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Fifteen years ago, it was widely assumed that the vast majority
of brain development takes place in the first few years of life.
Back then, 15 years ago, we didn't have the ability to look
inside the living human brain and track development across the
lifespan. In the past decade or so, mainly due to advances in
brain imaging technology such as magnetic resonance imaging, or
MRI, neuroscientists have started to look inside the living
human brain of all ages, and to track changes in brain structure
and brain function, so we use structural MRI if you'd like to
take a snapshot, a photograph, at really high resolution of the
inside of the living human brain, and we can ask questions like,
how much gray matter does the brain contain, and how does that
change with age? And we also use functional MRI, called fMRI, to
take a video, a movie, of brain activity when participants are
taking part in some kind of task like thinking or feeling or
perceiving something