The idea we have about adolescence right now it ends at 25 years old, this being the age at which supposedly the brain has just been ‘cooked’ forever to give way to a functional adult. But the reality is very different as the new studies point out, since we would continue to mature the brain until at least 32 years old.
Where did the current idea come from? To understand why scientists pointed to 25 years as the age at which brain maturity ends, we must go back to studies of the past. Specifically to Resonance studies from the 90s and early 2000s like the classic Nitin Gogtay who mapped brain development and discovered that the cortex matures from “back to front.”
This means that the sensory and motor areas are consolidated soon, but the prefrontal cortex which is in charge of executive functions, impulse control and planning is last in line. The problem is that many of those studies stopped following the subjects when you reach 20 or 21 years oldsince seeing that the curve continued to rise, it was assumed that the “peak” of maturity would arrive shortly after, around the mid-20s. But we had no idea what happened after this. Just assumptions.
A new frontier. In order to solve this ‘blindness’ of neuroscience used the analysis of more than 4,000 brains using connectivity neuroimaging techniques at the University of Cambridge. What they saw was clearly five ‘epochs’ or milestones in brain wiring throughout life.
Different turning points. And as if our life were a game, in the brain we have like five different screens that begin at a specific age that acts as a turning point. These ages are: 9, 32, 66 and 83 years. What interests us in this case is the period between 9 and 32 years, since the brain is characterized by a continuous increase in the efficiency and integration of neural networks.
It is what the authors describe as an ‘extended adolescence’. It’s not that at 30 you think the same as a 15-year-old, but that the architecture of connections has not yet reached its final ‘adult’ form. Something that occurs at age 32 and remains stable until age 66, when brain activity begins to decline.
To understand it better. Researchers wanted to use a simile to illustrate this new paradigm. To do this, they ask us to think of our brain as the union of several “functional neighborhoods” that specialize in specific tasks such as vision, language or logic. All of these are integrated with each other through different highways that are high-speed connections.
Well then, between 20 and 32 years old The brain is balancing these two processes, so that the connections between different areas of the brain are well connected and organized. And it is precisely this typical pattern of the adult network, where the brain is capable of integrating complex information fluidly, which does not appear until after the age of thirty.
Teenager at 30? This is where the important nuance comes in. Just because the brain continues to mature structurally does not mean that we should redefine adolescence in legal or clinical terms. All this because maturation is a gradient, not a switch of ‘now I’m a teenager and now I’m not’.
To understand this, you have to know that the different elements of the brain and executive functions have a very different development curve. In this way, saying that the brain matures at 32 is a simplification that is as useful (or as erroneous) as saying that it matures at 25. What science really tells us is that there is no sudden development “blackout”; We remain biologically plastic and dynamic much longer than we thought.
An opportunity for habits. This prolonged maturation is good news for all of us, since if the brain continues to actively ‘wire’ itself throughout our 20s, it means that structural plasticity is especially dynamic at this stage.
In this way, science is quite clear: aerobic exercise, learning new languages or facing cognitively demanding tasks during this “third decade” of life helps to improve the volume and organization of the brain’s white matter. On the contrary, factors such as chronic stress can affect the integrity of those connections.
In short, a brain at 28 years old is not a finished product, but rather a work in progress that is finishing paving its best highways. The next time someone tells you that you should have your life figured out now because “you’re an adult,” you can tell them that, according to the University of Cambridge, your brain still has a couple of years of baking left.
Images | Hal Gatewood Robina Weermeijer
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