elements
I'm about to talk about and how they relate to your life now
an adult-- because I'm looking around.
I think most people are adults.
There may be a couple of adolescents in the room--
but also to remember your own adolescence.
OK, so, I'm kind of an acronym addict.
So luckily this forms an acronym.
And if you had to ask yourself the question, what
is the essence of what Dan said, or what's
the essence of adolescence?
It spells the word essence.
So this is useful.
So let's review what we just covered.
So this is going to be a review of all this stuff,
and it's going to look at the upsides and downsides of each
of these four things.
The first is E-S, Emotional Spark.
We've said that the subcortical regions, the body, the brain
stem, and the limbic area, nature
has made more active in an adolescent.
And this has the downside with this more motion
is that adolescents can be moody.
They can be irritable.
As one adolescent told me to write in the book,
sometimes we feel one way.
Sometimes we feel another way, and chill out.
They want the adults to know not take it so personally.
These emotions are big, and they're hard.
It can be really disorienting to have so many big emotions going
on.
And that's a natural part of evoking motion
that nature's created.
It isn't a problem unless we make it a problem.
Now, some kids can get depressed.
They can develop all sorts of disorders.
In fact, the pruning process is one reason
we believe that all of the major psychiatric disorders
like schizophrenia, or depression, or manic depressive
illness have their onset in adolescence,
because the pruning is carving away vulnerable circuits.
We didn't understand that before,
and now we believe that's the major mechanism.
The good news is we can reverse that in many ways.
So early intervention can be really important.
But anyway, the first thing is emotional spark.
What's the upside of that?
This is a period where life becomes on fire,
and you feel passionate about something.
You really care about something.
And this passion fuels a sense of vitality.
And the sad thing is many adolescents
get crushed by adults' response at home
and adults' response in school and in society.
And so this is really sad, because then of course
you will get demoralized and feel
disempowered and disenfranchised.
So the opportunity, for example here in an organization
like Google, is to think about how
to shift the culture of conversation about adolescents.
And it's a huge opportunity to change the way we
as a culture approach this period of time.
So E-S, emotional spark.
S-E, Social Engagement, the adolescent, as we said,
because of these limbic changes, is
driven to be more with peers than their parents.
And that's healthy.
That's normal.
That's fine.
Adolescents need their peers to survive out in the world.
Peer group membership is important.
What's the downside?
If you give up morality for membership,
then peer pressure will crush your internal sense of values.
So membership is really important.
Parents need to realize that.
So when a kid comes to you and says,
I need to go to this party.
Joe and Sammy are all going, and I got to go.
I got to go.
You need to understand when your adolescent feels like it's
a matter of life and death, that's from millions of years
of evolution that tells them if they're not
a member of a group, they are likely to die.
They're not just making that up.
It's not just west Los Angeles culture or something like that.
It's in their genes.
Now, that doesn't mean you need to let them go to the party.
Or if they say, I need to wear a certain-- well, not
these shoes, but a certain kind of shoe or I'm
not going to fit in, it's a life and death matter.
That's how it feels.
You can accept the feeling even if you don't purchase the shoe.
So that's a really big step in increasing the communication
across the generational divide.
Now, the upside of social engagement
is that every research study, every single one
on your medical health, on your mental health, on how long
you live and your happiness, without exception,
every single one show that the number one
factor is supportive relationships.
You begin to learn to move away from your family
and develop these social networks of support
in adolescence.
So these are skills that can last a lifetime
and be incredibly positive.
So social engagement is S-E.
What's N?
So E-S, emotional spark, S-E, social engagement,
N is Novelty.
Novelty, as we said, the dopamine system change
gets you to try new things.
The downside of it, you can do risky things,
and you have unfortunately this increased risk of getting hurt.
Right?
What's the upside?
The upside is novelty is exciting.
It allows you to be driven to try new things,
to do new things, to take risks, to be brave,
to be courageous, to live with this kind of sense of gusto.
And that's great.
So we have to learn to manage this novelty-seeking drive.
And finally C-E, what is it?
C-E is Creative Explorations.
The creative exploration of the adolescent brain
is to try to push against the adult status quo.
And nature has designed this from a large evolutionary point
of view for the following reason.
Basically as a child, you're the sponge
soaking in the adult world.
As adults, you figure out what the world is like,
and you try to find your niche in it.
You go home.
You're tired.
You want to collapse.
You watch TV, in a modern times.
If we did not as a species have the adolescent period of time,
we would never be as adaptive as we
are to an ever-changing world.
You need to have a continual source of individuals,
children now turned adolescents, who
approach the status quo and say, I don't buy it.
