Granted, your average teen's coping mechanisms rarely extend beyond junk food and video games.Д«ut are adults' choices any better? Addicted to Internet porn, Gray's Anatomy, Tom Clancy novels and golf. Whether you're worried about making the track team or paying the mortgage about fitting in with the cool kids or impressing your new boss, it's all about trying to cope. The truth is, life is hard, no matter how old you are.

I think it's too easy to blame all this on brain chemistry. It's everything we can do to keep our complicated, must-have Starbucks coffee orders straight in our heads. They're forgetful, obsessed with their health (popping pills to an extent no teenager would even contemplate), envious of their neighbors and always-always-sleep-deprived.ДЇrankly, even on a good day, our brains are nothing to write home about. Most adults I know are over-worked, over-stressed and generally overwhelmed by their ongoing struggles with careers, child-rearing, and relationships. Not to mention the Middle East crisis, global warming, and daily bulletins about the life and travails of the OctoMom. We're in the middle of an economic melt-down, deluged with more-bad-news-updates constantly by the media. Because if my friends and I are at all representative, I'd argue that whatever's going on in our collective brains is equally suspect. But what about the mid-life brain? Perhaps the next time we embark on exhaustive, heavily-funded research into what's inside the human skull, we should focus our efforts on the average middle-aged person. After all, we now had proof positive that today's teens are simply too erratic to be entrusted with such responsibilities. Some researchers have even blamed these brain differences for the adolescent's devotion to high-decibel music, insistence on low-decibel mumbling, and willingness to stand in line for hours to see the midnight showing of Watchmen.ДЄs soon as these results made national headlines, the usual social pundits weighed in: this new research, they claimed, clearly suggested that we should ban teen driving and even raise the voting age. To the surprise of practically no one not wearing a lab coat, it's finally been demonstrated scientifically that the teenage brain is different from that of a mature adult.ДЄccording to the data, these differences explain the average teen's inclination to stay up late, sleep until noon, and exhibit extreme mood swings (for example, from sullen and defiant to really sullen and defiant).

From the pages of medical journals to feature stories on the network news, there's been a swell of media coverage the past few years concerning 'the teenage brain.'Дespite sounding like the title of Hollywood's latest horror-movie blockbuster, the phrase actually refers to recent neurological research on adolescent brain chemistry.

Nik halik the thrillionaire