Institute For The Future

Adolescence, Bacteria, and Thinking Beyond Risk

 

David Dobbs has a typically outstanding piece in this month's National Geographic about teenage behavior, arguing, in effect, that what appears to be difficult behavior among teenagers is an adaptation that makes them more capable of learning. It is a great example of an increasingly important theme in health: That we need to move beyond just seeing risks and problems, and instead also look for strengths and assets.

 

Dobbs' argument not an easy piece to excerpt, but here are a couple key paragraphs that give a sense of his argument:

 

 

Through the ages, most answers have cited dark forces that uniquely affect the teen. Aristotle concluded more than 2,300 years ago that "the young are heated by Nature as drunken men by wine." A shepherd in William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale wishes "there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting."…Freud saw adolescence as an expression of torturous psychosexual conflict; Erik Erikson, as the most tumultuous of life's several identity crises. Adolescence: always a problem….

 

The story you're reading right now, however, tells a different scientific tale about the teen brain. Over the past five years or so, even as the work-in-progress story spread into our culture, the discipline of adolescent brain studies learned to do some more-complex thinking of its own. A few researchers began to view recent brain and genetic findings in a brighter, more flattering light, one distinctly colored by evolutionary theory. The resulting account of the adolescent brain—call it the adaptive-adolescent story—casts the teen less as a rough draft than as an exquisitely sensitive, highly adaptable creature wired almost perfectly for the job of moving from the safety of home into the complicated world outside.

This view will likely sit better with teens. More important, it sits better with biology's most fundamental principle, that of natural selection. Selection is hell on dysfunctional traits. If adolescence is essentially a collection of them—angst, idiocy, and haste; impulsiveness, selfishness, and reckless bumbling—then how did those traits survive selection? They couldn't—not if they were the period's most fundamental or consequential features.

The answer is that those troublesome traits don't really characterize adolescence; they're just what we notice most because they annoy us or put our children in danger. As B. J. Casey, a neuroscientist at Weill Cornell Medical College who has spent nearly a decade applying brain and genetic studies to our understanding of adolescence, puts it, "We're so used to seeing adolescence as a problem. But the more we learn about what really makes this period unique, the more adolescence starts to seem like a highly functional, even adaptive period. It's exactly what you'd need to do the things you have to do then."

 

 

 

This theme--that things we've perceived as problems actually serve functional purposes, and that understanding those functions along with their drawbacks--is becoming increasingly critical to understanding health and well-being. For example, some psychologists are beginning to understand depression as a useful, if high-stakes way to think deeply and critically. A couple years ago, Dobbs popularized an emerging strain of research in genetics which argues that, in effect, genes that seemed to be risky actually predispose us to risk--as well as a better chance of success in an appropriate environment.

But one of the best recent example of moving beyond just looking for health risks comes from a very different realm of health: rethinking the role of bacteria. A commentary in Nature by BYU's Martin Blaser from a couple weeks ago argued that, in effect, overprescribing antibiotics--an effort to manage and eliminate risk--may have, over the past few decades made us much more susceptible to diseases like esophageal cancer. As Maryn McKenna notes, we've only begun to understand that we have bacteria inside us that are beneficial for us. In other words, we've only begun to look for anything good about bacteria.

I also think this example highlights the costs of only managing health risks: By overprescribing antibiotics, at least according to Blaser, we've left ourselves at greater risk of far more deadly and difficult conditions like asthma and cancer. By only looking to eliminate the bad, in other words, we've made things much worse.