I don't buy this.
I'm not going to settle for this.
I am going to try to create a new world.
I am going to adapt to the world that's here
and make my own world.
So if you think about art, and if you think about music,
and if you think about science, and if you
think about technology, you know that all the major innovations
primarily come from adolescent minds.
Now, think about it.
That's creative explorations.
Now, what's the downside of it?
The downside of creative exploration is as a child,
you just say, hey, this is the world I'm being given.
I'm learning to a deal with it, learning
to deal with it, fine, fine, fine.
But then when you get to be an adolescent, you go, hey.
This world I'm being given, it's kind of not so good.
In fact, it sucks.
In fact, I've got to try to change it.
And that's a burden, and it can be disorienting.
It can be frightening.
So we need to realize, especially
in these days when so much information is being shared,
and as you probably know-- I don't remember the ratios.
You can tell me-- we get information now in a week--
I think it's a week time, right?--
that is more information than 100 years ago,
people would get in a lifetime.
I think that's the ratio, something like that.
So think about an adolescent who's
just emerging from childhood who was built on the net, right?
Who's soaking in all the stuff, and their brain's
being flooded by all the changes that
are going on in Somalia, in the Ukraine, in the whole world.
Everything is blowing up, and people are killing each other.
I mean, it is overwhelming.
But 100 years ago, it was nothing like that.
We have this longer period of adolescence now, of course,
because adolescence used to be a lot shorter, a couple years.
Now it's a dozen years or more.
So we have this long period of adolescence,
and what's happening now is adolescence is being filled
with this stuff at a time when they realize
they are going to be responsible for this world
and they don't just accept it as is.
So that's the downside.
What's the upside?
Creative explorations allows us to create a new world.
So what I do when I speak to schools,
and I want to have you consider this,
is if we change the cultural conversation
around adolescence, two big things can happen.
Number one for adolescents themselves,
if we change the way the curriculum addresses this--
and now there's a province up in Canada, a school district here
in the United States, and in a couple
individual schools in the US too where
we're thinking about making a "Brainstorm" approach
to middle school and high school.
You would say, instead of doing the same old thing you'd
do for a younger child, you would
say, let's build on the emotional spark, the passion,
and have kids approach, let's say, the world's problems
of what they feel really compelled
to really try to improve.
Famine, violence, climate change, then I
say, OK, then what would you do with social engagement?
That's the emotional spark piece.
The social engagement, instead of having
to compete with each other, where you say,
hey, do the best on the spelling bee.
Get the best grades.
Get the best SAT scores so you can get in the best college
so you can get in the best graveyard.
That's basically what we're telling them really.
But instead, we are a collaborative species.
And not much is done in school to build
on our collaborative nature that's inherent to adolescents.
So what if you say, OK, instead of competing with each other,
if you have a competitive streak that's beautiful,
let's compete with the world's problems.
And let's get together in groups of collaborative nature
where we know from studies collective intelligence rises
above individual intelligence every time.
So let's have you actually build with each other
so that when you beat the competition, everybody wins.
That's the kind of setup which would be win-win.
And I'll bet you that when you allow the adolescent mind that
moves towards novelty and has creative explorations built
into these millions of years of evolution,
I'll bet you you're going to find solutions
to some of these world problems that we adults have never
been able to solve.
These are some of the world's most pressing problems,
and there's an untapped resource of incredible creativity
and courage.
So that's for the adolescents.
It's an incredible opportunity to empower them.
And in the "Brainstorm" book, I have these mindsight exercises
that allow the adolescent or the adult reading the book
to actually build the integrative fibers of the brain
than are the basis of well-being,
emotional intelligence, and also the basis of innovation
that they can actually build them.
So that's for the adolescent.
The final thing I want to say is think about it
for your own life.
How many people do you know as adults
who made it through adolescence but they lost their essence?
They lost their emotional spark.
They've lost social support, social engagement.
They don't do new things in their life,
and they aren't creatively challenging their mind
with creative exploration.
And they've lost the essence of living a vital life.
When I was writing this up, I went, oh my gosh,
because I'm very familiar with a field called neuroplasticity,
which is how we as adults keep our brain continually
growing strong throughout the lifespan.
And in a book called "Mindsight" I
show you how you do that even with someone in their 90s.
So we know that for sure.
What you do in your mind can keep your brain strong.
If you had to pick the top four aspects of life that
will keep your brain growing strong and even
being integrated, it would be emotional spark.
Keep passion in your life for what you do.
Social engagements, keep your social connections,
the network of support really strong.
