Almost 400 years ago, Shakespeare was portraying adolescents in a very similar light to the light that we portray them in today — but today we try to understand their behavior in terms of the underlying changes that are going on in their brain.

Blakemore contrasts two ways of explaining adolescence: the long-standing cultural observation that teenagers can be impulsive, emotionally intense, and socially preoccupied (a view already dramatized in Shakespeare), and the modern scientific effort to account for those behaviors through neurodevelopment. The quote suggests continuity in how societies perceive adolescent conduct, while emphasizing a shift in explanatory frameworks—from moral judgment or stereotype to developmental understanding. It also implies that neuroscience can add empathy and precision by linking behavior to ongoing maturation in brain systems involved in self-control, reward sensitivity, and social cognition, without reducing adolescents to “just hormones” or excusing all actions.