Dear Dr Ash,

I really want to give my 16-year-old son the freedom to take risks and make his own mistakes and to not be an overly protective mum. And yet, at the same time, I want to wrap him in cotton wool and lock him in his room and never allow him to ride a motorbike, or go travelling to South America. He’s started talking about wanting an electric bike to travel to sixth form college and even that has given me a near nervous breakdown. It doesn’t help that he’s the kind of happy-go-lucky boy who thinks he could fly if he jumped off a cliff. Every time I try and give him safety advice he switches off and he won’t even agree to wear a helmet on his bicycle.

How can I set him free, while not fraying my own nerves to shreds?

Anxious,
Andover

For an adolescent, risk is what threatens their social standing with their peers

Dear Anxious,

I read your letter having just flown in from Chicago, where I’d been attending the Society for Neuroscience annual conference. The conference is usually pandemonium: imagine 30,000 brain scientists simultaneously trying to get jobs, get laid and get lunch while actively interrogating the latest findings in the field. It’s exhilarating and utterly exhausting. In fact, I’d stopped attending years ago, but my oldest school friend recently moved to Chicago with his family, and I figured the conference gave me a good reason to pay them a long-overdue visit.

My friend and his family live in a leafy suburb north of the city, a place where every street has a bicycle lane and neighbours wave to each other from their front porches. The children bob down the street in thick down jackets and helmets – which is near enough to swathes of cotton wool. There was no real reason to be anxious about their safety here, but I could see that my friend was. Maybe, as he reminded me over a late-night whisky, it was because he knew precisely what we got up to when we were their age.

The next morning at the conference I had a chat about this with Dr Ashley Parr, a scientist from the University of Pittsburgh who studies brain development in adolescent mice. Her research maps out peaks in dopamine production during the teenage years, and shows correlations between these dopamine peaks and risk-taking behaviours. Parr pointed out that although dopamine is often associated with novelty-seeking, it also reflects the maturation of connections in the frontal lobe that underpin restraint and reasoning. Paradoxically, the same molecule that drives teenagers to explore the world regardless of consequence is simultaneously making them better able to appreciate and adapt to those consequences. The balance between these opposing roles for dopamine eventually settles in favour of prudence – the only challenge is whether you live long enough to get there.

Dr Parr also pointed out something interesting about how we think about risk in teenagers. For an adult, risk is anything that threatens survival; for an adolescent it’s anything that threatens social standing. As a young man, I certainly drove motorcycles too fast, tried cigarettes too young, and made any number of questionable romantic decisions. What I tried not to do was anything that might make me look foolish in front of my friends. I vividly remember the hot flush of shame when I was forced wear the naff shoes my mother had bought me, and the squirming feeling when I realised I was still listening to R.E.M. long after they’d gone mainstream. Teenagers are extraordinarily, even painfully risk-averse – they just have a different definition of risk.

In those moments when you most want to hold your boy close, it’s worth bearing in mind that he is probably playing it quite safe according to his own rules. Cuts and scrapes heal, and most bad decisions can be dealt with in time – but social scars can last a very long time indeed. Your son is navigating a world with an entirely different topography than the one you perceive, and he is probably doing a fine job of it. By all means fret, but do it in private, with old friends, over a stiff drink.

Best wishes
Dr Ash

Dear Dr Ash,

I was 79 in the summer and the thing I kept thinking, but not telling anyone, was that I’m terrified of dying. Firstly, because of the usual human fear of not existing and going off into a big black void. But secondly because I feel I haven’t really achieved anything, or enjoyed myself enough. I’ve led a pretty undistinguished life and I’ve never climbed Everest or written a novel or done anything that excites envy. I’ve had one short-lived marriage and a couple of long-term relationships, but I wouldn’t call any of them great passions.

Is this it? And, if so, how do I come to terms with my mortality?

Morbid,
Cirencester

Research shows that fear of death is hardwired

Dear Morbid,

The clocks have gone back, the days are getting short and a thick grey blanket of cloud has settled over Somerset. We have been trying to keep the house warmer this year, but it feels like shovelling bank notes into the boiler in a vain effort to keep out the damp. At this precise moment I can’t tell if the idea of mortality fills me with terror or relief.

I am struck, however, by the fact the birds seems much less fazed by the ending of summer than I am. The robin who patrols our driveway remains on duty, furiously harassing the postman every morning. A pair of swallows nesting in the apex of the garage roof had a late-season brood, and their now-teenage children cut silent acrobatic loops in the air whenever we come home. The jackdaws and rooks are quieter, having put aside their normal social squabbling in favour of a more contemplative posture.

If any of these birds have thoughts about their own mortality it is the corvids: they are the most human of the lot. I’d wager the rest don’t spare a thought for imminent death, much less for questions about what they’ve accomplished in life. Most creatures in the world seem to be happy just to be living, and if there are awards ceremonies or celebrities amongst them they keep it pretty quiet. But the human brain, with its exceptional ability to create hypothetical models of the future, risks a preoccupation with its own fictions. The cognitive trait that enables our species to adapt to almost any environmental niche is the same one that leaves us quaking in the face of death.

In extreme cases, this anxiety about death is called “thanatophobia”, and it is crippling. Thanatophobics suffer constant and intrusive thoughts about death that leave them unable to do anything else. And though there’s research that suggests fear of death is a natural part of our neurobiology – in fact, a specific brain network between the anterior cingulate cortex and lateral parietal lobe structures such as the supramarginal gyrus – there is no doubt culture plays a major role.

As I write this, we’re just a few days away from “Día de Muertos”, the Day of the Dead celebration in Mexico. There will be trumpets and dancing in the graveyards, red ballgowns trimmed with black lace, elaborate dinners, songs – all to celebrate friends and family who have died. I am sure that existential crises occur in Mexico, but it’s hard to attend a Día de Muertos celebration and not feel some deep connection between the living and the dead. In such cultures, wrestling with big existential questions is done in a group. Here in the Anglophonic world, individuals face the existential void on their own.

So one option is to move to Mexico. If that’s impracticable, I can only advise you to spend more time observing the natural world. You need not go far; the cyclical nature of the world presents itself every moment of every day, right outside your window. It sounds to me you have lived an estimable human life, with the usual moments of joy and sorrow, and now find yourself unable to articulate a story that explains it all. But the need for that story is an illusion arising from a biological quirk of the human brain; it’s not a need we share with other living creatures on Earth. As I think they will show you, the only meaning to be found in life is in the living of it.

Best wishes
Dr Ash