PROFESSOR OF NEUROSCIENCE VISITS SCHOOL
Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore visited Merchant Taylors’ Boys’ School, Crosby on Wednesday 9th March to deliver a lecture to 440 guests on ‘The Adolescent Brain’. Professor Blakemore is a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. Her group’s research focuses on brain development in human adolescence and she mounted a very strong defence for every teenager in Britain who has ever slammed a door, smoked a cigarette or driven a car too fast!
The audience included visiting pupils from Birkdale High School, Chesterfield High School and Hillside High School in Bootle. Ojie Ekun, Year 11 from Hillside ‘found the lecture really interesting; at times fascinating, particularly when she was talking about peer influence on adolescents. I could relate to that and am glad to know that I will grow out of it!’ Anna Collins, also from Hillside, felt the same way and said that ‘the comments about risk taking and young people made a lot of sense and helped me to understand more about some of the decisions I make. Perhaps this is what being ‘older and wiser’ actually means!’ said Anna.
Merchant Taylors’ has been delighted to forge a close relationship with Hillside High School through the Ogden Trust. The Ogden Trust is a charitable Trust that exists to promote the teaching and learning of physics. This is done by providing individual scholarships to talented sixth formers and a number of Hillside pupils have transferred into the Merchants’ Sixth Form to study Physics and other Sciences.
‘Our Sixth Form caters, with considerable success, for those wishing to enter higher education but it also prepares our students for the rigours and demands of life after University; we are delighted to welcome pupils from Hillside and other surrounding High Schools’, commented David Cook, Headmaster.
If you would like to find out more about Professor Blakemore’s lecture on the Adolescent Brain, please follow this link: www.icn.ucl.ac.uk/sblakemore
