Nimitha’s Reviews > Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain > Status Update

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.

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.