Tweens: WTF?

I was a prepubescent person at one point in my life, and a teen girl at another point of my life. I listened to music and preferred certain bands over others. I however, never looked like this:



The following is an excerpt from an article in the August issue of Rolling Stone. The article focuses on the Jonas Brothers (a uber-famous boy band whose fan based is primarily adolescent girls), it's titled, "The Clean Teen Machine".

"Suddenly, the lights go dark, triggering a roar in the 20,000-sear Cricket Wireless Pavilion that can only be described as primal. And it is, in a way. The neuropsychiatrist Dr. Louann Brizendine, author of the bestseller The Female Brain, says the release of dopamine in a screaming teenage girl's brain upon seeing her pop idol is like "injecting heroin." Being with other screaming girls, she says, only makes the effect wilder.
"There's a thing in biology we call synchrony," Brizendine says. "Basically, one girl affects another affects another, and it becomes a domino effect building up to that level of hysteria. They are getting all these brain hits of dopamine, and also oxytocin, which is a love-and-bonding hormone. Teenage girls have so much estrogen, which just catapults the level of dopamine and oxytocin in the brain, creating this sort of ecstatic rush in themselves and others. It truly is a state of ecstatic love."

Wow!