Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain

by Sarah-Jayne Blakemore

Overview

Award-winning neuroscientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore explains the developmental journey our brains take during adolescence and how the experience of these years determines the adults we become.
Risk taking, intense relationships, going to bed and getting up late--what is going on in teenagers' brains? Until very recently, we believed that the human brain stopped developing in childhood--that by the time you reached adolescence, your brain was fully developed. In Inventing Ourselves, award-winning neuroscientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore reveals that this is simply not the case.

Blakemore shows that there are fundamental differences between the adult and adolescent brain, and typical teenage behavior is caused by the transformations that take place during this formative period. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these physiological changes are most evident in the prefrontal cortex, the region responsible for decision-making, planning, inhibiting inappropriate behavior, evaluating risk, and understanding others.

With implications for education, parenting, and treating mental health conditions, Inventing Ourselves will transform the way we think about adolescence and reveal that the changes we experience throughout our teenage years dictate the adults we become.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781610397322
Publisher:	PublicAffairs
Publication date:	05/15/2018
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	130,794
File size:	10 MB

About the Author

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore is a Royal Society University Research Fellow and a professor in cognitive neuroscience at University College London. She has published over 100 papers in scientific journals, and won multiple major awards for her research, including the BPS Spearman Medal 2006, the Turin Young Mind&Brain Prize 2013, the Royal Society Rosalind Franklin Award 2013, and the Klaus J. Jacobs Research Prize 2015. She was named in the Times Young Female Power List 2014 and was one of only four scientists on the Sunday Times 100 Makers of the 21st Century 2014.

Table of Contents

1 Adolescence isn't an aberration 1

2 A sense of self 19

3 Fitting in 31

4 Inside the skull 51

5 Inside the living brain 69

6 The ever-plastic brain 79

7 Social mind, social brain 97

8 Understanding other people 119

9 The right sort of risks 133

10 When things go wrong 157

11 Educating the brain 177

12 It's the journey that matters 193

Notes 203

Acknowledgements 225

Illustration sources 229

Index 233