Question: what is different between a teenagers brain and adults brain

Iroise Dumontheil answered on 8 Nov 2016:

Using neuroimaging methods we have been able to find out that teenagers’ brains have thicker cortex (the surface of the brain) but less white matter (the fiber tracts connecting different parts of the cortex to each other) than adults’ brains. This is particularly true in regions like the prefrontal cortex and the temporal cortex which are involved in what we call “higher cognition”, things like decision making, planning, manipulating abstract thoughts, and interacting socially. During adolescence (teenager years) the brain structure changes, and sometimes that’s just related to age, other times it’s related to hormones and the different stages of puberty.
So that’s for the anatomy. In terms of brain activity, or function, there is a lot of research going on about this at the moment. One example of a difference is that it seems that teenagers brains show greater activity in response to emotional stimuli (for example an angry face) than children or adults’ brains, this is in particular in a brain region called the amygdala, deep in the brain, which is involved in the fight or flight response. How teenagers’ brains respond to rewards also seem to be different.
In the social domain, a part of the prefrontal cortex, behind the mniddle of the forehead, is more active in teenagers than in adults when they are asked to think about their own thoughts or someone else’s thoughts or emotions in social scenarios.