When I was sixteen, I got a speeding ticket. I knew I shouldn’t have been driving sixty-five miles per hour in a thirty-five mile per hour zone, but on the other hand how awesome was it (until I got pulled over)? Pretty awesome (until I got pulled over)! Wall Street Journal explains:

Recent studies in the neuroscientist B.J. Casey’s lab at Cornell University suggest that adolescents aren’t reckless because they underestimate risks, but because they overestimate rewards-or, rather, find rewards more rewarding than adults do.

Think about videogames, which present only rewards. If my mom’s Honda had been merely a batch of pixels in Forza, I could have pressed that magical rewind button the game gives you and gone back thirty seconds and slowed down, saving myself $675 and several weeks of grounding from my parents in the process. Ah, if only.

-Drew Millard

[via Wall Street Journal]