Grouchy teenagers are losing brain matter and should be left alone

A top neuroscientist has called for parents to be more sympathetic towards the grouchy behaviour of teenagers as it is all part of their brains changing and maturing. Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London, said science is only just starting to understand how a significant loss of grey matter affects teenage behaviour. She includes typical characteristics like moodiness, risk-taking, sleeping late and feelings of embarrassment towards their parents in the list of things that should be understood in the context of the maturing teenage brain. 'The teenage brain is not broken, it is not dysfunctional, it is not a defective adult brain,' she told an audience at the Hay festival, having recently published a book on the subject: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain. A top neuroscientist has called for parents to be more sympathetic to teenagers' bad habits She told the audience that the teenage brain loses 17 per cent of its grey matter between childhood and adulthood in the pre-frontal cortex, the brain's'control center'. The impact of this is something that scientists are only recently beginning to understand, she said.