50 Fun Facts About Human Growth and Development

Louise Brown, born in Oldham in 1978, was the first baby conceived through which medical procedure?

In vitro fertilization joins egg and sperm outside the body, so the press called Brown a 'test-tube baby', though a Petri dish was used. Robert Edwards won a 2010 Nobel Prize for the work.

Which Frenchwoman, who said she met Vincent van Gogh as a girl, lived a verified record 122 years?

Jeanne Calment died in 1997 aged 122 years and 164 days, the longest human life ever verified. She recalled the painter giving her a condescending look in her uncle's fabric shop.

Which phrase did psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques coin in a 1965 essay about creative geniuses?

Midlife crisis first appeared in his paper 'Death and the Midlife Crisis', published in a psychoanalysis journal. Jaques is also credited with originating the idea of corporate culture.

The 'Jim twins', reunited at 39 after being raised apart, were studied at which US state's university?

Minnesota psychologist Thomas Bouchard found both Jims had married a Linda and then a Betty, and each owned a dog called Toy. He noted that most separated twins are far less alike.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's 1969 book On Death and Dying set out five stages of grief, ending with which one?

Acceptance closes a sequence that opens with denial. Kübler-Ross drew the stages from her work with terminally ill patients, and later observed that people do not pass through them in strict order.

Auguste Deter, a Frankfurt patient who died in 1906, was the first person diagnosed with which condition?

Alzheimer's disease is named after Alois Alzheimer, the German psychiatrist who first described it in 1906. It is the most common cause of dementia, behind around 60–70% of cases.

In the familiar pyramid drawn from Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which need sits at the very top?

Self-actualization, the drive to become all that one can be, crowns the pyramid, with physiological needs at its base. Maslow himself never drew the famous diagram.

Which brain region is among the last to mature, still developing well into a person's twenties?

Prefrontal cortex development is still under way through the teenage years, one reason adolescents may take more risks: the social rewards can outweigh the possible consequences.

The Up documentaries revisited the same British children every seven years, mirroring which kind of study?

Longitudinal studies track the same people over long periods, so the changes they record are less likely to reflect differences between generations. The films began when the children were seven.

An extra copy of chromosome 21 causes which condition, first described by an English asylum doctor in the 1860s?

Down syndrome is named after John Langdon Down, who ran the Earlswood Asylum in Surrey. The extra chromosome behind it was not discovered until 1959, almost a century after his reports.

Which Augustinian friar worked out the basic rules of heredity by cross-breeding pea plants?

Gregor Mendel's findings were ignored by the scientific community in his lifetime and only rediscovered around 1900, more than three decades after he published them.

A smooth groove between nose and upper lip can signal that a baby was exposed in the womb to what?

Alcohol flattens that groove, the philtrum, in step with the amount of exposure, and doctors grade it against a five-point photo guide. No safe level in pregnancy has been established.

Which temporary organ, delivered after the baby in the third stage of labor, nourishes the fetus?

Placenta tissue also acts as a gland, producing hormones that regulate both the mother's and the baby's physiology throughout pregnancy.

Pregnant women are advised to take which B vitamin as a supplement to cut the baby's risk of spina bifida?

Folic acid lowers the risk of neural tube defects so reliably that more than 80 countries add it to certain foods, either by law or voluntarily.

Which English philosopher argued that the mind at birth is a blank slate, or tabula rasa?

John Locke made the case in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The Latin phrase recalls the wax tablets Romans wrote on, which were heated and smoothed blank for reuse.

Which term, from the Greek for 'yoked', names the single cell formed when a sperm fuses with an egg?

Zygote cells are diploid: the egg and the sperm each supply half of the chromosomes, 23 apiece in humans, so the new cell carries a complete set.

Studies of children raised in which country's orphanages in the 1980s and 1990s showed how neglect harms the brain?

Romania's orphanages filled after Nicolae Ceaușescu banned abortion and contraception. Research on the children raised there showed that babies need human contact as well as food.

