Free The Good Girl by Fiona Neill Page A

Harry never tired of the mostly female adulation. ‘It requires real confidence for a man to do that.’
    ‘Women do it all the time,’ said Ailsa, instantly regretting the comment because it made her sound ungrateful and faintly defensive.
    ‘Also Ailsa’s parents live close by,’ Harry continued. ‘Lived, I should say. Adam still does. Her mother died shortly before we arrived in the summer. Completely unexpected. Sealed the decision to move. We’re hoping it was the storm before the calm.’
    ‘I’m sorry to hear about your loss,’ said Wolf to Ailsa and Adam. His straightforward approach to death marked him out as an American more than his accent, which lurched between English vowel sounds and diphthongs from the Deep South.
    ‘Thank you,’ said Ailsa. ‘It’s been a tough year.’ Her voice faltered. ‘We were living in central London and we thought Luckmore would be a safer environment for our teenagers to push the boundaries.’
    ‘We were beginning to have a few problems with Luke,’ added Harry. ‘And it’s a better school. Especially with such a safe pair of hands at the helm.’
    ‘So what do you do, Harry?’ asked Loveday.
    ‘I’m
a cognitive neuroscientist,’ he replied.
    ‘What does that involve?’
    ‘I study how the brain affects behaviour.’
    ‘Wow. I’m impressed,’ said Loveday. ‘That must be very interesting.’
    ‘Mostly it involves spending hours in airless basements with no natural daylight repeating the same experiment over and over again,’ joked Harry.
    ‘So what’s the upside?’ asked Wolf.
    ‘It gives you a fascinating insight into the neural mechanisms underlying cognition. The way the mind and the brain work. Helps us all understand each other a little bit more or at least understand why we do the things we do.’
    ‘What’s the book about?’ asked Loveday.
    ‘I’ve spent the past decade researching the development of the teenage brain. I’m trying to make the science real for a wider audience so that it helps us understand what kids are going through during puberty.’
    ‘And what have you discovered?’ asked Loveday, arching one of her eyebrows. Somehow she made even the most innocuous question sound flirtatious.
    ‘We used to think that the teenage brain was simply a version of the adult brain. But we’ve discovered that the frontal lobes that control impulsive behaviour and inhibit inappropriate behaviour get pruned through adolescence while the thrill-seeking part goes into overdrive. This has a big effect on behaviour. Teenagers basically have Ferrari engines and Fiat brakes because
the rational pre-frontal cortex ends up playing second fiddle to the risk-taking ventral striatum. The front of your brain isn’t fully developed until your late twenties.’
    ‘It’s a book based on science but hopefully with wide appeal to parents up and down the land,’ Ailsa explained.
    ‘Most mental health problems start in adolescence, and the neural pathways laid down then run very deep,’ Harry added.
    ‘So what you’re saying is that parents have to function as a temporary pre-frontal cortex to their teenage children?’ said Wolf.
    ‘I couldn’t have put it any better myself,’ said Harry.
    ‘Harry is very big on impulse control,’ said Rachel, a hint of alcohol-fuelled menace in her tone. ‘But there’s a big difference between theory and practice, isn’t there, Harry?’
    ‘So why are teenagers so impulsive?’ asked Loveday.
    ‘In a nutshell,’ Harry began, ‘during adolescence there’s an increase in the activity of neural circuits using dopamine, a neurotransmitter central in creating our drive for reward. Increased dopamine means adolescents are drawn to thrilling and exhilarating sensations. Their baseline level of dopamine is low but its release in response to experience is higher, which is why they say they are bored a lot and very impulsive. They are focused on the positive rewards from experiences but can’t value the