for real there’s nothing worse than seeing actual teenagers trot out the “your brain isn’t fully developed until you’re 25!” bullshit. that is a view of brain development that falls somewhere in the spectrum between “way oversimplified” and “just plain wrong”. it gets pushed and repeated because it helps prop up social norms that include robbing young people of autonomy and consent, regulating them out of the public sphere, and silencing their voices on important issues. and my heart just breaks to see teens internalizing this narrative of “you’re inherently stupid and untrustworthy because your brain is programmed to be shitty for another 10 years”. it’s like some kind of mass stockholm syndrome. young people please love yourselves and realize you do not have to wait until your mid-20s to be a whole and real person with the right to be taken seriously.
So, I agree that young people’s opinions should be taken more seriously, but could you expand on the first bit? Why do you see the fact that the brain isn’t fully developed until you’re 25 to be nearly plain wrong? It’s fact that the prefrontal cortex– the part of the brain in charge of risk vs reward, decision making, control of the ego, etc.– finishes developing at 25, and is the last cortex to reach maturity. While I agree it has become overused to write off young people’s rights, it is in fact a true statement.
so, this is a big issue. I’m going to try and break it down into a few vital points but I’ll probably miss some things.
first, there’s the problem of science being poorly reported or even entirely misrepresented in popular media and in social discourse at large. a magazine called Parenting Science ran a great article about this in 2009. they used the example of a brain imaging study that had found teenagers showed more activity in the medial prefrontal cortex - the area of the brain associated with social decision making - than adults in certain situations. the scientists who did this study posited that this result might have something to do with teens having less social experience to draw on, and thus needing to think harder to understand subtle cues and predict others’ behavior; or with the more flexible but less efficient neural networks that characterize young brains. but when it hit the popular press, this study was reported, incredibly, as “teen brains lack capacity for empathy”. and not just in niche blogs or local rags - WebMD, MSNBC, and CBS all ran this story, saying that a study that had nothing to do with empathy whatsoever had scientifically proven that teenagers were less capable of caring about others than adults.
what’s happening here is that science is being twisted in public consciousness to support pre-existing stereotypes of young people. this really isn’t surprising if you study the history of science and society - any research about a group of people commonly treated as a cohesive social category will get misused to some extent.
next, there’s the issue in both general public discourse and academia itself of going into research with biased framings. our culture approaches childhood with what you might call a “deficit model”: any difference between young people and adults is taken to mean that adults are better. example: everyone knows teens think they’re invincible and don’t understand danger and that’s why they’re risk-takers, right? so we get year after year of research that aims to figure out exactly what part of the brain is responsible for that dangerous behavior, and never questions the underlying assumption. this study in the academic journal Nature turns this assumption on its head by saying teens aren’t irresponsible and reckless, they’re tolerant of ambiguity and uncertainty.
and really, this makes a lot more sense than thinking about it the other way. there’s no reason the human race would’ve evolved such that our brains have a diminished capacity to understand danger in the years before we procreate. what’s the survival advantage of that?? but it makes a hell of a lot of sense that we would’ve evolved such that in the early years of our independent lives, we’re more accepting of situations we can’t predict or control. and in fact, this study in the Journal of Research on Adolescence (paywall) suggests something very much along these lines is at play: young people who engage in potentially hazardous “exploratory behavior” with their peers learn faster and show better performance on similar tasks later.
now, of course, that might still look like “risky” behavior from an objective outside point of view. but when a researcher starts out from the unbiased perspective of “how do adolescents approach decision-making situations?” rather than the biased perspective of “why are teen brains so screwy?”, very different results emerge about the mechanisms behind age-related differences, and the potential value of those differences.
next, there’s the fact that there’s stuff about the young brain we just don’t know yet, and some of it could have the potential to seriously change what supposedly settled science means. this study by researchers at Washington University in St Louis found that children and adults actually use different parts of the brain to perform the same tasks. specifically - this is the fascinating part - children tend to use more regions toward the back of their brains to do cognitive tasks that adults would tend to use more regions toward the front of their brains for. the lead scientist on the study specifically said this could be a way children’s brains compensate for the slow development of frontal regions.
now, this hasn’t been explored specifically yet as far as I know, but what this could imply is that those studies that show less activity in “the region of the brain associated with self-regulation” might be effectively meaningless. if kids can do the same things with different parts of their brains compared to adults, maybe they don’t need “fully-developed” prefrontal cortices to do what adults rely on our fully-developed prefrontal cortices for.
there’s also the fact that biology may be taking credit for what is, in fact, the province of culture and society. psychologist Robert Epstein wrote an article in Scientific American in which he attempted to remind us all that brain imaging studies are correlational, not causational; in other words, they can’t say whether or not differences in brain structure and function are the cause of different behavior. and the relationship between emotions/experiences/behavior and the brain isn’t a one-way street. the way we act, the way we feel, and what we see, hear, and do all change our brains in profound ways. “if teens are in turmoil,” Epstein says, “we will necessarily find some corresponding chemical, electrical or anatomical properties in the brain. but did the brain cause the turmoil, or did the turmoil alter the brain?”
in other words, even if teenagers are categorically more reckless, more prone to destructive and criminal behavior, more likely to suffer mental illness, and even if teen brains are categorically different from adult brains…we don’t have any solid data by which to blame the one on the other. it is just as likely, if not more likely, that the way our society treats young people (subjecting them to ten times as many restrictions on their behavior and experiences as the average adult and twice as many as incarcerated felons, Epstein points out) is the cause of this tumultuous adolescence, which in turn causes differences in brain function - rather than teen brains being naturally different, and that naturally causing teen turmoil.
the final point I want to make is that even when the science is relatively settled, how it gets perceived and interpreted in everyday thought and discourse is often the result of it being filtered through preexisting prejudices. as an example: there are things the young brain is better at. young children’s brains are (on average) superior to adolescent and adult brains in skill acquisition and sensorimotor processing. adolescent and young adult brains are superior in processing speed, short-term memory, and creative thinking. adult brains are superior in emotional regulation, executive functioning, and critical thinking. (I can find sources for these if anyone is curious, but they would all be different and I didn’t want to be giving 6+ links in the middle of a paragraph.)
so why do we consider a brain “fully developed” when it’s reached the peak of its executive function prowess, instead of the peak of its processing speed and creativity? because society, not science, says adults are “fully developed” humans, and so any aspect of young brains which is superior is considered unimportant. we admit, quite freely, that young people are often more creative and better at learning - but we ultimately don’t care. meanwhile, the aspects of cognition that happen to be stronger later in life get held up as marks of some sort of ineffable completeness.
to be honest, I would go so far as to say it’s completely impossible to actually understand age-based differences in human cognition within the current social framework of how we understand childhood and adulthood. I question at a base level whether unbiased scientific knowledge is even accessible in this kind of cultural climate. I’m not saying research on this should all just stop, but we should start having the same conversations we’re having about research on the brain and gender, for example.
this is probably the longest post I’ve ever written on this site now, but science and society is such a fascinating topic for me generally, especially when it gets paired with social justice issues. I hope what I’ve written here make sense and is helpful in understanding why it’s so problematic to just boil everything down to “your brain isn’t fully formed until you’re 25″. send me an ask if you want me to clarify anything!
