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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.

The part of the brain that processes sound (the auditory cortex) in highly skilled musicians is about 25 per cent larger than it is in people who have never played an instrument. The degree of enlargement is correlated with the age at which musicians began to practise, suggesting that the expansion of the auditory cortex is dependent on how much it is used.

Myelination is a very gradual process, beginning in the second trimester of foetal life and continuing during the rest of pregnancy and infancy, and throughout childhood, adolescence and early adulthood.

Introspection ability is associated with the size of the right rostrolateral prefrontal cortex: the better you are at introspecting, the larger this part of the brain is.

Synapses that are required to process the particular stimuli in one’s environment are maintained and strengthened, whereas those that are not needed are pruned away. The implication of this was that an adolescent’s environment – culture, education, home and social life, hobbies, nutrition and exercise – might contribute to shaping their brain.

Certain parts of the brain don’t stop developing in childhood,but instead continue to develop throughout childhood and adolescence. Furthermore, environmental experience might play an important role in shaping the human prefrontal cortex in adolescence. Synapses in this region of the brain are still being pruned away in adolescence, and we know that synaptic pruning depends partly on the individual’s environment.

We are all influenced by other people. What I would argue is that adolescents are especially susceptible to social influence. In terms of the decision see-saw, this means that social factors weigh in particularly heavily for adolescents; adolescent decision-making is more driven by the need for peer acceptance and the desire to avoid being socially excluded.

The consequences of social instability in adolescence – in both rats and humans – can be so detrimental that mechanisms and behaviours promoting peer acceptance can be considered adaptive. That is, it might be evolutionarily beneficial for adolescents to do their utmost to be accepted by their peer group, so as to avoid being socially isolated.

human adolescents who experience social stress suffer behavioural consequences in adulthood. Adolescents in very socially unstable environments – moving between foster homes and children’s homes, for example, and possibly experiencing violence and chaos in the home – tend to be in poorer physical and mental health than adolescents whose social worlds are relatively consistent and stable.

adolescents are especially sensitive to how they fit into their social environment – in this case, being included by other people in a game.

As they begin to question who they are and how they fit in with other people, young adolescents may become increasingly self-conscious, to the extent that they imagine an audience even if it doesn’t exist.

Do you remember being a teenager? Perhaps you went through a phase of being acutely self-conscious, when you thought other people were constantly evaluating you, even talking about you. This is quite common in early adolescence (around age 11–14), when young people become increasingly aware that others have the capacity to evaluate them, and as a result may overestimate the extent to which this actually occurs.

While self-identity continues to evolve throughout life, by the late teens most people have developed a sense of who they are and how they are – or would like to be – seen by other people.

In addition, and through interaction with our genes, the environment plays a role in determining who we become. Our many childhood experiences, our upbringing, education, social interactions, hobbies and so on, combine gradually to form a sense of who we are.

How do you become you? To a certain degree, our genetic material, inherited from our parents, determines who we will become. Personality, intelligence, preferences and cognitive strengths are all to some degree hereditary – passed on in the genes from generation to generation.

For all of the patients I talked to, it was in their late adolescence that the symptoms started to emerge. This is interesting because it tells us that schizophrenia is a developmental condition, but one that starts much later than other developmental conditions such as autism or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Every patient I asked, regardless of age, race or gender, told me that the first time they experienced their frightening and debilitating symptoms was between the ages of 18 and 25 – that is, in what is generally considered late adolescence or emerging adulthood.

The brain has a system for labelling self-produced sensations and distinguishing them from sensations produced externally. It turns out that the mechanism for distinguishing between what the world does to you and what you do to yourself isn’t working normally in people with schizophrenia.

Adolescence is a formative period of life, when neural pathways are malleable, and passion and creativity run high.

Adolescents aren’t stupid–rationally,they already understand the risks.But in the heat of the moment,when they’re offered a cigarette/an Ecstasy tablet,many adolescents care far more about what their peer group thinks of them than about the potential health risks of their choice.Often,their decisions are driven by the fear of exclusion by their friends, rather than by a dispassionate consideration of the consequences

Sensation-seeking increased between age 10 and the late teens (peaking at age 19), and then fell again during the twenties. In contrast, self-regulation increased steadily between 10 and the mid-twenties, after which it levelled out.

All mammals undergo a period of development between puberty and becoming fully sexually mature that we can think of as adolescence.There’s a lot of research on this period in mice & rats, which are ‘adolescent’ for about thirty days.Research has shown that, during the month or so of adolescence, these animals take more risks & are more inclined to seek out novel environments than either before puberty or in adulthood

On a mission this year to read books A loves. I think I am going to love this series.