Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Adolescent Brain

Product Description

Our personalities, aspirations and dreams are all established in our brains. It creates every feeling, emotion and desire we experience, and stores every one of our memories. And yet, until very recently, we believed that it 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. There are fundamental differences between the adult and adolescent brain, and typical teenage behaviour - risk taking, intense relationships, going to bed and getting up late - 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 behaviour, evaluating risk and understanding others. While working in a psychiatric hospital in Versailles, Sarah-Jayne Blakemore was struck by the realisation that every patient first experienced symptoms during this pivotal period. Why is this? What happens to our brains during our teenage years? And what makes adolescent brains particularly vulnerable to illnesses such as schizophrenia? 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.Our personalities, aspirations and dreams are all established in our brains. It creates every feeling, emotion and desire we experience, and stores every one of our memories. And yet, until very recently, we believed that it 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. There are fundamental differences between the adult and adolescent brain, and typical teenage behaviour - risk taking, intense relationships, going to bed and getting up late - 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 behaviour, evaluating risk and understanding others. While working in a psychiatric hospital in Versailles, Sarah-Jayne Blakemore was struck by the realisation that every patient first experienced symptoms during this pivotal period. Why is this? What happens to our brains during our teenage years? And what makes adolescent brains particularly vulnerable to illnesses such as schizophrenia? 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.
Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore is a Royal Society University Research Fellow and Professor in Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL. 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. Inventing Ourselves is her first solo book.