CNS 2027 Q&A
In 2011, sociologist David Finkelhor coined the term “juvenoia” to describe an exaggerated fear older adults have about the impact of social change on children and youth. A combination of “juvenile” and “paranoia,” juvenoia seems to pop up in every generation as a way of casting doubt on the abilities of younger generations. Yet, cognitive neuroscientists are finding that the brains of young people are uniquely poised to tackle a myriad social challenges.
“We often think that all adolescents are irrational, too emotional, or have no respect for the elderly,” says Eveline Crone of the Erasmus University Rotterdam. “But in reality, these assumptions often are more telling of how adults perceive youth than that they are actually true.”
As Crone will present in the keynote lecture at the annual CNS meeting this March in Boston, while young people in their teens through 20s often take social risks and question the status quo, that type of questioning is what is necessary to move society forward. The young adult brain benefits from the emergence of brain regions involved in reward processing, perspective taking, and prosocial behavior, all of which help attune youth to social connection and social contribution.
I spoke with Crone about her early start in cognitive neuroscience, what has changed in understanding adolescent brain development since then, and what the future might look like.
CNS: What makes you interested in the area of adolescent brain development and decision-making??
Crone: I have always been interested in how the brain changes across the life span; my initial training was in developmental psychology. The adolescent years are formative years in one’s life, when the brain further specializes and prepares you for an adult role in society. How we take decisions that affect self and others is important for so many aspects in life, ranging from forming social groups, mental health and contributions to communities more generally.
CNS: Can you give us a preview of findings you plan to present at your upcoming keynote address at CNS 2027 in Boston?
Crone: I will be presenting results on how young people develop their self-concept and how they share, trust, and collaborate with others. I will also show some of our most recent results on how adolescents think about societal questions related to their future, climate change, and social inequality.
We found that adolescence and young adulthood are particularly sensitive times for feelings of mattering, contributions, and being seen, as well as heard and valued for your ideas. We often underestimate the power of the younger generations as agents of change. Our research shows that the brain of young people may be wired for social connection and societal engagement.
CNS: How much have these ideas changed since when you first started in this field?
Crone: I am so excited to speak at CNS because it was the first conference on neuroscience that I attended as a post doc in 2003. At that meeting in San Francisco, we just started to understand how the brain responds to very simple tasks. How far we have come since then!
CNS: Can you share more big ideas from this field since then?
Crone: We have discovered so much in the last 20 years – it is an amazing research field! We first focused mainly on the role of the prefrontal cortex as an important regulatory brain region that gradually emerges over the teenage years. Then we started to understand the role of deep emotional nodes in the brain and how they shape and influence thoughts and feelings of adolescents. And even more recently, we discovered the role of social brain regions that help people to understand their own and other people’s minds.
For me, the most important discovery is that emotions help us to achieve our goals, rather than interfering with it. Think of how young people can excel in sports: This requires careful planning, staying on task, being super alert, but also a drive to perform well, motivation to pursue your goals, and the joy when reaching your goal.
CNS: What new techniques have enabled these discoveries?
Crone: We now have access to longitudinal datasets in which we follow participants over time. This was already the golden standard in developmental psychology but it took a while to also build these datasets in neuroscience. This is opening a whole new area of questions, such as whether brain development predicts developmental outcomes or is mainly affected by experiences. These questions are super important for developing new theories, which is much needed for developing explanatory models.
CNS: What do you hope people will take away from your keynote address?
Crone: I hope people will leave the room hopeful, and value the adolescent and young adults’ brain as an opportunity for a better world. Young people deserve to be taken seriously for their ideas, in fact, we can learn a lot from the creativity of the youth.
CNS: What’s next for your research?
Crone: My research in the last years has been greatly enriched by the use of participatory methods, mostly based on design research. These methods involve young people in all phases of the research cycle, from developing the research question to designing the study and interpreting the results. Young people don’t care so much about inhibition or working memory, they care about climate change, polarization, and inequality.
CNS: Is there anything else you’d like to add that I did not ask you about?
Crone: I am excited about the ideas of the young generation of scientists. They impress me with their ideas and their drive to make academia better, more inclusive, and more focused on collaboration than competition. I love how CNS values the perspective of younger scientists, and I can’t wait to hear more about their ideas.
-Lisa M.P. Munoz
