Blame My Brain - The Amazing Teenage Brain Revealed

By Nicola Morgan (2013)

I perhaps should have read the blurb more closely as this book is aimed at a young teen market.  In fact, I don't think my 16 year old daughter would have been surprised by anything in it.  I was familiar with absolutely all the information it contained, and skipped through the stories as they seemed unnecessary for making the rather sketchy neuroscience. 

I am not even sure that it doesn't directly contradict some of the stuff in the previous book I have just finished, ie: How Emotions are Made, by Lisa Feldman Barrett, which, if right, might challenge a few of the very broad assumptions that are made in this book.

I did, however, warm to the device of offering several different explanations for her assertions.  This at least seemed sufficiently modest.  I particularly liked the one about "how do brains come through adolescence and out the other side with a whole bundle of skills to boot".  One suggested that it was school.  The other, imo, much more likely, the brain, given sufficient stimulus and interest, will come out thriving anyway, given the nature of the growth and then preening of neurons.

Less realistically, she suggested that rats in a box with no stimuli is the same as watching TV and are equally bad for the brain. The author clearly hasn't seen Netflix in a while.  The two situations are not analogous.

Rating 3/10.







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