One of our researchers, Christian Tamnes, was recently interviewed regarding the development of teenage brains. In these Norwegian articles, Tamnes explains how the human changes through early development and into early adulthood.
The take-home message being, that teenager’s brains undergo a large-scale “cleaning” operation, pruning the neurons of the brain. When we are born, we have many more neuro’s and neuron connections that we do in adulthood, and the number increases in the first post-natal stages of life. During our teens, there is a large pruning effort within the brain to select connections and neurons to keep and strengthen, and which ones to diminish and let go.
