Teen Brains During Lockdown

What happens to the teen brain when adolescents are isolated from interacting with other human beings for prolonged periods of time?  Sadly 2020-2022 provided the opportunity to study such an experiment, as it was implemented by governments around the world to try to minimize the harms of COVID-19. 

The Guardian reports on this study which found that teens had not only poorer mental health, but there was also evidence of accelerated brain aging.  A sample from the Guardian story:

The researchers compared MRI scans of 81 teens in the US taken before the pandemic, between November 2016 and November 2019, with those of 82 teens collected between October 2020 and March 2022, during the pandemic but after lockdowns were lifted.

After matching 64 participants in each group for factors including age and sex, the team found that physical changes in the brain that occurred during adolescence – such as thinning of the cortex and growth of the hippocampus and the amygdala – were greater in the post-lockdown group than in the pre-pandemic group, suggesting such processes had sped up. In other words, their brains had aged faster.

....“Large-scale measures of the brain don’t tell us about the detailed circuits that drive behaviour. I would say it’s very speculative what, if any, long term consequences there will be, and whether these brain changes will be enduring or fade away.”

Thomas also stressed that it was not clear that potential impacts would necessarily be negative, noting some of the accelerated changes reported by the team were also associated with higher performance, such as in intelligence tests.

Cheers, 

Colin