Novelty, give your brain new things it does.
Try new activities.
And creative explorations, challenge your mind
in ways that are not just the status quo
but really keep you pushing the boundaries.
Emotional spark, social engagement,
novelty, creative explorations, exactly what
we need as adults too.
And then I realized, wow, maybe some adults
I've seen over these 25 years of being in practice,
maybe they're angry at their adolescents.
Outside of their awareness but deep in their hearts,
they know this adolescent has an essence that they themselves
have lost.
So what I say to the adult very gingerly who's
also reading the book so they won't just toss it in the trash
can, I say, look, if this essence
is something you would like to get back, if you follow
these exercises too, you can get it back too.
It's never too late to revive your essence.
I know for a fact you can take someone even in their 90s
and revive it.
And so when we do this then, the exciting thing
is everybody wins.
You improve the relationship between adults and adolescents.
You'll tap into an incredible resource
of innovation, courage, and creativity
in the adolescent group.
You'll allow the adult who's lost their essence
to get really revived.
And so everybody wins.
So the exciting thing is getting this change
in the cultural conversation for adolescents and adults
out in the world.
And the great news is if we do that, there's
this incredible opportunity to actually make
this world a better place for all of us to live.
So thank you so much for your attention,
and we have time for discussion.
Thank you.
AUDIENCE: You talked about pruning
and then the myelin growth stage.
Do you know when those two stages tend to occur?
DANIEL SIEGEL: Yeah, they're a little different male
and female.
So female starts about a year and a half sooner than males.
And when you watch the path, they happen differently.
But basically, it's the first few years is a lot of pruning,
and the pruning sort of comes down.
And then the myelination, which is the white matter
or the brain, is increasing later on.
So if you saw a graph, it would be
kind of overlapping like that.
So the first two, three, four years, a lot, a lot of pruning.
And then you see the following years a lot of myelination.
And the myelination goes on into the 20s.
Now, here's the thing.
This is sort of a myth, but it's just a misconception.
People say, oh, the prefrontal cortex is just immature.
That's why adolescents are immature.
And I really think we should stop using the word immature.
Because immature applies you are one
place only because you're getting
ready to go somewhere else.
I think the adolescent period is a period where you're basically
growing these integrative fibers throughout the brain.
And so the brain is becoming more integrated.
And the prefrontal cortex is like a profound integrative
area that's just making sure all the other regions that
are growing.
So you really have to look at specific areas,
and they're a little different male and female.
But if you look at the graph, you can see it that way.
And I can refer you to some papers.
AUDIENCE: And one follow-up based
on that is should you be doing something different
as a parent during those different stages?
Or do you kind of consider that all part of adolescence?
DANIEL SIEGEL: You mean pruning and myelination?
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
DANIEL SIEGEL: Well, they go together.
But here's the way I would think about it.
I would think that, and what I would say to the adolescent
as a parent of an adolescent is, it's a use it
or lose it principle.
So I'd say to a kid who's into music, if you really like music
and you're 12, 13 years old, pruning happens.
And basically nature is going to say,
if you're not using a certain circuit, dump it.
You don't need it.
So this period of adolescence, I say to my adolescents,
is, if you really like music, just exposure yourself
to a lot of music.
Play a lot of music.
Do music.
That's great.
Do it.
Because this is the time your brain
is going to be specializing.
I would let them know that.
Same thing with athletics, same thing with anything.
That's a good time to do something.
The myelinating is by practice, you actually lay down myelin.
And so I would just say that and then back off.
So it isn't like you say, you should be doing this.
You should say, this is information you should have,
and you make your decision.
That's a very different thing than saying,
let's avoid pruning.
Let's avoid-- every morning.
And some adolescents have told me
they're a little worried about the pruning.
And so you want to say, you can use your mind
to keep those circuits going.
Yeah.
AUDIENCE: I find it fascinating about the PDP
process in your heart or gut.
In that sense, you mentioned the example the adolescents are
actually know from those part that the danger, the risk.
DANIEL SIEGEL: Yes.
AUDIENCE: So what's the practical implication?
DANIEL SIEGEL: So the practical thing is this-- yes, very good.
So you have your intestines, and you have your heart.
And they're going to process information.
There is a pathway from these PDP processors up lamina 1,
layer one of the spinal cord, and up the 10th cranial nerve,
the vagus nerve.
You don't need to remember.
If you want to know those details, they're there.
But anyway, they're basically very limited pathways
that come up.
They come up into the brain to a very specific area called
the anterior insula and the anterior cingulate.
