Why You Were So Desperate to Fit in as a Teenager

The social experience of adolescence is massively complex compared to that of fully-developed adults. This is evidenced both by scientific research and casual observation of social cues, like the godawful haircut I ended up with in 2007. Above all else, teenagers are desperate to fit in, battling peer pressure, social anxieties and general feelings of constant humiliation in their quest to blend. There is a reason for this, and it's because the teenage brain—particularly the structures that make up what's called the "social brain"—looks markedly different to adults' brains. As any good sixth-grade P.E. teacher will tell you, becoming a teenager comes with a whole host of physical changes; however, these changes go far beyond discovering your first pubic hair, or banging freshly-discovered hip bones into tables. Adolescence actually alters the brain's structure.

Up until approximately 15 years ago, there was a general agreement in neuroscience that most of our brain development happens in the first few years of our life. But more recently, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies have shown this to be incorrect. In the teenage prefrontal cortex—the area of the brain responsible for planning, decision-making, personality expression, and moderating social behaviour—grey matter is being lost, thanks to a process called "synaptic pruning." Meantime, neural pathways are boosted with a delicious fatty coating, in a process called "myelination."

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