Summary: The Evolution Of The Adolescent Brain

In this article the focus was on how there haven’t been many studies done on how the adolescent brain changes during puberty over the years, but that is slowly changing. The authors also talked about some of the experiments and studies that have been done already dealing with the adolescent brain. The focus of some of these studies ranged from White Matter (WM) and Gray Matter (GM) to the Prefrontal Cortex (PFC). When the authors were talking about WM and GM it was stated that throughout adolescence that in the temporal and parietal cortexes that WM increases and GM decreases (Choudhury 143). Then they went into how from what researchers have noticed that the adolescent brain matures from back to front, having the sensory and motor maturing first and …show more content…
Some of those things were the Prefrontal Cortex, and White Matter and Gray Matter. In the textbook, it states that WM is myelinated axons of a neuron, while GM is just the cell body that is not myelinated (Santrock 88). So when looking back onto the article it is said the amount of myelinated axons that are in an adolescent brain increases resulting in less GM because there are less cells that are not myelinated. Then on the PFC aspect of things, both the book and the article mentioned how it takes the PFC the most time to fully develop. In the article all it said was that it was the last thing to develop. Meanwhile, in the book it stated that it could continue to develop all the way until someone is 18-25 years old (Santrock 88). There wasn’t really much of a connection between what was in the textbook and the article said about social cognitive development because of the fact in the article it mainly talked about the studies were done. One thing that was made clear both in the article and in the text was that when someone is going through puberty, their brain processes some things slower than they would have if they were a child or an