For most people, the way you get the processing
that goes on there into the part of the brain, this cortex
that's going to make ultimate decisions, go, no go.
Do I do it?
Do I not do it?
Let's say for the driving, you can
have the processing going on.
But the pathway to this prefrontal decision-making
circuit is not well developed.
So even though their gut would be processing don't do it,
their cortex would never receive the signal.
So in the book, I teach exercises
where we know how to increase the anterior insula
activity and size.
And I put them in the book.
Literally we now know-- this is the amazing thing-- we now
know if you do this exercise, you will stimulate the-- I
call it SNAG-- Stimulate Neuronal Activity Growth.
You're going to SNAG the anterior insula
so that when you stimulate to grow studies
show it will not only fire.
You get it to fire.
Neurons which fire together wire together is the fun statement.
And you get it to grow.
Then that kid-- we need to do the studies,
but this is what I suggest in the book
because all the research points in this direction--
is that the person who has that kind of mindfulness,
that kind of reflection, that kind of interoception
is what it's called, they will allow the wisdom of the body
to influence the cortical circuits of decision.
Does that make sense?
So you're basically strengthening--
I don't know if the computer analogy-- you're strengthening
the PDP processing in one region that's
geographically separate from another.
And you're laying down the cables
and so that it reaches the ultimate decision--
because this doesn't make decisions.
This makes decisions what the body is going to do.
This doesn't do that.
So we want to have this have literally--
and what I teach the adolescent reading is I say,
this is how it works.
Your cortex is vulnerable because it's hyper-rational.
You want to let your own wisdom, not your parents' rules,
not the law, because of course you're pushing against those.
You want to let your own wisdom be your guide.
I call that an internal compass.
That's how you develop it.
AUDIENCE: I'm curious what you were saying about the drastic
link-
DANIEL SIEGEL: Come right up to the mic so we can hear.
AUDIENCE: Curious about the drastic lengthening
of the adolescence period.
You were saying it used to be a couple years,
and now it's like a dozen years.
I assume that cultural factors would have a big part of that.
But adolescence, as you're defining it,
is really biological processes.
So what are the interactions there?
DANIEL SIEGEL: Yeah, it's a great question.
So let me just lay out the facts as we know them.
The external marker that we use from let's say 150 years ago
is the onset of puberty.
So puberty had its onset around 15 or 16 years of age
150 years ago across many cultures.
And for girls, it was about a year, year and a half
before boys.
So there's a little bit different male female
difference.
And then girls would actually get married and settled
down around two years later in terms of raising a family.
And boys would be maybe two or three years later.
So for a female, the adolescent period was about two years.
For males, about 3 1/2, 4 years.
That was basically 150 years ago.
What has changed now is that puberty
just as a marker, rough marker, has come from 15 or 16 down.
And now some girls are having the beginning
of their menstrual cycle around 11, 10, some even 9
for reasons we don't understand.
It looks like it's related to nutrition.
Boys it's coming down early about a year and a half
later in terms of development of *** maturation.
And roughly, it's not exactly the same
because you can have someone delay puberty who actually
has started adolescence in the brain.
This is why we know they're not exactly the same thing.
But as a rough estimate, then this stretch
then where now you have people starting the adolescent period
around 12, more or less, they're not
assuming adult responsibilities.
And also the brain is remodeling way into the mid-20s.
So this is definitely culturally dependent.
If we could do these same scans on people from Papua New
Guinea, maybe they'd have a two-year period.
We'd have to look at that.
There's a center that we've been running for 10 years called
the Center for Culture, Brain, and Development.
And just to respond to your really important big question,
culture shapes the timing of brain development.
But the periods that we go through
seem to be biologically built in.
The question is their onset and their offset
may be culturally determined.
AUDIENCE: So it's almost like the adult responsibilities
kind of clamps down on this process and terminates it.
DANIEL SIEGEL: Well, that would be the interesting thing
to study subcultures where people do settle down,
get married.
And we don't have enough brain scans to see yet.
Absolutely, that may be what happens.
And of course what we know is that it's a cyclical thing.
What I write about, which gets people
very interested in this whole thing,
is that the mind is not just about brain activity.
It's about what happens in a culture too,
like what's shaped by our information
sharing in the internet, for example,
and what's shaped across media and stuff like that.
So mental processes are both cultural.
That is they're relational, how we share information.
And they're embodied.
They're what's happening throughout the whole body.
So when you look at it that way and the developing mind
kind of explorers this, then you realize, half of the story
is the body.
The other half is our relational world of information sharing.
And so they influence each other.
Yes, and we can do one more question?
Yeah, great.
