First Article - Hope you like it!
Our Amazing Brains
by Danika Saxon
Our brains are amazing things. Where would we be without our brains? We wouldn’t be alive, that’s where! So, be thankful for your brain. But in all seriousness, our teenage brains are incredible organs. As a teenager, our brains become more stimulated with hormones. There is no doubt that these hormones do strange things to our minds and bodies. How many times do we ask ourselves, “Why did I just do/say/think that?” We do many strange things that we later regret or get punished for. So, why do we still do stupid things? I read an article in the National Geographic magazine called, “The New Science of the Teenage Brain” that attempted to answer that question. The article proved to be a great example of how the best lies are always the ones with a grain of truth in them.
It was an interesting article. It talked about how teenagers do stupid things not because they are “works in progress,” immature or “[our] puny developing brains fail [us],” but because we are products of natural selection and evolution. Woah, there! Natural Selection and Evolution? Really? Yes. This article actually said that we are risk takers because of Evolution.
While reading the first part of the article, I found that I was agreeing with most of what it said. The article kept explained that teenage brains are different than adult brains. And adults just misunderstand teenagers. It gave reasonable, even admirable explanations for our impulsiveness, thrill-seeking and risk-taking. He said that we just value the reward after the risk more than the risk, itself. That makes sense to me. The author of the article made us sound smart—like we know what we are doing and adults don’t give us enough credit. His perspective was comforting.
Then, he dropped the Natural Selection/Evolution bomb. He said that the reason we are all so impulsive at this stage in our lives is because natural selection picked off those who weren’t; that this was the characteristic that is most useful for us at this point in our lives. It makes sense though. If you think about it, this is the time in our lives that we make the most friends, have the most fun and are truly exposed to the world and all its parts. From an evolution perspective, the kids who made the most friends, had the most experiences and who figured out how the world works, should survive best.
Even though it made some sense to me, as a Christian, I found this article to be annoying. It gave all the credit of our wonderful brains to evolution. The only good thing that I took from reading this article was how something so wonderful sounding can be so wrong. The best lies, indeed, have a grain of truth in them. The author of the article talked about how amazing our brains were and how smart teens actually are. But then it attributes our characteristics to evolution—which is a big lie. God created us to be this way. There are no accidents in God’s plan. He wanted us to be this way for a reason.
This article serves as a reminder to us to guard our hearts. Really think about the information you are presented with. I liked the teen-praising message this man was feeding me. It could have been so easy to go along with everything that he said. But we have to remember to test everything we are presented with against scripture and what God has taught us or else we can fall into all kinds of traps.
