Word: childhood
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...also twins, plus eldest brother Christopher, 22, are here to have their heads examined. Literally. The five brothers from Orem, Utah, are the latest recruits to a giant study that's been going on in this building since 1991. Its goal: to determine how the brain develops from childhood into adolescence and on into early adulthood...
Construction Ahead One reason scientists have been surprised by the ferment in the teenage brain is that the brain grows very little over the course of childhood. By the time a child is 6, it is 90% to 95% of its adult size. As a matter of fact, we are born equipped with most of the neurons our brain will ever have - and that's fewer than we have in utero. Humans achieve their maximum brain-cell density between the third and sixth month of gestation - the culmination of an explosive period of prenatal neural growth. During the final months...
What Giedd's long-term studies have documented is that there is a second wave of proliferation and pruning that occurs later in childhood and that the final, critical part of this second wave, affecting some of our highest mental functions, occurs in the late teens. Unlike the prenatal changes, this neural waxing and waning alters not the number of nerve cells but the number of connections, or synapses, between them. When a child is between the ages of 6 and 12, the neurons grow bushier, each making dozens of connections to other neurons and creating new pathways for nerve...
Pruning Problems The new discoveries about teenage brain development have prompted all sorts of questions and theories about the timing of childhood mental illness and cognitive disorders. Some scientists now believe that ADHD and Tourette's syndrome, which typically appear by the time a child reaches age 7, may be related to the brain proliferation period. Though both disorders have genetic roots, the rapid growth of brain tissue in early childhood, especially in regions rich in dopamine, "may set the stage for the increase in motor activities and tics," says Dr. Martin Teicher, director of developmental biopsychiatry research at McLean...
...while freshman Facebook statuses bemoaning its conclusion have begun to pop up across the Harvard network, I can’t help but question the legitimacy of this nostalgia. Because, to be quite frank, Harvard is populated by a group of people who were undoubtedly painfully awkward campers in childhood, and why any such camper would virtually pine for a return to the contrived, queasy confines of any camp-like situation beguiles me. Flash back to the summer of 1998. Imagine Peter, my twenty-something camp counselor, struggling to silence a hot room full of rowdy pre-teens. Silently sitting...