Ever felt like you’re talking to a brick wall when trying to communicate with your kids?
Well, a new study suggests there might be something scientific after finding that teenage brains begin to tone down their mothers’ voices around the age of 13.
This is because they no longer find it “uniquely rewarding,” the researchers said, and instead tune in more to unfamiliar voices.
The Stanford School of Medicine study used functional MRI brain scans to provide the first detailed neurobiological explanation for how teenagers separate from their parents.
It suggests that if your teens don’t seem to hear you, it’s not simply because they don’t want to tidy their room or do their homework — their brains don’t register your voice the way they did in the pre-teen years.
Ever felt like you’re talking to a brick wall when trying to communicate with your kids? Well, a new study suggests there might be something scientific after finding that teenage brains start to tone down their mother’s voice around the age of 13 (stock image).
“Just as an infant knows how to tune into its mother’s voice, an adolescent knows how to tune into novel voices,” said study lead author Daniel Abrams, clinical associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences.
“As a teenager, you don’t know you’re doing this. You are just yourself: you have your friends and new companions and you want to spend time with them.
“Your mind becomes increasingly sensitive and drawn to these unfamiliar voices.”
In some ways, teenage brains are more receptive to all voices — including those of their mothers — than the brains of children under 12, the researchers discovered, a finding consistent with teens’ increased interest in many types of social cues.
But in teenage brains, the reward circuits and brain centers that prioritize important stimuli are more activated by unfamiliar voices than their mothers’.
The brain’s shift toward new voices is one aspect of healthy maturation, the researchers said.
“A child eventually becomes independent, and that has to be triggered by an underlying biological signal,” said the study’s lead author Vinod Menon, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences.
“Here’s what we found: This is a signal that helps teens engage with the world and form connections that allow them to be socially savvy outside of their families.”
The Stanford team previously found that hearing a mother’s voice triggers an explosion of unique responses in the brains of children under the age of 12.
A study published in 2016 showed that children can identify their mother’s voice with extremely high accuracy and that the special sound not only appeals to the auditory areas of the brain, but also to many areas that are not addressed by unfamiliar voices.
These include reward centers, emotion processing regions, visual processing centers, and brain networks that decide which incoming information is salient.
The Stanford School of Medicine study used functional MRI brain scans to provide the first detailed neurobiological explanation for how teenagers separate from their parents
“The mother’s voice is the sound source that teaches young children all about the socio-emotional world and language development,” said Percy Mistry, co-lead author and researcher in the fields of psychiatry and behavioral sciences.
“Fetuses in utero can recognize their mother’s voice before they are born, but in adolescents — although they have spent more time with this sound source than babies have — their brains tune in favor of the voices they have never heard of.” .’
The new study built on the previous study and added data from teenagers aged 13 to 16.5 years.
The researchers recorded the teens’ mothers saying three nonsensical words that lasted just under a second.
The use of nonsense words ensured that participants did not react to the meaning or emotional content of the words.
Two women unfamiliar with the study participants were recorded saying the same nonsensical words.
Each adolescent participant listened to multiple repetitions of the nonsensical word recordings of their own mother and the unfamiliar women presented in random order and identified themselves when they heard their mother.
Just like younger children, teenagers correctly recognized their mothers’ voices more than 97 percent of the time.
The teenagers were then placed in an MRI scanner, where they listened to the voice recordings again.
They also listened to brief recordings of household noises, such as B. a running dishwasher so the researchers could see how the brain responds to voices compared to other non-social sounds.
The researchers found that in teenagers, compared to younger children, all voices elicited greater activation in several brain regions: the “voice-selective superior temporal sulcus,” an auditory processing area; “Processing Regions of Excellence” that filter what information is important; and the “posterior cingulate cortex,” which is involved in aspects of autobiographical and social memory.
Brain responses to voices increased with the teens’ ages — in fact, the relationship was so strong that researchers were able to use the voice response information in teens’ brain scans to predict how old they were.
The fact that the brain is so attuned to voices makes sense — just ask anyone who’s ever felt an emotional shock after a long time hearing the voice of a friend or family member, the researchers said.
“The voices around us are this incredibly rewarding source of sound that allows us to feel connected, included, part of a community and part of a family,” Abrams said.
“Voices are really what unites us.”
Children’s social interactions undergo major changes during adolescence.
“Our results show that this process is rooted in neurobiological changes,” Menon said.
“If teenagers seem to rebel by not listening to their parents, it’s because they’re predisposed to pay more attention to voices outside the home.”
The research was published in the Journal of Neuroscience.
Teens really ignore you! According to a study, young people spend 12% less time looking the person they are talking to in the face than adults
Teens really ignore you and spend less time looking into your face when you’re talking to them than another adult would, a study published last year found.
A team led by the University of Kent recorded three groups of volunteers aged 10-19, 20-40 and 60-80 in real social interaction situations.
The situations included them conversing face-to-face and navigating an environment, using eye-tracking goggles to monitor their interactions.
Results showed that adolescents pay less attention to social cues in real-world interactions than adults.
They found that teens and older adults spend 12 percent less time looking at someone they are talking to and 2 percent less time looking at people navigating, compared to young adults in their 20s and 40s years.
The researchers explained that interpreting the facial expressions, tone of voice and gestures of others is an essential element of social interaction.
The results show that social attention changes with age, the researchers say, adding that this has potential implications for how successfully we interpret social interactions in daily life and throughout our lifespan.
“Interpreting the facial expressions, tone of voice, and gestures of others is an essential element of social interaction,” the authors write.
“These abilities allow us to quickly make inferences about the mental states of others, such as their intentions, emotions, desires, and beliefs.”
Successful social interaction fosters perspective taking and empathy, as well as other important social skills, and plays an important role in enhancing our well-being.
The research, led by PhD student Martina De Lillo with Professor Heather Ferguson, was the first of its kind to examine how social attention is allocated during adolescence and whether it differs from adulthood.