5 Ways High School Really Does Suck (According To Science)

3 The Adolescent Brain Can't Process Multi-Step Instructions

Remember when your parents used to tell you to do the dishes, take out the trash, brush your teeth, feed Uncle Ernie and then go to bed, and how you would never get around to all of that? Remember how pissed your parents were when they found out that Uncle Ernie got out and ritualistically murdered your neighbor's cat?

Or if you're too old to remember your teenage years, do you at least remember the last time you bought a cup of coffee and had the pimple-faced kid behind the counter seem to get really confused trying to keep track of both the size and flavor of your beverage (until you finally just rolled over the counter and made it yourself)?

"I swear to God, if there's cream in this, I'm funneling it into your rectum."

Once again this comes back to the fact that it's the awkward years for the brain, too -- a new study shows that teenagers' brains don't have the part that handles multi-tasking yet. The frontal cortex is the part of your brain that figures out what to do when you get a whole mess of information at once and how to sort through it all, and the problem is that it doesn't finish developing until after you're old enough to drive.

This doesn't mean that teens have trouble remembering all that information; your memory is just fine by the time you get to high school. But what's still developing is "strategic, self-organized thinking." That would be the ability to prioritize -- being able to juggle six different assignments while still training for the big game.

"Wait, do I eat it, or ... I'm confused."

And when they do it wrong, that's when the grown-ups start yelling at them. Now remember the previous entry about how stress completely wrecks the teenage decision-making part of the brain and you can start to wonder how any of us make it out of our teens alive.

Not that the brain is the teenager's only enemy ...