By Kevin Berger
When we asked Robert Sapolsky what he might like to write about for the Nautilus Turbulence issue, he responded, “adolescence.” We had to laugh because the idea just seemed so perfect. Is there a more turbulent time in our lives? But is adolescence really a demarcated period in human life, biologically speaking, or just a modern cultural construct created, seemingly, by Mountain Dew? In fact, teens are their own beasts. Or their brains are. “The adolescent brain is not merely an adult brain that is half-cooked, or a child’s brain left unrefrigerated for too long,” Sapolsky said. As he explains in his Nautilus essay, “Dude, Where’s My Frontal Cortex?,” the teen brain, for all its famous downsides, such as a sullen love for Morrissey, is a necessary stage in human development’s slow dance, an incubation time for social intelligence.
Sapolsky built his career on a facet of turbulence: stress; in particular, stress-related diseases in Savanna baboons. At age 21 he ventured to Kenya to study a troop of baboons. He would return to Kenya for more than 30 years to detail the troop’s lives and families. The bookish kid from Brooklyn whose rebellion against his religious upbringing took the…
