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Hello everybody, I'm Gemma Speck and welcome back to The Psychology of Your 20s, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology.
Hello everybody, welcome back to the show, welcome back to the podcast.
In fact, back for a special little bonus episode from me to you, just for my OG audio listeners.
You guys know the drill with these smaller episodes.
I feel like there are some topics that are so, so interesting, but also deeply understood and However, they just don't warrant like a full 30 to 45 minute episode.
There's like only so much that I can ramble on, only so many tangents that I can go on, unfortunately.
But I still want to talk about them.
I still want to talk about it.
I still think a lot of it would be interesting, not just for me to research but for you guys to hear.
Today's episode is one of those topics because we are talking about frontal lobe development.
And the recently I would say recently like insanely popular idea that our frontal lobe only fully develops at 25.
And kind of the reasoning that therefore, you know, we can't really trust any decisions that we make before then.
We don't really know who we are until then.
And the sense that, you know, you wake up at 25 and suddenly like the world just makes sense.
Suddenly like this is when real adult life begins.
I've seen so many people online describe this like almost like a sensory feeling of what it feels like to turn 25 and to experience this like seismic shift in their identity and maturity almost all at once.
And I definitely don't doubt that they're experiencing this.
I think I've also felt this way in recent years.
It's just not as clear cut as you would think.
And it turns out that frontal lobe development age that everybody talks about actually comes from some really I don't want to say dodgy misrepresented research from like 20 to 30 years ago.
And it has since been dissected, dismissed, and kind of revealed to probably not be very accurate.
So let's talk about it.
Let's begin by actually discussing like what the frontal lobe is does like.
Why is this part of our brain so essential for essentially determining that somebody is mature or determining that somebody's brain is fully developed?
So your brain has a few lobes.
You've probably learned this in like high school science class.
It has four lobes the parietal temporal, occipital lobe and, of course, the frontal lobe.
You can also include the insular and limbic lobes as well if you want to get really technical, if you want to be.
I really want to impress people.
You can say it's six lobes, but the theory essentially goes that each lobe is responsible for different functions and behaviors.
Now even this theory.
I have to say that theory in itself has been hotly debated, because I think we now realize like the brain is a highly integrated network of cells.
It's not like there are four or six little brains in our brain.
It's one brain that every area of our brain is constantly communicating.
If you were to look inside the brain, you wouldn't see any physical walls dividing the different regions.
The functions definitely overlap, but Yeah, there's definitely different things that each lobe does.
And the frontal lobe especially, we definitely know is deeply responsible for attention, for reasoning, for memory, for identity and, most importantly for this episode, for executive functioning.
So executive functioning basically just means your ability to to exert control over your actions and impulses and to just think through your decisions, think through your emotions, think through a situation in front of you and come up with a clear idea of what is best for you to do and how to execute that.
Now if that area of your brain is, let's say, injured or not developed or underdeveloped, not at its full capacity yet, the logic basically follows that we would have a lot of difficulty performing those same attention reasoning memory, executive functioning functions as well.
And basically this would explain why you know before the age of 25, as this theory goes, before this area of our brain isn't developed.
That is why we make stupid decisions.
That is why we text our ex when we know we shouldn't.
That is why we make random spontaneous life choices.
That is why we do highly irrational things.
That is why a man who was 40 dating somebody who was 22 doesn't make sense.
Which literally yeah, probably true.
Actually, absolutely true.
And I think there's like parts of that theory that are very comforting, right?
Because we all do really stupid things in our early 20s, like I cannot tell you how many times I have bleached my hair blonde and then dyed it black and then bleached it again and then dyed it black, and I've cut my bangs a few too many times without ever really thinking it through.
Those are just some examples and you know, the older I've gotten, the more I, you know, those impulses have kind of But does that all happen?
Or did that all happen the moment I turned 25?
No.
And that's because the 25 thing, as I've kind of already revealed, is a myth.
And it sometimes becomes a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, where we definitely feel like we now are adults after that age.
But no.
Really, that's just the feeling that we are getting from the popularity of this number and from the popularity of this narrative.
The narrative behind it isn't actually true.
And this is where we need to talk about where this number came from, because it didn't just magically appear.
What really happened and what it all stems from is this singular study that was done Actually, I lie not a singular study.
It was a couple of studies.
There was one done in 1999 and one done in 2004 by the same group of researchers that looked at brain development from childhood to adolescence.
Particularly, what they were looking at was increases and decreases in gray and white matter.
Grey matter is responsible for a lot of our thinking, like it's called, the thinking matter and decision making.
