Ragin' Caucasian - Welcome

This is a new blog dedicated to discussing various social, scientific, economic, and athletic topics. While the name implies anger and impulse, my posts are largely geered around intelligent conversation and discussion. I welcome whoever is interested. So join and chat about whatever, wherever, whenever, or whoever you have on your mind. This is truly an open blog, dedicated to discussing whatever topic is of interest to you.

Excusing Immaturity, Not Encouraging Development

Pioneering work by neuro-scientists is providing more detailed and conclusive information on brain development than was ever previously known. Particularly revealing is the work by researchers on adolescent brain development and the competing maturation of cognitive control and reward seeking parts of the brains; apparently youth's brains develop in a way that their reward seeking matures faster than their cognitive control, therefore they are more inclined to take risks, because they place more "value" on the potential reward from a given act than they do on the associated "costs" of that exact act. Although I find this interesting, and having worked with adolescents for several years I do not find this necessarily a novel idea ("adolescents do not weigh the costs and benefits of an action the same way an adult would and often make seemingly stupid decisions that get them in trouble"---stop the presses!). What I am concerned about are the potential societal ramifications related to such research. At what point do we shift from saying, "hey, teenagers brains are at a state of extreme plasticity, and certain regions are more developed than other regions" to "oh, teenagers cannot be held responsible for their actions, their brains make them take risks"? Such research and findings are very easily adapted to a dialog of excuse and dismissal of teenage behavior, whereby society no longer expects anything of its teenagers, and instead enables them to be immature and delays any sort of maturation and development until even later. I am not disputing what these researchers are finding related to the development of the adolescent brain; in fact, I am inclined to agree with them. I am concerned, however, with the applications such research has for society. When we take agency away from the individual, we leave ourselves with an overly deterministic husk of a human.