Why Do I Need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google

Ibiza next year
    • Explaining why I think use of nuclear power is a good or bad thing
    • Persuading my dad to let me off the hook for being out till three am last night
    • Being out till three am last night and feeling a bit guilty about it
    • Coming to the conclusion that my homework is/is not important
    • Wondering what it’s all about
    • Wondering whether it’s all worth it anyway, even if you did know
    • Choosing to smoke that strange-looking cigarette because bad things only ever happen to other people and I’m not dead yet and see no reasons why things should change.
    Apart from that strange feeling you have that I’ve just read some of your teenage diaries, what they all share is that they have involved a part of the brain called the pre-frontal cortex, the very last part of our brain to mature.
    The pre-frontal cortex, or PFC, is the part of the brain we use when we are comparing short-term gains over long-term goals, balancing risk and reward, using intellectual language, making choices based on morals and exploring right versus wrong. It is what is at play when we move from what is called ‘exogenous’ behaviour control, that is to say we are simply responding to stimuli like a stick or a carrot, to ‘endogenous’ control, where we behave according to a personal and voluntary plan. In fact, the PFC is right at the heart of the sort of thinking that separates grown-ups from children. And it’s the bit alcohol shuts up. 1 No wonder it is also known as ‘the area of sober second thought’.
    Once you understand this it helps you put all those stressful and infuriating situations you have with your class – or your own children – very muchinto perspective. Now you, too, will be able to go up to that colleague who is tearing her hair out because of the behaviour and attitude of that group of 15-year-olds, tap your temple and say knowingly, ‘It’s just their immature pre-frontal cortex so don’t worry about it.’
    The PFC has been the subject of a great deal of debate and research ever since an unfortunate man named Phineas Gage ended up with a metal rod in his after an accident whilst building a railroad in America in 1848. As recounted by Rita Carter in
Mapping the Mind
, the doctor who treated Gage described how he had changed from being a hardworking conscientious employee to become a drunken vagrant who was ‘at times pertinaciously obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of future operations which are soon abandoned … a child in his intellectual capacity and manifestations yet with the animal passions of a young man’ (Carter 1988).
    Sound like any adolescent boys you know?
    One hundred years later, the influence that the PFC has over our behaviours fell under the spotlight of one Walter Freeman, a neurologist who pioneered the ‘transorbital lobotomy’, that is to say the practice of sticking a kitchen ice pick up through the eye sockets of patients with mental illness and having a bit of a scrape around their frontal lobes. The arrival of antipsychotic drugs in the 1950s helped eliminate this barbaric practice and his work became quickly discredited, but not before Freeman, travelling across America in his ‘lobotomobile’, had performed 3,500 of these procedures (El-Hai 2005).
    There is even new evidence about the influence of the PFC on lying, something that has been shown to employ a great deal of PFC action, with structural differences in both the grey and white matter components in this part of the brain between liars and non-liars. 2 A fascinating online article entitled
Liar, Liar, Your Prefrontal Cortex Is On Fire
quotes the
British Journal of Psychiatry
when it describes how liars have 22 per cent more white matter and 14 per cent less grey matter than non-liars. The researchers’ conclusion was that this difference meant that liars had the wiring (white matter) necessary to tell ‘big whoppers’ but not the necessary brain cells (grey matter) to keep an adequate moral check on things. Interestingly, they also found that the complete opposite was true in children with autism, a group that research has shown find it difficult to lie. These children had an equivalent but opposite ratio of grey matter to white.
    In his seminal book on the pre-frontal cortex, imaginatively named
The Prefrontal Cortex
, Joaquin M. Fuster describes how planning and decision-making are two of the three main functions of the pre-frontal cortex.
    If there