Lives are full of change, and that’s why Yara Toenders is researching the brain

Yara Toenders likes to look into other people’s lives. As a scientist and as a reader. With the book The eighth life (for Brilka) by Nino Haratischwili she could lose herself in six generations. A bull’s-eye.

The book The eighth life (for Brilka) by Nino Haratischwili is ‘one of the favourite books’ of Yara Toenders. Her enthusiasm is shared by those around her. When she attended the theatre production of the same name, her uncle and aunt were sitting a row behind her and somewhere further along she spotted a friend. In the Netherlands nearly one hundred thousand copies of the book about six generations of a family in Georgia have been sold. What resonates?

Curious about the life of others

Toenders likes to take a brief look into the lives of others. The book offered her a glimpse into seven lives at once, lives that are connected but each developing in their own way. Every life goes through different stages; when Toenders thought about which stage she had read with the most interest, she arrived at adolescence. The period, roughly between 10 and 24 years of age, which she studies as a neurobiologist. “In that period people start discovering the world, they become more themselves and they develop opinions that differ from those of their parents. The characters in the book start exploring, just like the young adults I see in my research.”

Her scientific interest in adolescence began with the complex changes in the brain during this stage. Contrary to what people often think, the number of brain cells decreases during adolescence, Toenders explains. “At the same time, we call it a growth spurt, because the number of connections between the cells increases. In childhood, the brain is a densely overgrown forest with narrow paths; from puberty onwards some trees disappear, the paths widen and you can walk through the forest more easily and quickly, is the analogy.”

Mood swings are normal

While she focused on young people dealing with depression during her PhD research, she now turns to the mental well-being of adolescents in general. And what turns out? “Mood swings and gloomy thoughts are part of growing up. In the period between 10 and 24 many people experience mood swings, but that period passes. Later in life those mood swings, on average, decrease again.”

The developments and changes that people undergo throughout their lives are of interest to Toenders. That is why she is so enthusiastic about the book The eighth life (for Brilka) in which human lives unfold, and surprisingly enough it is also the reason she’s interested in brains.

Life-long brains

Brain scientists are sometimes accused of being deterministic, as if everything has already been decided, but Toenders emphasises the plasticity of the brain. “You can try to use the brain to explain or clarify something, but the brain itself also develops. The brain is never finished.”

For Toenders herself the exploratory phase that is so typical of adolescence began when, at eighteen, she left Wadenoijen, a small village near Tiel, and moved to Amsterdam. As a young mother she can now, through personal experience, relate to studies showing that the brain undergoes change during this stage.