Discovery Channel

In the 1980s, young entertainers sang and talked of the feelings and frustrations of the teen years. Most teenagers were familiar with the feelings of wanting things they couldn't have and being under the control of adults who didn't understand them. More recent studies have shown that changes in hormones and appearance aren't the only things going on during the teen years.

Scientists once thought that brain growth was complete and patterns were set by the age of 3 years. Magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, has shown that the brain also goes through a teen growth spurt. But just as a developing teenage boy's voice changes up and down, teens' brains grow a little unevenly. Some of the connection between different neural regions improves, but many parts of the brain still aren't mature. This may explain why some teens drift toward risk-taking, impulsivity and other behaviors that parents find hard to understand.

During the teenage years, the brain experiences a burst of growth of synapses, or connections. Compared with the adult brain -- in which the different parts work together -- a teenage brain is more like your entertainment center when it first arrives and the components are not connected. The part of the brain that ties things together and helps control impulses and emotions is the prefrontal cortex -- this is also the part of the brain most involved in making judgment calls about situations and in understanding the relationship between the self and other people. Scientists have found that it is less mature in a teen brain than in an adult one, which may be a major reason that teenagers can make poor decisions and often feel misunderstood or out of place.

One area of teen brains develops early -- the nucleus accumbens. This center is associated with pleasure and reward. The teen nucleus accumbens is not balanced by a mature prefrontal cortex, so teens also handle reward, impulses and consequences differently than adults.

    Link:

http://curiosity.discovery.com/question/reason-teenagers-feel-misunderstood

This website comes from Discovery.com, and talks about the reasons teenagers feel misunderstood. This site contains the above, and a short video near the bottom of the website page, that explains the above through visuals.

Hypothesis:

                There was 13 percent of America’s population that died from tobacco use alone. There is a mass production and overuse of tobacco everywhere in America. My hypothesis is teenagers will notice that there is an overuse of tobacco in ever day lives, and the younger teenagers will say they need better education, while the older teens will say they have been educated, but still have room to better understand the dangers of tobacco.

Context:

                My target audience or respondents are teenagers from ages thirteen to seventeen. I chose these ages because I wanted to find out if teens were aware of one of the largest growing problems in America, tobacco overuse. I believe that my results from the respondents were reliable. These results are reliable because most of my respondents took their time completing them instead of rushing through; my respondents showed they were critically thinking and completely enticed. No data from my survey was skewed or biased because of invalid questioning; no questions were skipped, or randomly answered.

Results:
                (From 25 surveys so far)

What was asked	Male 17 (majority) 20%	Female 17 (majority) 25%	Male 15 (majority) 38%	Female 15 (majority) 17%
What they thought percentage of deaths were	13%	11%	13%	10%
Rate of tobacco use in our community	4 Overused	3 On occasion	4 overused	3 On occasion
Who was to blame for overuse	Stress and habits.	Ads. Stress and negative pressures such as peers.	Ads. Government, stress, habits, stores.	Ads. Stress, negative pressures, habits, stores.
What tobacco influences/changes the most	Lifestyles	Health	Habits	Lifestyles
Are they well educated about tobacco usage	Yes	Yes	No	No

What I Want to Know

• Why do we really smoke or chew tobacco besides stress and addiction if we can quit?
• Has our lifestyles and natural habits passed down through generations changed to keep us from quitting?
• How do negative pressures tie in with overuse of tobacco?
• Should there be more laws or education about tobacco products to teenagers?
• When does overuse of tobacco become an addiction?

Story Behind My Topic

In 2008, eleven percent of the United States average deaths were from cancers caused by tobacco. Was one or more of your loved ones part of that eleven percent? My uncle was. At the time of his death, I was only twelve, but I looked up to him as a role model and the father figure I had always wished for. When he died, I went through a traumatic emotional event, which led to depression and an antisocial independence. On top of that, my mother and my father smoked all the time, so I was in a state of worry constantly and still am today. I grew up despising the act of touching anything to do with tobacco, and was constantly told not to get into anything with tobacco, which I thought at the time was hypocritical considering they were smoking right in front of me every day. The worry, depression, and antisocial lifestyle that I created for myself, started to affect me in school, and health. I was emotionally, physically, and mentally drained all the time, my grades would drop, and I started hanging around the wrong group of teens. Everything that I had ever known went downhill; I felt hopeless and alone. I realized that it is not just my parents' or my uncle's fault that they were addicted to tobacco; it is also the fact that there is a mass production and usage of the tobacco products in the United States. Almost every store sells or advertises cigarettes and other tobacco products. On top of that, there is negative pressures everywhere; in ads, other people, media, news, almost every and anything. Tobacco has changed many teenagers' lives, including mine.