AUDIENCE: There's a book I read a while back
called "Hold Onto Your Kids" by Gabor Mate.
DANIEL SIEGEL: Yes.
AUDIENCE: Are you familiar with it?
DANIEL SIEGEL: I know Gabor, yeah, yes, I'm
familiar with it.
AUDIENCE: So the basic premise I took away
from that was that the attachment of adolescents
to peers should not be encouraged but really
redirected to the parents instead,
whereas you seem to say that peer attachment is actually
the norm and actually desirable for adolescents.
And how do you feel that parents should approach this?
DANIEL SIEGEL: Yes, thank you for pointing that out.
So first of all, what happens in modern culture is-- and there's
a very important question you were raising--
is that adolescents have a natural push away.
In all cultures we've been able to study,
so in our center, the Center for Culture, Brain, and Development
at UCLA, we looked at all cultures
that have been studied.
And every culture has an adolescent period
where the adolescents push against adults.
Now, it could be in subtle ways like if you're
in a society where they're weaving from the top down,
well, you're going to weave from the bottom up.
That's your so-called pushing away.
But in every society we're able to study, there's a push away.
Now, in most societies except ours,
there are non-parental adults who
serve important mentor relationships guiding
the development of adolescents.
That's extremely important.
But it's not the parent.
So where I would disagree the Gabor,
and we had a talk about this recently at a meeting up
in British Columbia, I don't agree that it's unhealthy,
as he points out, for adolescents
to push away from their parents.
I don't agree with that at all.
What I do agree with is the sentiment
that adolescents should be launched into the world
without any adult involved with them.
The challenge we have in this culture,
as you've seen from what happened at Penn State
and what happens in some religious organizations,
is when you get a non-family member adult, sometimes even
a family member, involved that's not a parent involved
in an adolescent's life, there's abuse that goes on.
So understandably, we as parents are
very concerned about when you see an adult starting
to take on a mentor role with an adolescent boy or girl.
So I don't have an easy answer to this.
But the general issue is adolescents need each other.
They need to have attachment with each other.
It's extremely important for their development.
And if you look at the work of Susan Harter, H-A-R-T-E-R,
I think the research absolutely bears that out.
They should be becoming attached to each other.
It's a natural part of millions of years of evolution
that that's a natural thing.
Should they push away completely from adults, their parents
including?
Not at all, so that I agree with Gabor.
For sure, they shouldn't push away completely.
So the balance would be how we as a society
can figure out how do you have some kind
of institutionalized mentor program
where you have non-parental adults who
are an active part of the essence
of adolescence supporting and adolescent's growth?
So I think we need to get our minds all together
saying, how are we going to invent this,
minimizing the risks.
Because abuse is a serious risk.
I mean, just look at what would happen in these things
I'm talking about.
So we need to do it in a safe way,
but we absolutely need it, because our culture basically
lacks it.
And in that sense, it's really true.
We need to keep adults involved in adolescents' lives
but also support them in having attachments with each other.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, good, thank you.
RON: I have one final question.
DANIEL SIEGEL: Yes.
RON: This is Google, and outliers are kind of the norm
here, so I would like to ask--
DANIEL SIEGEL: That's why I feel so at home at Google.
RON: This onset at 12 and ending at 24,
what's the variability on that?
DANIEL SIEGEL: Yeah, so first of all, saying it ends at 24
is an estimate of when the remodeling generally
seems to come to some kind of completion.
But the brain continues to change throughout the lifespan.
So what I would say is this.
I would say adults who can hold onto their adolescent essence
are going to live the most vital kind of life.
And if you mean by an outlier that you're
kind of thinking outside the box,
and pushing the limit of things, and all that's
a part of adolescent creative explorations and novelty,
that's a beautiful thing.
And so the number 24 doesn't mean adolescence should end.
So a lot of these talks, people come to me,
I think I'm still adolescent.
I go, good for you.
So seriously, I mean, it's a funny thing.
The word adolescence has in some connotations
a negative spin, like, oh, you're just adolescent.
What I hope we can do-- literally we as a society--
is change the cultural conversation
where you realize the essence of adolescence
is actually the essence of adulthood.
And we shouldn't let it go.
And we should support people who make the outliers really
be filled with inspiration for everyone.
RON: Thank you.
Maybe the natural follow-up question
is, do you have people come up to you
and say, my spouse is an adolescent,
and what can I do about that?
DANIEL SIEGEL: Yes, I do.
But that could be a lot of fun.
RON: Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, and we'll continue the conversation
outside, have book signing.
Thank you.
DANIEL SIEGEL: Thank you.