Which Victorian polymath, a half-cousin of Charles Darwin, popularized the phrase 'nature versus nurture'?

Francis Galton used the phrase to frame how far heredity or environment shapes ability. He proposed settling the question by comparing twins, anticipating modern behavior genetics.

Which term, built on a Greek word for 'monster', describes substances that can cause birth defects?

Teratogens vary in the harm they do with the dose and with timing: the damage depends on the stage of development the embryo has reached when it is exposed.

Health effects on babies carried through the Dutch 'hunger winter' of 1944–45 became a famous example in which field?

Epigenetics studies changes in how genes are expressed without altering the DNA sequence. Babies exposed to the famine in the womb ran higher risks of diabetes and obesity as adults.

Erik Erikson, who placed a search for the self at the heart of adolescence, coined which now-everyday phrase?

Identity crisis was a subject Erikson knew at first hand: born Erik Salomonsen and raised as Erik Homburger, he replaced his stepfather's surname with one of his own invention.

Sigmund Freud named a young boy's supposed rivalry with his father after which king from Greek tragedy?

Oedipus unknowingly kills his father and marries his mother in Sophocles' play. Freud introduced the term in 1910, and rejected the 'Electra complex' that Carl Jung proposed for girls.

In Mary Ainsworth's Strange Situation test, which attachment pattern is the most common worldwide?

Secure babies explore freely while the caregiver is present, may be upset at being left and are happy at the reunion. Ainsworth made her first mother-infant observations near Kampala, Uganda.

Erik Erikson's eight psychosocial stages end in old age with which conflict, whose successful outcome is wisdom?

Integrity vs. despair turns on whether people can look back on their lives as meaningful. Erikson's wife and collaborator Joan later added a ninth stage for the eighties and nineties.

Which term did Jerome Bruner introduce for teaching support that is gradually removed as a learner improves?

Scaffolding builds on Lev Vygotsky's zone of proximal development: the gap between what a child can do alone and what the child can reach with help from someone more knowledgeable.

Which psychologist, born in a Canadian town of roughly 400 people, originated social learning theory and self-efficacy?

Albert Bandura showed in his 1961 Bobo doll experiment that children who watched an adult attack a doll were more likely to beat it themselves, learning by observation alone.

Jean Piaget's final stage of cognitive development, when abstract reasoning emerges, is called what?

Formal operational thinkers can reason about the hypothetical: Piaget found that most children under twelve could not work out which variables affect the swing of a pendulum.

Alexander Thomas and Stella Chess sorted babies as easy, difficult or slow-to-warm-up to describe which inborn trait?

Temperament in their New York study was rated on nine characteristics. About 40% of the babies fitted the easy pattern, 10% the difficult one and 15% were slow to warm up.

Jean Piaget asked children what a doll could see from across a model of three mountains to test for what?

Egocentrism showed when four-year-olds chose the photograph matching their own view rather than the doll's. The model's three peaks were marked by snow, a red cross and a hut.

Which term did Erik Erikson coin in 1950 for a middle-aged adult's concern with guiding younger people?

Generativity is set against stagnation in the seventh of his eight stages. After growing old himself, Erikson came to think it matters more in later life than he had first believed.

Which gland releases growth hormone, causing gigantism when it makes too much in childhood?

Pituitary tumors are almost always what lies behind gigantism, flooding the body with growth hormone before the growth plates in the bones fuse soon after puberty.

Natural menopause, typically between ages 45 and 55, follows a fall in progesterone and which other hormone?

Estrogen decline lies behind the hot flashes many women experience, which last from 30 seconds to ten minutes and can recur for years. Tobacco use tends to bring the change on earlier.

A boy's voice typically drops about an octave at puberty because which organ grows and its folds lengthen?

Larynx growth happens in both sexes under the influence of sex hormones: the vocal folds lengthen and thicken, and while a boy's voice breaks, a girl's gradually becomes richer.

Teenagers tend to fall asleep and wake later because adolescence shifts the timing of which hormone's release?

