Drive

P.E. was not my favorite class in high school. I didn’t dread it, but P.E. often served as a reminder that had I lived in a more brutal environment — medieval Denmark, for example--I would most likely not have made it past freshmen year.

I was, and still am, a bit clumsy. Despite this defect, however, one bright spot did exist in the Physical Education curriculum, and that was badminton.

Badminton was made for people like me because there is very little chance of being seriously injured. Doubles badminton, especially, was great, because it offered me the opportunity to ride on the fourth-hour coattails of the best badminton player in the entire school: “Jump” Anderson.

Now, for the three of you who actually went to school with me, you know that there was no “Jump.” “Jump” is merely a pseudonym for an old classmate who most likely has no interest being mentioned in a newspaper, but was absolutely designed for badminton. Speedy, lithe, aggressive and smart, this guy could react to even the most intense shuttlecock barrage and send the birdie back across the net exactly where the defenders weren’t.

Our strategy was simple: he played front; I played back. This was kind of an offshoot of our baseball strategy, the one in which he pitched while right field was mine, which, in turn, was closely related to our basketball strategy, where he ran the offense and I ran the tap for the team water bottles. Basically, my job was to serve on occasion and stay out of his way. Once we settled into our rolls, we burned through the fourth hour tournament bracket like an ACC dynasty.

Now, many of you are probably thinking, “What. Are. You talking about? March Madness is over, baseball is in full swing, and badminton is not even a real sport.”

All true statements, but I write to you today about badminton because it relates to a much more serious topic: pretend teenage driving.

According to a recent article from NPR, Laurence Steinberg, a psychology professor at Temple University, conducted an experiment in which he put a number of adolescents into a fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) machine while they played a virtual driving game. Despite what we may assume, the adolescents actually “drove” as safely as a group of adult subjects — when they drove by themselves. However, when additional adolescents were added to the mix, “this doubles the number of chances adolescents take,” Steinberg found, without making any difference in the performance of the adult drivers.

Now, this is not really new information. Graduated driving ages and teenage insurance rates have reflected this conventional wisdom for quite some time. Many teenagers tend to do silly things in front of their peers that they otherwise would not.

But why?

Another scientist mentioned in the same article, B.J. Casey from Weill Cornell Medical College, explains that in adolescents, the prefrontal cortex, which plays a crucial role in decision-making, is still very much a work in progress. According to Casey, this part of the brain acts as the Dr. Spock to the limbic system’s Captain Kirk. The limbic system, “the emotional center of the brain that's always on the lookout for threats and rewards,” needs the prefrontal cortex to make sense of the environment. However, because this portion of the brain is still developing in adolescents, the reward-seeking impetus behind the limbic system often overrides the cold, hard logic of reasonable behavior.

This is why many teenagers willfully engage in behavior that they are fully aware is counterproductive, such as smoking or jumping off houses. They do these things for the visceral thrill, yes, but they also do it, quite literally, because they are in front of their friends. According to the article, “The limbic system doesn't just flag rewards... A 12-year-old gets a kind of high simply by being around other adolescents.”

The crucial takeaway from this study is that peers can influence one another’s behavior by affecting each other’s brain chemistry. Thus, adolescents should be wary of who they hang out with. Parents should be especially wary of who hangs out with their kids.

This was quite true for me in high school, because by hanging out with “Jump” in fourth-hour P.E., I made it all the way to the championship match of our esteemed double-elimination tournament. Things went well for awhile. The score stayed tight, but in the end, our opponents sent one too many birdies flying to the back court. When the game was on the line, I swung and missed. We lost.

Which just goes to show, our peers absolutely do influence our lives, for better or for worse, as children, as adolescents, and even as adults. In the end, though, in badminton, as in life, no one can take our swings for us.