And white matter is kind of what carries the messages between the different lobes or parts of your brain.
If you were to see like a cross section of a brain, it's the white matter, is a lot of the stuff in the middle.
And in these studies they wanted to know when our levels of white and gray matter like reached peak maturity.
And so they scanned hundreds of brains, hundreds and hundreds to figure this out.
Here's the catch though.
The oldest subject, the oldest person whose brain they scanned, how old do you think they were?
21.
They were 21 years old.
I think there was a couple of other studies around that time that had a couple 22-year-olds, a couple 23-year-olds.
But those most prominent studies firstly that one in 1999 and then the very famous one in 2004.
The oldest participant was 21.
So where did that 25 number come from?
Well, it came from the author of the paper called Jay Geard.
I don't know if it's Geard, it's G-I-E-D-D.
And he basically speculated and he said, well, I guess it would be 25.
If we wanted, based on our research, if we wanted to guess when the brain fully developed, I would say 25.
Literally, this is exactly where this comes from.
He does this research.
He goes and gives a bunch of interviews about this research, and in an interview he does with Time magazine, they ask him, based on what you've been seeing in teenage brains and children's brains and adolescent brains and young adult brains,
When do you think the brain fully develops?
And he quote, he says, if I had to pick a number right now, I'd probably say 25.
Now that number stuck because of what a prominent interviewer was.
The reason it was really prominent was because at the time this was in America, they were debating.
The death penalty and basically like criminal implications for teenagers and for people in their early 20s in the US, and whether people who were 17 18 19 20, 21 could be deemed responsible for their actions, given this theory that their brains probably still reflected those of teenagers.
And you know why could a?
It was basically like why would somebody who was 15 not be given the death penalty but somebody who was 17 be given the death penalty or somebody who was 20 being given the death penalty when, according to our research, like the, these brains, the brains of these individuals look really, really similar?
So it was a huge news story.
Right, it was.
It was a massive news story and that is where the 25 number comes from this interview, that that this guy did, this interview that that jay did, where he said, if i had to choose a number right now 25, despite the fact that their study did not include anybody who was 25.
And specifically to hone on this like, why was it the frontal lobe specifically, that develops at 25?
Why not the whole brain?
Why was there such a focus on this?
That is because, from that same research, the same scientists discovered that it was the frontal lobe that developed last.
So it just kind of made sense.
The frontal lobe was the last piece of the puzzle.
When frontal lobe development was done, they said brain development was done.
When the frontal lobe clicked into place.
That's when people could be seen as responsible, emotionally responsible morally, most importantly, criminally.
So that is the origin of the myth.
I also think that there is something to be said about the fact that 25 is a really nice number.
25 is a very solid, clean, neat And that attracted a lot of attention.
You know, he didn't say 24 years and 11 months.
He didn't say 26 years and four days.
He didn't even say 25 years and one, I don't know, one quarter.
He gave us one simple, neat, attractive number.
And people love that kind of certainty and that kind of simplicity when it comes to describing something as confusing and complex as brain development.
It is the same reason why the myth that we only use 10 of our brain is so popular because 10 is a nice, simple number.
Same with the myth that people are 90% water.
Simple number.
The thing is actually pinpointing when the brain develops for real is incredibly, incredibly difficult because
It differs from person to person, based on genetics, based on environment, based on experiences, even based on exposure to things like alcohol.
It's also gradual.
Yes, like there is a point where your brain will reach peak maturity, but It's kind of what we call like a bold man conundrum.
I don't know if you've heard this kind of exercise before, but essentially there's this debate around how many hairs does a man have to have before he's no longer bald?
You know, if there was a man in front of you and he had one hair, one single hair, you would think he was bald.
What if he had five hairs?
Probably still bald.
What if he had 500 hairs?
You know, there is a point at which one additional hair stops that man from being bald.
And I know that sounds like a weird analogy for brain development, but there is a point where one slight neural change Take somebody's brain from not developed to developed.
So that's like the interesting thing.
That is going to be different for everybody.
The other thing is that the brain continues to change across the lifespan.
New paths are constantly being paved.
Old paths are scrapped.
We lose and gain white matter due to learning and changes in our lives.
So Is our brain ever fully developed?
Yes, but is it also constantly a work in progress?
Also, yes.
What does development really look like?
What does that peak look like?
This is what the science says these days.
When is our brain fully developed?
Actually, just last year they kind of got as close as they ever have to answering that question and they did it in the most roundabout, confusing way possible, because of course they do.
