This neuroscientist wants to change the story you’ve been told about the teenage brain

The teenage years live as easy caricature in the collective imagination of adults. Parents spend years telling each other to brace themselves yet still find themselves caught off guard by their teens — the wild emotional swings, the sheer impulsiveness, the obsession with their social circle, the dialects designed to remain forever unknowable to adults. “Who is this person?” parents sigh.

Neuroscientists have been asking that same question in recent decades and now have a far richer model of the brain changes that undergird the behavioral shifts rued by generations of parents. As a result, researchers such as Adriana Galván at UCLA are trying to shift the narrative on adolescence, framing it as a period of rapid brain development in which risky behavior, the quest for the next dopamine hit, and hyper-sociality all play essential roles in wiring together the adolescent brain’s distinct regions in new ways. Seen this way, adolescence is an astonishing period of growth and identity formation that should be appreciated as the marvel of human evolution that it is. 

Galván, a professor of psychology and the co-executive director of the Center for the Developing Adolescent at UCLA, outlined this newer understanding of adolescence while delivering the keynote address to journalists taking part in the 2026 National Fellowship at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles this week. Her research pushes back on our tendency to pathologize the teenage years, and offers urgent lessons for how we run youth-serving systems, particularly schools, child welfare and the juvenile justice system. 

In a whirlwind tour of decades of neuroscience research, Galván described adolescence as a period of prolonged brain plasticity that continues into the early 20s. That extended development affords the prefrontal cortex ample time to mature in coordination with its environment. The signature behaviors are recognizable: It’s a life stage marked by heightened reward-seeking, as teens’ dopamine system goes into overdrive and doles out hits of pleasure when learning new things, taking risks and exploring new ways of being in the world. The amygdala — the part of the brain that responds to emotions and threats — is not well connected to the prefrontal cortex at this stage of development, so the ability to regulate emotions remains a work in progress.

“It’s not a coincidence that we have the stretch of 10 to 25 when our brains are developing, when we're seeking independence, when we’re looking for ways, healthy ways, to leave the nest, so to speak,” she said. “It’s because we need that time for the entire maturation of the brain. It’s the last time when our brains are so plastic that we can adopt a new language or new skills, we can learn how to drive, we can start to think about our own future and make health decisions as relevant.”

While the traditional view of adolescence casts these behaviors as liabilities or even hazards to health, the neuroscience-based story Galván tells casts this process of experimentation and self-fashioning as creative and deeply moving. “Whatever your culture is, or your community, or the way that you're reared, if you’re a young person, you will seek ways to take a risk during that time, you will find a way to leave the nest and learn about something outside of you, which I find really beautiful.”

By definition, taking risks doesn’t always work out well. Getting in a car with a friend who has been drinking can quickly turn tragic. Trying to prove your status by getting into fights can leave lasting wounds, or worse. But in Galván’s telling, these “health compromising risks” too often dominate the cultural conversation, crowding out countervailing ideas of healthy risk-taking and the need for teens to have safe places to be and connect with each other.

“If we encourage risk taking in the classroom, for example, or trying out a new activity — all of those are risks that will satisfy the itch in the adolescent brain that is trying to push the boundaries, and if we reframe that and think about it as a learning opportunity, we will help these young people achieve new heights and achieve new milestones,” she said.

Galván is also quick to acknowledge that taking risks doesn’t turn out the same for everyone. “There are some young people who can take risks and maybe cause harm to themselves or others and come out relatively unscathed, and there are other young people for whom those same risks are not going to yield the same outcomes — and that's where we need some support, and changing systems that penalize young people who otherwise may have had a different outcome if they came from a different neighborhood or a different race or spoke a different language or something like that,” she said.

Such inequities can pose more direct harms to the budding brain as well. When young people experience chronic stress, their bodies get hit with repeated spikes in cortisol, with real consequences for brain development over time. “If you have been reared in an environment or school system or a neighborhood where there is constant threat, then that excessive cortisol release will eventually not only prevent new neurogenesis — growth of new neurons — but it will also detract from the other things you need to be learning as an adolescent: skill building, school information, social-connection building,” she said.

Sleep is crucial, too. Teens get on average far less sleep than the recommended eight to 10 hours a night, and that in turn hinders their prefrontal and emotion regulation systems. (When Galván's lab studied the sleep environments of adolescents across Los Angeles, the biggest threat to good sleep was surprisingly not technology but the comfort of their bedding and pillows.) Mentorship plays a crucial role as well. “(A)dolescents who receive mentorship, whether that's a parent or a family member or someone else, fare better in every metric that we measure — education, emotion, psychology, financial — because they had a mentor.” 

Viewing adolescence through the lens of current neuroscience poses serious questions for how youth institutions and systems treat young people, and how we hold them accountable for their actions. Galván’s work has focused in particular on juvenile justice systems. 

“The age of majority is 18, and yet people continue to develop through early to mid 20s. So, how are those things going to be reconciled?” Galván asked. “Neuroscientists and psychologists across the country have aimed to spread the narrative that the developmental principles tell us that these young people have more opportunity for growth. If we place them, for example, in solitary confinement, that’s antithetical to what young people need during this time, which is positive social input from peers and from other caring adults.”

As the mother of a 12- and 15-year-old, Galván is now living the themes that have defined her research career. So, what does she tell them when confronted by their inscrutable lingo and newfound identities? 

“I say that I honor you and I support who you are and who you’re becoming in your dreams, and yet I have no idea what the hell you’re saying all the time. But I appreciate that, because that is the way adolescents are really good at distinguishing themselves from adults, in the language they use, in their hairstyles, in the way they dress. And that is so beautiful.”