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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28193 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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Sure, here's an article from Slate from last year: https://slate.com/technology/2022/11/brain-development-25-year-old-mature-myth.html

Quoting:

They also found important clues to brain function. For instance, a 2016 study found that when faced with negative emotion, 18- to 21-year-olds had brain activity in the prefrontal cortices that looked more like that of younger teenagers than that of people over 21. Alexandra Cohen, the lead author of that study and now a neuroscientist at Emory University, said the scientific consensus is that brain development continues into people’s 20s.

But, she wrote in an email, “I don’t think there’s anything magical about the age of 25.”

Yet we’ve seen that many people do believe something special happens at 25. That’s the result of pop culture telephone: As people reference the takeaways from Cohen and other researchers’ work, the nuance gets lost. For example, to add an air of credibility to its DiCaprio theory, YourTango excerpts a passage from a 2012 New York Times op-ed written by the psychologist Larry Steinberg: “Significant changes in brain anatomy and activity are still taking place during young adulthood, especially in prefrontal regions that are important for planning ahead, anticipating the future consequences of one’s decisions, controlling impulses, and comparing risk and reward,” he wrote.

And further down:

To complicate things further, there’s a huge amount of variability between individual brains. Just as you might stop growing taller at 23, or 17—or, if you’re like me, 12—the age that corresponds with brain plateaus can differ greatly from person to person. In one study, participants ranged from 7 to 30 years old, and researchers tried to predict each person’s “brain age” by mapping the connections in each person’s brain. Their age predictions accounted for about 55 percent of the variance among the participants, but far from all of it. “Some 8-year-old brains exhibited a greater ‘maturation index’ than some 25 year old brains,” Somerville wrote in her Neuron review. Some of those differences might be random genetic variation, but people’s behavior and lived experience contribute as well. “Childhood experiences, epigenetics, substance use, genetics related to anxiety, psychosis, and ADHD—all that affects brain development as well,” said Sarah Mallard Wakefield, a forensic psychiatrist.

Bolding mine.

Seriously read the whole article, it's not too long and definitely worth it.

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