Inventing Ourselves Quotes

“There’s nothing like teenage diaries for putting momentous historical events in perspective. This is my entry for 20 July 1969. I went to arts centre (by myself!) in yellow cords and blouse. Ian was there but he didn’t speak to me. Got rhyme put in my handbag from someone who’s apparently got a crush on me. It’s Nicholas I think. UGH. Man landed on moon.”
― Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain

“If a child has ‘slipped through the net’ and hasn’t done well during childhood, it’s not too late to start intervening and providing extra support in adolescence.”
― Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain

“Adolescence is a formative period of life, when neural pathways are malleable, and passion and creativity run high. The changes that take place in the brain during this period offer us a lens through which we can begin to see ourselves anew.”
― Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain

“the number of synapses peaks at around 8–12 months and then starts to decline again, levelling out at around 12 years.9 In the auditory cortex, the region involved in processing sounds and hearing spoken language, the peak occurs at around 3 months, and then declines until around age 12. This means that the numbers of synapses in these sensory regions don’t change much after 12 years old, by which time they have already reached adult levels.”
― Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain

“The results suggest that adolescents and adults learn in different ways, and that a reward-based approach, rather than punishment, might be more likely to be effective in adolescent learning.”
― Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain

“In contrast, compared with children and adults, adolescents showed a reduced ability to inhibit pressing the key when the no-go stimuli were happy faces. In other words, the ability to stop yourself making an automatic response to positive stimuli showed a dip in adolescence.”
― Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain

“Such changes may also be reversible. A number of studies have looked at learning to juggle. One of these studies, carried out by Arne May and colleagues at the University of Regensburg in Germany, scanned people’s brains before and after they had practised juggling three balls every day for three months. At the end of this time, two regions of the jugglers’ brains that process visual motion information had increased in size. But after the passage of another three months, during which the same people had not done any juggling, these regions had returned to their previous size.”
― Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain

“For many of us, a deep and complex sense of self, particularly of our social self, has its origins in adolescence. And in developing that social self, one group of people stands out as being exceptionally significant: our friends; other adolescents–people like us.”
― Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain

“However, more recent studies suggest that while our sense of the imaginary audience increases between childhood and adolescence, it remains quite high even in adulthood. Perhaps we are all, to some extent, overly concerned with what other people are thinking about us.”
― Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain

“During adolescence, your sense of who you are–your moral and political beliefs, your music and fashion tastes, what social group you associate with–undergoes profound change. During adolescence, we are inventing ourselves.”
― Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain

“Adolescents aren’t stupid–rationally, they already understand the risks. But in the heat of the moment, when they’re offered a cigarette or an Ecstasy tablet, many adolescents care far more about what their peer group thinks of them than about the potential health risks of their choice. Often, their decisions are driven by the fear of exclusion by their friends, rather than by a dispassionate consideration of the consequences.”
― Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain