There’s a line that always comes up in discussions about laws or other thing regarding young people, like driving laws, or the age of consent. People will mention that teenagers my be full grown, but that the brain isn’t fully developed until some particular age, often cited as 20, but I’ve heard people say 25.
What does that mean? The brain never stops “developing” in the sense that it’s not a static structure. Whenever you learn something, or form some a new memory your brain has changed on some level. A 20-year-old brain is different from a 15-year-old one, but a 30-year-old is different from the 20-year old as well. Are there gross visible changes in the brain’s structure that people are referring to?
If there are there some sort of measurable cognitive abilities that don’t develop until then, can they actually be shown to have a biological basis rather than just being a result of where a person of a certain age is likely to be in our society and our educational systems?
People always throw around this line about teenager’s brains not being fully developed, but I’ve never heard where the bef
It is mainly the frontal lobe region of the brain that has been shown to exhibit marked differences in teens and young adults. Cite.
The “executive functions” are described as “planning, impulse control and reasoning.” Basically, it is the ability to accurately predict and prepare for long-term consequences that appears to be deficient in a younger person’s mind. Personally I think that is partly due to a lack of the experience necessary to have formed those sorts of connections at that stage in life.
I have my doubts about any “qualitatively different from us” assertions about the brains of younger people of any age.
Newborn infants have brains that seem to be working quite well. They notice patterns and process information. Considering their almost complete lack of prior experience and knowledge, they do a damn impressive job of making sense of their world, and doing so in an observable fashion despite severe limitations on their ability to express themselves or take compliex deliberate action to any major extent.
One example would be the development of the part of the brain that plays a major role in the ability to form short term memories - the hippocampus. This part of the brain doesn’t usually fully develop until age 2 or 3, which means that an infant’s ability to form memories is fairly limited. They are able to learn things like new words, faces, etc., but forming detailed memories (like what their 1st birthday party was like) is a little out of reach. Cite (Handbook of Child Psychology).
Other parts of the brain aren’t fully developed until later in childhood, accounting for egocentrism in children. While it may not be as prominent as Piaget et al. had originally thought, it certainly exists. Anyone who’s ever had a child stand directly in front of the TV, not knowing they’re blocking it from the rest of the family, can attest to that.
