This year’s Cambridge Science Festival (13-26 March) lifts the lid on the teenage brain and takes a closer look at the stereotypes.
One of the most common stereotypes of adolescence is the rebellious, wild teen continually at odds with their parents and families. This often results in the teen years being dismissed as an unpleasant transitional stage or even maligned as a blight on society. But are teenagers really as unproductive and worthless as we are usually led to believe?
During an event, Zits, sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll – all human life is here (18 March), Dr David Bainbridge – the Cambridge University Clinical Veterinary Anatomist – takes a comparative, natural history, zoological approach to understanding teenagers, and he finds that some exciting discoveries have been made in the last 15 years.
It is becoming clear that adolescence is the pivotal process of human life – it is a central point of physical, mental, behavioural, emotional, romantic and sexual change. Also, the flux involved in the second decade of life brings teenagers into dramatic and unavoidable conflict with adults, to the extent that teenagers are frequently viewed a scourge of human society. However, Dr Bainbridge also uses anthropology, physiology, history and psychology to argue that the teenage years should instead be seen as a unique human innovation – the very phenomenon, in fact, which has allowed our species to achieve so much. He argues that many of the wonderful and stressful things teenagers experience may only be understood in the light of our species’ bizarre evolutionary history.
Dr David Bainbridge is a vet, reproductive biologist and the author of ‘Teenagers: A Natural History’, as well as ‘Middle Age: A Natural History’ and ‘Curvology: The origins and power of female body shape’. He teaches veterinary anatomy at Cambridge University.
In a related event, Exploring the teenage brain (21 March), Dr Kirstie Whitaker takes us on a journey ‘under the hood’ to learn how researchers in Cambridge and around the world are studying the teenage brain. She discusses what we can, and cannot, learn from the use of brain scans to understand this sensitive period of brain development.
Speaking about her event, Dr Kirstie Whitaker, a postdoctoral researcher in the Brain Mapping Unit of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge, said: “Adolescence is a period of human brain growth and high incidence of mental health disorders. In my talk, I will discuss recent work by the Neuroscience in Psychiatry Network – a collaboration between the University of Cambridge and University College London that seeks to better understand adolescent development in brain and behaviour.
“I will describe the different types of magnetic resonance images we acquire to better understand changes in the brain’s structure and function. I will also explain our use of graph theory for brain network analysis. The different parts of the brain do not work alone, they are connected to each other and send messages back and forth to generate complex thoughts and social interactions. The particularly well connected regions – the hubs of the network – continue to develop throughout the teenage years, and this may be a mechanism to explain the emergence of mental health disorders during the teenage years.”
For further events during the Festival and to pre-book, visit the Cambridge Science Festival website: www.sciencefestival.cam.ac.uk or call: 01223 766 766. Visit the Festival’s twitter site @camscience #csf2017, or Facebook page cambridgesciencefestival
Image copyright: Palliativo
Cambridge Science Festival brings science, technology, engineering, maths and medicine to an audience of all ages through demonstrations, talks, performances and debates. Run by the University of Cambridge, the Festival draws together independent organisations in addition to many University Departments, Centres and Museums.
This year’s Festival sponsors and partners are Cambridge University Press, AstraZeneca, MedImmune, Illumina, TTP Group, Science AAAS, Anglia Ruskin University, Microsoft Research, FameLab, Babraham Institute, Wellcome Genome Campus, Napp, Alzheimer’s Research UK, The Institute of Engineering and Technology, UTC Cambridge, Hills Road Sixth Form College, Cambridge Junction, British Science Week, Cambridge Live, and BBC Cambridgeshire.
_____________________________________________________