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Heightened positive emotions or states of arousal are indicators of a likeliness to engage in risk-taking behavior; this may be why in casinos a person who is surrounded by free alcohol and food is more likely to take a spin of the roulette wheel or a pull on a slot machine.

Addiction, therefore, is more strongly “hardwired” into the adolescent brain, and as rehabilitation centers well know, detox is much harder and fails more often in adolescents, too.

As a result, these very plastic and active synapses respond by strengthening their connections, which causes more dopamine to be released in response to each stimulating experience. Hence the craving builds much faster in the adolescent brain than in the adult brain: neurons are more active to start with and have an exaggerated plasticity in response to exposure to the addictive stimulus.

addiction is really a specialized form of memory. It is a form of synaptic plasticity, or LTP, except that the action is not in the hippocampus but in the nucleus accumbens and the ventral tegmental area—key areas for the reward circuit. Just like LTP and memory, addiction happens because a drug or another pleasurable stimulus strongly activates these synapses.

Novelty and sensation-seeking seem to motivate every act. And if it’s not about risk-taking, then it’s about rebellion—against parents, against teachers, against anyone in authority. Evolutionarily, this kind of behavior makes sense. Adolescence is the time of life when the young separate from the comfort and safety of their parents in order to explore the world and find independence.

Melatonin, a hormone critical to inducing sleep, is released two hours later at night in a teenager’s brain than it is in an adult’s. It also stays in the teenager’s system longer, and this is why it’s so hard to wake your high schooler up in the morning. Adults, on the other hand, have almost no melatonin in their system when they wake up and therefore don’t have the same groggy feeling.

Bedtime isn’t simply a way 4 the body to relax & recoup after a hard day of working, studying, or playing. It’s the glue that allows us not only 2 recollect our experiences but also to remember everything we’ve learned that day. Sleep isn’t a luxury. Memory & learning are thought 2b consolidated during sleep, so it’s a requirement 4 adolescents and as vital to their health as the air they breathe & the food they eat

The good news about brain plasticity is that it may peak in childhood and adolescence but it never entirely stops—at least not until we do. The more you learn, the easier it is to learn the next thing.

Adults also have less glutamate and dopamine and fewer receptors available; therefore they are less cognitively flexible.

adolescents have less ability to process negative information than adults do, and so they are less inclined not to do something risky, and less likely to learn from the ensuing mistake or misadventure, than adults are.

adolescents have less ability to process negative information than adults do, and so they are less inclined not to do something risky, and less likely to learn from the ensuing mistake or misadventure, than adults are.

Your teenagers are knowledgeable and self-aware enough to know that they are not automatons, and this means they have the capacity to modify and the responsibility for modifying their own behavior. This is what you must remind them—and then remind them again and again and again

"An objective basis for certain common interests on the basis of religion (or
caste) could exist for a time only if suppression on religious (or caste) grounds was practiced in the society. This was not the case in colonial India."
Even if the state didn't practice caste-based oppression, it was the everyday reality of people in colonial India🤔

Of course, religion as a social diversity or differentiation existed in real life; but making this diversity the basis of political organization, mobilization, and action or seeing it as the main inner contradiction in social, economic and political life was certainly an aspect of false consciousness.

Communalism was the false consciousness of the historical process of the last 150 years because, objectively, no real conflict between the interests of Hindus and Muslims existed.

"And if your teenager fails to comply, take away the phone or the iPod, or limit computer use to homework. Also, insist on knowing the user names and passwords for all their accounts."

Hmm this sounds a bit intrusive. Probably having a bit of trust or going with the temperament of your individual child is the key. My 12 yo, for example won't take any threat to his autonomy lightly 😀

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.

Only minutes after you learn a new thing, your synapses start to grow bigger. In a few hours they are virtually cemented into a stronger form.

one reason why communalism developed in certain areas and sections of Indian society was because of their failure to adequately develop the new national consciousness, linguistic-cultural homogeneity and class identities.

It is wrong to argue that a consciousness, ideology or social movement having no objective basis cannot be sustained for long; or the converse that if it is popular over a sufficiently long period, it must be valid or true or a correct reflection of reality. Otherwise racism or anti-Semitism or doctrines of the inferiority of women would have, by now; been proved true or valid many times over.

Also, if believed in widely and long enough, a false consciousness can get internalized within a large number of people, can be very effective and can become a major motive force for historical events. Such was, for example, the case with the success of racism in Germany in 1933 and communalism in the partition of India in IS47.

a false consciousness docs not act as its own causation, and its growth and prevalence have, in turn, to be explained. Furthermore, the concept of the falsity of a consciousness only means its lack of correspondence to reality; it does not decide the question of its political effectivity which depends on other socioeconomic and political factors.

Communalism involved either conscious deception or unconscious self-deception; the communalist was either deceiving others or more likely he was deceiving himself as well. He was deceiving himself & others because the interests he claimed to represent did not exist in real life & the
demands he undertook to fulfil were incapable of being fulfilled in
the way he had posed them &in the way he proposed to fulfil
them

an upper-class Muslim had far more in common culturally with an upper-class Hindu than with a lower-class Muslim. And a Panjabi Hindu stood closer culturally to a Panjabi Muslim than to a Bengali Hindu; and of course, the same was true of a Bengali Muslim in relation to a Bengali Hindu and a Panjabi Muslim.

the more frequently and the more recently we learn something and then recall it or use it again, the more entrenched the knowledge, whether it’s remembering the route between home and work or how to add a contact to your smartphone’s directory.

Changes associated with experience and stimulation, including brain size, gray matter volume, neuron size, dendritic branching, and the number of synapses per neuron. The more stimulation and experience, they concluded, the larger the neurons, the bushier the dendrites, the higher the number of synapses, and the thicker the gray matter.

Teenagers are different because of their brains and specifically because of two unusual aspects of their brains at this stage of their development. Their brains are both more powerful and more vulnerable than at virtually any other time in their lives. Even as they are learning things faster, their brains are eliminating gray matter and shedding neurons.

Teenagers may look like adults, they may even think like adults in many ways, and their ability to learn is staggering, but knowing what teenagers are unable to do—what their cognitive, emotional, and behavioral limitations are—is critically important.