Anyone who has parented teenagers would agree that there is something, well, different about their brains.

Just last week, there was a story about teens drinking hand sanitizer. Really? Hand sanitizer? Apparently you can get drunk off the stuff. And what about the cinnamon challenge, where kids (usually teens) eat a spoonful of cinnamon (which can be dangerous) for no other reason except to see if they can? Or the choking game--trying to get high by cheating death?

You really have to wonder about the brain of anybody who would try this stuff.

But all of us, if we think about our youth, can think of something colossally stupid we did. I have no idea why my friends and I stood up in the back of a speeding pickup truck. Or tried to hold our breath longer than anyone else underwater (in deep water at a beach without lifeguards). These things seemed, I don't know, exciting. That they could possibly kill us didn't seem to matter.

I remember a lecture in my freshman Shakespeare course in college. The professor was talking about Hamlet. Suddenly he stopped. He looked out at all of us silently for a few moments, and then he said, "You can't possibly understand this, because all of you think you are immortal. To understand this, you have to understand that you could die."