Brain developing sequence through adolescence: Study

A recent study finds that brain development does not occur consistently throughout the entire brain. A Penn Medicine study follows a recently discovered developmental progression. Young people are susceptible to socioeconomic situations until adolescence because brain regions that support cognitive, social, and emotional functions seem to retain their ability to change, adapt, and remodel longer than other brain regions.
Using magnetic resonance imaging, researchers studied how the human brain develops from the age of eight to 23 years old. The results suggest a fresh method for figuring out how individual brain regions lose flexibility at different developmental stages. The findings of the study were published recently in Nature Neuroscience.
The findings reveal that reductions in brain plasticity occur earliest in “sensory-motor” regions, such as visual and auditory regions, and occur later in “associative” regions, such as those involved in higher-order thinking (problem-solving and social learning). As a result, brain regions that support executive, social, and emotional functions appear to be particularly malleable and responsive to the environment during early adolescence, as plasticity occurs later in development.
Corresponding author Theodore D. Satterthwaite, MD, the McLure Associate Professor of Psychiatry in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and director of the Penn Lifespan Informatics and Neuroimaging Center (PennLINC), said, “Studying brain development in the living human brain is challenging. A lot of neuroscientists’ understanding about brain plasticity during development actually comes from studies conducted with rodents. But rodent brains do not have many of what we refer to as the association regions of the human brain, so we know less about how these important areas develop.”
Analysing MRI scans from more than 1,000 individuals, the authors found that the functional marker of brain plasticity declined in earlier childhood in sensory-motor regions but did not decline until mid-adolescence in associative regions. "These slow-developing associative regions are also those that are vital for children's cognitive attainment, social interactions, and emotional well-being," Satterthwaite added. "We are really starting to understand the uniqueness of human's prolonged developmental program.”
"If a brain region remains malleable for longer, it may also remain sensitive to environmental influences for a longer window of development," Sydnor said, adding, "This study found evidence for just that.”