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wWhen you think about it, the age at which we decide that a human being has passed that age threshold from childhood to adulthood They are as arbitrary as they are strange.
The first accepted turning point in British culture comes at age 16, when you can get a full-time job, drop out of school, buy lottery tickets and consent to sex. Then at age 18 there’s the legal transition into an adult: You can live alone, buy alcohol and cigarettes, vote, gamble, and get tattoos and piercings without anyone else’s say-so. And finally, 21, when not much is happening – unless you’re particularly keen to adopt a child, have a minibus or pilot’s license, and pee in North America – but still, it’s considered the final stage in maturity.
Yet not a single one of these milestones specifically reflects our neurological development. Neuroscience has long shown that our prefrontal cortexImpulse control, responsible for decision-making, planning, and problem-solving, does not fully develop until about age 25. but now one new study Has exposed a completely new benchmark.
Based on brain scans of nearly 4,000 people, the research mapped the neural connections that develop to identify five distinct “ages” or ages for the brain, which include changes that occur at four key ages: nine, 32, 66 and 83. Despite the societal ideas that surround us about what happens when one grows up, these latest findings show that “adult mode” just kicks into gear. in our early thirtiesOnly then does our brain architecture stabilize and coincide with a “plateau in intelligence and personality,”
I’m not surprised by this at all; If anything, I feel innocent. Although lead researcher Alexa Mousley is quick to point out that they are “certainly not saying that people in their late twenties will behave like teenagers…it’s actually a pattern of change,” the notion that I was an “adult” – responsible or otherwise – in my teens or twenties, is vague.
Admittedly, I was always a late bloomer. At 16, I was still very busy creating elaborate routines Centre Stage Soundtrack with your friends to contemplate coitus. At 18, I probably went to university, but even I embarrassingly didn’t know (during a “how to cook pasta” lesson with my mother before leaving the house, when asked to wait until the water was boiling I actually responded, “But how can I tell?”). At 21, I dressed up as a dolphin for my birthday party at a seedy nightclub, made fun of a stranger, vomited copiously and walked into the ocean the next day while still drunk, singing songs in the ocean for my full-year lecture.
I’d go as far as to say that I developed some semblance of sophistication in my twenties – and indeed, at the end of that decade, I finally found my way onto a more solid career path and started my first adult-feeling relationship. But, in all honesty, that period was mostly filled with unfortunate fumbles between plays. There was that morning when I slept through my alarm and woke up 90 minutes late to run a workshop for 500 youth; The day I reached the station and realized I didn’t have enough money to buy a train ticket to work; the time i accidentally thousands of pounds in debt When I moved out of a shared flat and forgot to cancel all the direct debits.
I won’t even get into the romantic mishaps — we don’t have that kind of time — but suffice to say they were abundant and ranged from chaotic to embarrassing. “Making good decisions” was as different a concept as brushing my teeth at that age. If I was really hot this would be my “Hot Mess” era.
The notion that I was an adult in my twenties – responsible or otherwise – is invisible.
When I look back, there’s no denying the key moments that led to my transition into becoming a proper adult man with his girlfriend—and almost every single event occurred around the time identified by the study. At age 31, I got a job at this very publication, the first time I really felt like I was intentionally taking my career in the direction I wanted. At the age of 32, I Identified the coastal city where I wanted to build my life As an adult. At the age of 33, I broke up with my long term partner Because we both realized that it wasn’t right – and in many ways, we always felt like teenagers playing house together.
My generation, the Millennials, have long been accused of refusing to grow up. We’re buying a house, getting married and having children laterWhile the childhood obsession with Disney and Harry Potter remains intact. But apart from all the socio-economic factors that have led to this so-called stunted growth, perhaps we haven’t got it so wrong. Perhaps “childhood” isn’t something to be vilified, but rather a completely natural stage of life, symbolizing the chaotic whirlwind of our twenties before we wise up, settle down, and become comfortable in our own skin.
This doesn’t mean we should always be Peter Pans. Simply put, your twenties are about making mistakes, learning from them, and figuring out who you want to be. So the next time you miss your train, your finances are in a mess or you go home with a suspicious person, just apologize, shrug it off – and explain that science made you do it.