The brains of young children are especially attuned to the voices of their mothers. Teenage brains, in their typical rebellious glory, definitely aren’t.
That conclusion, outlined April 28 in the Journal of Neuroscience, may seem ridiculously obvious to parents of teenagers, including neuroscientist Daniel Abrams of the Stanford University School of Medicine. “I myself have two teenage sons, and it’s a fun result,” he says.
But the finding may reflect something much deeper than a joke. As children grow and expand their social connections beyond their family, their brains must be attuned to that growing world. “Just like a baby tunes in with a mother, teens have all these other kinds of sounds and voices that they need to tune in to,” says Abrams.
He and his colleagues scanned the brains of children ages 7 to 16 as they listened to the voices of their mothers or unknown women. To simplify the experiment to the sound of a voice, the words were gibberish: teebudieshawlt, keebudieshawlt, and peebudieshawlt. As the children and adolescents listened, certain parts of their brains activated.
Previous experiments by Abrams and colleagues have shown that certain brain regions of 7- to 12-year-olds, particularly those parts involved in detecting rewards and paying attention, respond more strongly to mom’s voice than to a girl’s voice. unknown woman. “In adolescence, we show the exact opposite of that,” says Abrams.
In these same brain regions in adolescents, unknown voices elicited greater responses than the voices of their own dear mothers. The change from mother to another seems to occur between the ages of 13 and 14.
It’s not that these areas of the adolescent brain stop responding to mom, says Abrams. Rather, unfamiliar voices become more rewarding and worthy of attention.
And that’s exactly how it should be, says Abrams. Exploring new people and situations is a hallmark of adolescence. “What we are seeing here is purely a reflection of this phenomenon.”
Voices can carry powerful signals. When the stressed girls heard their moms’ voices on the phone, the girls stress hormones downbiological anthropologist Leslie Seltzer of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and colleagues found in 2011 (Serial number: 12/8/11). It wasn’t the same with the text messages from her mothers.
The current results support the idea that the brain changes to reflect new needs that arise over time and experience, says Seltzer. “As we mature, our survival depends less and less on maternal support and more on our group affiliations with peers.”
It is not clear how universal this neural change is. The finding could change in various mother-child relationships, including those with different parenting styles, or even a history of neglect or abuse, Seltzer says.
So while teens and parents can sometimes be frustrated by missed messages, take heart, says Abrams. “This is how the brain is wired, and there’s a good reason for it.”