Status Updates From Inventing Ourselves

The teenage brain isn’t broken. Adolescence is a period of life when the brain is changing in important ways: we should understand it, nurture it – and celebrate it.

Whenever you see a headline about a new result in neuroscience, the first two questions you should ask are: is the sample big enough, and has the result been replicated? If the answer to either or both is ‘no’, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the claim should be disregarded – just that it should be viewed with an appropriate amount of caution.

working memory training not only improves working memory but also brings about improvements in other domains such as reasoning.

you are not right-brained or left-brained. You use both sides of the brain all the time, and you use them together.

It’s important to remember that humans throughout the ages have always worried about the effects of new technologies on young people’s minds. Plato seemed to be concerned that the invention of writing would harm people’s memories:

The authors of these studies suggested that this extra brain activity when completing a cognitive task might be due to compensation – that is, that the adolescent drinkers needed to activate more parts of their brain than the non-drinkers to achieve comparable performance.

Many studies showed that adolescent drinkers showed greater engagement of regions involved in the task at hand, and also engaged numerous additional regions that aren’t typically involved in these tasks.

research has shown that the chances of developing schizophrenia are higher for people who live in an urban rather than a rural environment.

Some researchers have suggested that increased activity and connections within emotion-processing regions during tasks that involve emotional processing might reflect heightened reactivity to emotional and social stimuli in adolescents with depression.

Post-mortem studies have shown that the brain tissue of adults with schizophrenia contains fewer synapses than the brain tissue of people without schizophrenia.

Post-mortem studies have shown that the brain tissue of adults with schizophrenia contains fewer synapses than the brain tissue of people without schizophrenia.

Feinberg speculated that synaptic pruning during adolescence might be exaggerated in young people who develop schizophrenia, so that their brains lose too many synapses during this critical period.

if we want to curb certain kinds of risk-taking in young people, it would be a good idea to focus on the immediate, social consequences of actions and decisions rather than, or as well as, delivering earnest warnings about long-term repercussions.

If adolescents tend to be more influenced by reward than by punishment, and are more tempted by immediate rewards than inclined to wait for larger rewards later, then perhaps this explains why some advertising warning about the long-term damaging effects of, say, smoking has little effect in this age group.

a reward-based approach, rather than punishment, might be more likely to be effective in adolescent learning.

Intriguingly, the ability to resist the marshmallow was correlated with all sorts of positive outcomes later in life. The longer they could ‘delay gratification’ as children, the higher they were rated as adolescents by their parents in terms of being interpersonally competent, able to concentrate and to exert self-control, and the better they did in their school exams

Fletcher and his colleagues found that four brain regions were more active when participants read the mentalizing stories rather than the unlinked sentences. These four regions are the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) and the anterior temporal cortex (ATC)

The results of this study indicate that increases in perspective-taking tendencies in adolescence may be associated with more sophistication and discrimination in deciding what levels of trust and reciprocity to adopt, as opposed to simply generalized increases in ‘prosocial’ (generous) behaviour.

This ability to understand that people’s beliefs differ from one’s own beliefs, and can be false, is a component of mentalizing – our ability to form views about other people’s minds.

By day two, they can detect the difference between a foreign language and their own – sucking longer when they’re exposed to foreign-language sounds than when they hear sounds from their native language, to which they were exposed in the womb. By day three, a baby can recognize his or her mother’s voice, preferring to listen to her speech than to that of strangers.

The idea is that the baby will produce longer sucks for sounds that are not familiar, and shorter sucks for sounds he or she recognizes. Using this clever method, scientists have discovered that, by day one of life, babies can distinguish between male and female voices.

The same subcortical structures are present in many other animals, enabling them to recognize and respond quickly to potential threats such as predators, as well as to identify figures of safety such as parents, and to spot prey.

Early face recognition has been found to rely on subcortical structures. These structures, most of which develop early in life, contribute to a pathway in the brain that enables us to make fast, automatic movements in response to what we see or hear.

The main proposal of the mind-blindness theory is that the intuitive understanding that other people have minds is lacking or diminished in people with autism. If people with autism cannot automatically mentalize, then this would explain why they find communication and social interaction, especially understanding the nuances of social interaction, so challenging.