 HaShat Audio presents Inventing Ourselves, The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain, written by Sarah Jane Blakemore, read by Sarah Borges. Chapter 1 Adolescents Isn't an Aberration When I tell people I studied the adolescent brain, the immediate response is often a joke, something along the lines of, what, teenagers have brains? For some reason it's socially acceptable to mock people in this stage of their lives. But when you think about it, this is strange. We wouldn't ridicule other age groups in the same way. Imagine if we went around openly sneering at the elderly for their poor memory and lack of agility. Perhaps part of the reason why adolescents are mocked is that they do sometimes behave differently from adults. Some take risks, many become self-conscious. They go to bed late, get up late, they relate to their friends differently. We now know that all these characteristics are reflections of an important stage of brain development. Adolescents isn't an aberration, it's a crucial stage of our becoming individual and social human beings. I find teenage behaviour fascinating, but not because it's irrational, inexplicable, quite the opposite, because it gives us an insight into how natural changes in the physiology of our brains are reflected in the things we do and determine who we will become as adults. In this book I want to tell you what we know about the adolescent brain. I will show you how we study the way the brain develops during these years, how that development shapes adolescent behaviour and how it ultimately goes on to define the people we become, this is the time during which much of our sense of ourselves and of how we fit in with others is laid down. The development that adolescents go through is central to human experience. So what is adolescence? It's not a straightforward question to answer. Some people think of adolescence as equivalent to the teenage years. Scientific studies often define it simply as the second decade of life. This is the World Health Organization definition. On the other hand, many people believe that adolescents should not be tied to a particular chronological age range. The first psychologist to study adolescence as a period of development was Stanley Hall, who at the beginning of the 20th century defined adolescence as starting at puberty around 12 or 13 years and ending between 22 years.