Melatonin is produced in darkness by the pineal gland, and its later release in the teenage years delays both sleep and waking, a finding that fuels debate over school start times.

Margaret Mead's 1928 book on adolescence, a key text in the nature–nurture debate, studied girls in which islands?

Samoa was where Mead observed girls on the island of Taʻū, arguing that culture shapes how the young grow up. In the 1980s Derek Freeman claimed she had been hoaxed, a charge many anthropologists reject.

Which term, introduced in 1981, describes adults caring for both their own children and their aging parents?

Sandwich generation pressures grew as people lived longer and had children later, so that small children and frail parents now often need support at the same time.

Which age-related hardening of the eye's lens makes most people over 40 hold small print farther away?

Presbyopia affects everyone to some degree and usually worsens until about 65. It is distinct from ordinary farsightedness, which nearly all newborns have and tend to grow out of.

Which term for a girl's first period combines the Greek words for 'month' and 'beginning'?

Menarche came at an average age of about 12.7 in studies from both Canada and South Korea, and the vast majority of girls have reached it by the age of 14.

David Elkind coined which term in 1967 for an adolescent's conviction of being unique and invulnerable?

Personal fable thinking grows out of teenagers seeing themselves as the center of attention, and its sense of invulnerability makes an adolescent more likely to take risks.

The Grant Study, begun in 1938 to follow 268 male undergraduates through adult life, is based at which university?

Harvard drew the men from its own undergraduate classes; they included the future president John F. Kennedy and the Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee.

Which type of intelligence, named by Raymond Cattell in 1943, rests on stored knowledge and holds up for decades?

Crystallized intelligence, measured by tasks such as vocabulary, begins to decline only after about 65, whereas its quick-reasoning counterpart peaks in early adulthood.

Which name is given to the twentieth-century rise in IQ scores, about three points a decade in the United States?

Flynn effect is the name textbooks adopted after James Flynn documented the rise. One 2009 study found British children's scores on a reasoning test up 14 points between 1942 and 2008.

Which protective caps at the ends of chromosomes shorten each time a body cell divides, a change linked to aging?

Telomeres may lie behind the Hayflick limit: in 1961 Leonard Hayflick showed that normal human cells divide only 40 to 60 times in culture before they stop for good.

Which psychologist argued in 1982 that Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development were male-oriented?

Carol Gilligan had been Kohlberg's research assistant. She pointed out that his theory was built on a sample of boys, and went on to originate the ethics of care.

Which Moscow-born psychologist, who helped develop America's Head Start program, devised ecological systems theory?

Urie Bronfenbrenner set the theory out in his most cited book, The Ecology of Human Development. He spent most of his career at Cornell, where he had studied psychology and music.

In James Marcia's four identity statuses, which describes a commitment made without exploring alternatives?

Foreclosure often means taking on a family's expectations unexamined: Marcia saw young people in this status as becoming the alter egos of their parents.

Which term, from the Greek for 'poverty of flesh', names the gradual loss of muscle mass and strength with age?

Sarcopenia was named in 1989 by a researcher called Rosenberg, who argued that perhaps no feature of age-related decline affects mobility and independence more dramatically.

Which Yale psychologist, who compiled a 1934 atlas of infant behavior, invented a mirrored dome for observing children?

Arnold Gesell's dome was a one-way mirror that let him watch children without disturbing them, and his atlas chronicled the typical milestones for each age.

Robert Guthrie's 1960s heel-prick blood test for newborns was first designed to detect which inherited disorder?

Phenylketonuria can be managed with a special diet begun soon after birth. Guthrie turned to the field after his own son was born disabled, and the filter-paper cards he devised spread to screening programs worldwide.

Cicely Saunders, a nurse turned physician, opened St Christopher's in London in 1967 as the first modern what?

Hospice care as Saunders shaped it joins expert pain relief to attention to patients' social, psychological and spiritual needs. She qualified as a social worker before training as a doctor.