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

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.

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.