Abstract

Since the 1990s, researchers have been proposing that adolescence can be understood as a “sensitive period” of brain and cognitive development. This notion has powerful implications outside science giving a brain basis to the uniqueness of adolescence as a developmental stage marked by specific, defining neural changes. We begin by describing the current state of the science, and then go on to summarize some of the policy and media implications of this new science of the “teen brain”. We then interrogate the notion of adolescence as naturalized by neuroscience, by pointing to the historical and cultural contexts of adolescence as a category. We conclude by drawing on “critical neuroscience” and the ways in which adolescent behaviors, and the neuroscience of adolescent behavior, must be viewed as richly situated in their social and cultural contexts. We develop a view of the adolescent brain as a “situated brain” and emphasize the social ecology in which adolescent behaviors occur and can be studied.