are adults, and they multiply rapidly within the first months of life. A two-year-old has twice as many synapses as an adult. Recent scans of the brain found that grey matter volume of adolescents tended to be lower than that of children (16). As the brain develops the fibres connecting nerve cells are wrapped in a protein that greatly increases the speed with which they can transmit impulses from cell to cell. The resulting increase in connectivity shapes how well different parts of the brain work in unison. Research is ongoing, but has found that the extent of this connectivity is related to intellectual growth in areas such as memory and learning (15).
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