Frances E. Jensen > Quotes

“Well, no,” you have to say, “your brain is sometimes an explanation; it’s never an excuse.”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“Downtime, whether it is a good night’s sleep, a nap, or simply a few quiet moments of relaxation in the middle of the day, is important for turning learning into long-term memories.”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“The most important part of the human brain—the place where actions are weighed, situations judged, and decisions made—is right behind the forehead, in the frontal lobes. This is the last part of the brain to develop, and that is why you need to be your teens’ frontal lobes until their brains are fully wired and hooked up and ready to go on their own.”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“It’s important to remember that even though their brains are learning at peak efficiency, much else is inefficient, including attention, self-discipline, task completion, and emotions. So the mantra “one thing at a time” is useful to repeat to yourself. Try not to overwhelm your teenagers with instructions.”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“This goes for giving instructions and directions, too. Write them down for your teens in addition to giving them orally, and limit the instructions to one or two points, not three, four, or five.”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“researchers at the University of Minnesota have shown that the ability to successfully switch attention among multiple tasks is still developing through the teenage years. So it may not come as a surprise to learn that of the nearly six thousand adolescents who die every year in automobile accidents, 87 percent die because of distracted driving.”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“Sleep isn’t a luxury. Memory and learning are thought to be consolidated during sleep, so it’s a requirement for adolescents and as vital to their health as the air they breathe and the food they eat. In fact, sleep helps teens eat better. It also allows them to manage stress.”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“Recent research shows that fear of losing their parents’ trust and respect is the greatest deterrent to adolescents’ drug use.”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“One of the reasons that repetition is so important lies in your teenager’s brain development. One of the frontal lobes’ executive functions includes something called prospective memory, which is the ability to hold in your mind the intention to perform a certain action at a future time—for instance, remembering to return a phone call when you get home from work. Researchers have found not only that prospective memory is very much associated with the frontal lobes but also that it continues to develop and become more efficient specifically between the ages of six and ten, and then again in the twenties. Between the ages of ten and fourteen, however, studies reveal no significant improvement. It’s as if that part of the brain—the ability to remember to do something—is simply not keeping up with the rest of a teenager’s growth and development. The parietal lobes,”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“Marijuana smoke, which users inhale and try to hold in their lungs for as long as possible, also contains 50 to 70 percent more cancer-causing chemicals than cigarette smoke contains.”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“There is solid data to show that your IQ can change during your teen years, more than anyone had ever expected. Between thirteen and seventeen years of age, one-third of people stay the same, one-third of people decrease their IQ, and a remarkable one-third of people actually significantly raise their IQ.”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“Encourage your adolescents to make lists—such as what they need to take home from school in the afternoon in order to do homework, or what they need to accomplish before going to bed.”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“This is why it is so important for teens to get more than just a good night’s sleep before an exam. They need to get that good night’s sleep right after studying for the exam.”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“could sit my kids down and tell them, Look, you don’t believe me when I say that you’re being irrational or impulsive or overly sensitive, but let me tell you why it’s your brain’s “fault.”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“When rapid or binge drinking results in a blackout—a period of time for which the person cannot remember critical information or entire events—the hippocampal damage can be severe, impairing, in particular, a person’s ability to create new long-term memories.”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“Scientists have calculated that the average adolescent actually requires nine and a quarter hours of sleep. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends adolescents get eight and a half hours to nine and a half hours of sleep a night.) Only about 15 percent of all American teenagers actually get that much on a regular basis. Worse,”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“The more you learn, the more you need to sleep, it would seem.”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“Our best tool as they enter and move through their adolescent years is our ability to advise and explain, and also to be good role models.”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“The most critical issue for teens is that THC disrupts the development of neural pathways.”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“obstacle to sleep that you should be aware of is the bright LED light of a computer screen, which should be turned off about an hour before bedtime to relax the overstimulated eyes and brain. In 2012 a study released by the Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, found that just a two-hour exposure to the self-luminous backlit displays of smartphones, computers, and other LED devices suppressed melatonin by about 22 percent.”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“It’s also the time when you can get the best results from remediation, special help, for learning and emotional issues.”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“Although adolescents must be held responsible for their actions, they generally lack mature decision-making capability, have an inflated appetite for risk, are prone to influence by peers, and do not accurately assess future consequences. For the better part of this book I’ve provided scientific evidence supporting the notion that teen brains are different from adult brains. The question the high court was considering was how to weigh those differences in sentencing people for crimes committed when they were still adolescents.”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“each year approximately five thousand people under the age of 21 die as a result of drinking. In 1965 the average age when”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“Not surprisingly, smokers are ten times more likely than nonsmokers to develop alcoholism. For”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“Because adolescents are hypersensitive to dopamine, even small rewards, if they are immediate, trigger greater nucleus accumbens activity than larger, delayed rewards. Immediacy and emotion, in other words, are linked in the decision to take a risk and in the teen brain’s inability to delay gratification.”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“Recent functional MRI studies in adolescents have shown that addiction to cocaine and meth alters connectivity patterns between the brain’s two hemispheres as well as other important regions that use dopamine as a transmitter. What is interesting about the MRI studies of Internet addicts is that they are similar in pattern.”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“You have to stuff their minds with real stories, real consequences, and then you have to do it again—over dinner, after soccer practice, before music lessons, and, yes, even when they complain they’ve heard it all before.”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“These brain regions are used every day for basic cognitive tasks, whether it’s abstract thinking, the ability to change one’s behavior in relation to changing demands in the environment, or the inhibition of inappropriate responses.”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“One conclusion, said researchers, is that alcohol use could inhibit the ability of the adolescent brain to consider multiple sources of information when making a decision, force them to use fewer strategies when learning new information, and impair their emotional functioning. Another study showed that white matter damage increased the longer a teen drank and the more withdrawal symptoms the teen experienced. Alcohol dependence has two”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“According to one recent study, each teen sends an average of 3,300 texts every month. (Girls average more: 4,050 texts a month.) Researchers at a sleep disorders clinic at JFK Medical Center in New Jersey estimate that one in five teenagers actually interrupts his or her sleep in order to text. The”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults