Abenteuer Wissen: Leben! Zeit des Erwachens (ZDF)

Writer and Director: Dr. Luise Wagner-Roos

Production: Christine Lachmann

Line producer: Anke Meyer

Executive Producer: Hartmut Klenke

Locations: Aachen, Hamburg, Wittingen

Broadcast:
Wednesdays, starting March 18, at 10:15 PM on ZDF

Length: 30'

 

Content:

The basis of this short series is a portrait of five teenagers filmed over three years which doc.station produced for ZDF, a long-term study with images that sensitively show puberty, “A Time of Miracles.” This unique film material has now been supplemented by new scientific studies which could explain the phenomena of puberty. It is only in the last few years that imaging methods have become safe enough to look into teenagers’ heads without exposing them to radiation. The neural processes shown with this method have fundamentally changed our understanding of puberty. Abenteuer Wissen shows experiments with six young people, and a child psychiatrist and a neurologist present their findings with the help of computers in a modern “media-lab.” In this lab, projections of brain scans and custom animated examples of brain activity help us understand a teenager’s unique emotional state.

Using excerpts from “A Time of Miracles” as well as statements by Professor Michael Schulte Markwort of Hamburg and Professor Beate Herpertz-Dahlmann of Aachen, the first episode explains puberty as the search for a new ego. The classic “symptoms” of puberty are talked about in an entertaining way: rebellion & provocation, doubt & risk, cult & narcissism, love & despair, ups & downs.

The second episode explains the confusion which dominates this leap into adulthood as massive restructuring goes on in the brain during puberty and causes logic and emotion to stop working as a team. Young viewers and their parents will be shown why everything seems to spin out of control during this phase of development, and how to regain control without falling into a cycle of aggression and counter-aggression. The scientists also examine new phenomena such as “coma drinking” and explain why alcohol, nicotine and other drugs exert such a strong attraction during this period of maturation.

The third episode focuses on a sensational pioneer study in which Professor Herpertz-Dahlmann shows why boys and girls are different. She studied the influence of sex hormones on the brain and proved that differences between boys and girls go deeper than their socialisation. In males, testosterone causes significant growth of the amygdalae, which control instinctive reactions and “gut decisions.” For girls, however, oestrogen stimulates growth in the region of the hippocampus. This part of the limbic system plays a crucial role in formation of emotions and memory. These differences correlate to the gender-specific patterns of mental disorders during puberty and could perhaps explain the high rate of depression in girls.

The fourth film sensitizes the audience not only for new insights into the much discussed topic of anorexia but also for the underestimated incidence of depression during puberty. A patient with anorexia tells her story and how it feels to be different from everyone else. Her fate is depicted in sensitive images and compared to the world of an ordinary teenager. The film also addresses the question of whether anorexia and other eating disorders are on the rise. Scientific misunderstandings caused by the heated debate about underweight fashion models and the ideal they supposedly represent are elucidated by Professor Herpertz-Dahlmann’s clinical work. The excesses which hunger can cause and which mechanisms can trigger depression are explained in the context of brain research.