This study was called the study that kind of concluded not once and for all, but pretty solidly what is actually happening is called topological turning points across the human lifespan.
It was conducted.
It was a study conducted out of cambridge.
If you follow me on Instagram, you may have seen me talking about this study recently.
But essentially these researchers analyzed the brain scans of more than 4000 people, from infancy all the way up to 90 years old.
So, no, they didn't just stop at 21.
And they specifically looked at white matter changes.
Here is what they found.
Your brain basically has several spurts or key periods of development across the lifespan.
And in each of those periods, different things are occurring.
The four turning points that we need to know are age is nine, age is 32, age 66 and age 83.
So between zero and nine, your brain is just like building as much as it possibly can.
It's growing very, very rapidly between nine and 32, which they actually they call the adolescence period, even though it's not just the teenage years.
That is when your brain starts to prune.
It starts to build different neighborhoods of neurons and thought processes and it integrates those neighborhoods.
It gets really, really organized.
It starts to kind of get closer to optimizing and gets closer to being able to reason through all of its thoughts.
Between 32 and 66 is when it gets the most efficient and it begins to specialize.
Basically things start to really feel locked in.
That's when we're perfecting pathways.
After 63, the core areas of our brain and those core pathways become more important.
All the other like kind of medium and small important pathways around and different circuits become less important.
So basically it's organizing and it's consolidating even deeper.
And after the age of 83 is when we see a lot of neural decline, loss of gray and white matter and it's when we see central pathways really become the main pathways.
So if you think about it, like almost like the building of a society, zero to nine is when like everybody is like pitching tents, like everybody's just trying to figure out what's going on, like there's all these disparate areas, all these different regions, and like they're not very connected and it's like kind of rudimentary.
Then, like that second period, 9 to 32, is when you know we start building some roads between the towns, like things start to get a bit more coherent.
And 32 to 63 is when like yeah, we've got major buildings going up.
We've got a highway.
We've got all the structures like are good to go.
After 63 to 83 it's like oh, you know, people kind of, you know we're getting like the people kind of moving out of town.
You know, they don't really use all those little suburban streets we built for them.
It really just made they use, like you know, a couple of main roads, and 83 onwards is like the town is now bypassed by a highway.
There's like a couple of roads that run through.
Those are the ones that are used.
All those little disparate neighborhoods are no longer really supported.
That's like the best way i can think of explaining it.
What this study basically found is that there is not one final age we land at and we are good to go.
We are changing in different ways across our lives, based on our neural and environmental, and social and emotional and mental needs.
It also says that you know.
If you are in your 20s right now, which I'm pretty sure you are, I'm going to take a well-informed guess, considering you're looking or you're listening to this podcast.
Don't feel like you are locked in.
Like you will continue to be in a state of exploration and change and growth until your mid 30s.
And then after that, you will continue to be in a state of optimization until your 60s.
If you're in your mid-20s and you're waiting for that epiphany that comes with your frontal lobe developing for good, you may have to wait a little bit longer.
That is a good thing.
What this study also talked about is how much we are at an advantage during this period to shift and change and really influence what pathways are strengthened and which pathways are abandoned.
So you need to make the most of your brain right now by giving it as many experiences and learning opportunities as As possible, because you are in your prime.
You are building the society of your brain.
I also think it's scary in some ways, like obviously it's scary to be like oh my God, I've got to wait a little bit longer.
And also, oh, my God, it's scary to think that after 32, I can't make as many changes as I could.
Now, you can continue to make changes.
There is no magical switch.
You get to keep learning, keep developing much longer than you probably anticipated.
And obviously, like the older you get, the more you will start to make more informed decisions.
And the more you'll be able to feel like you have more control over your life.
So I think all of this is actually a good thing.
As long as you are feeding your brain newness and novelty and even like actually engaging in the spontaneity of this time in your life, I actually think you're totally winning.
Of course, like after 32, we can still continue to do that.
We still will make dumb decisions.
But I think the same drive and impulse won't be there.
And that is a huge perk of being young.
Your willingness to explore and to take risks and just to follow impulse and follow desire and follow passion is a huge part of this period that you're in right now, not just in terms of your life, but in terms of your brain development.
So there you go, guys.
This is the frontal lobe myth decoded for you.
Next time somebody makes a comment about it at a party or makes a meme about it online, you can be that annoying know-it-all who corrects them.
Or at least the person with the fun fact that hey no, your brain does not, or your frontal lobe does not fully develop at 25.
You got at least seven more years before that takes place, maybe even longer.
I hope you enjoyed this little bonus episode.
I'm not going to ramble or rant for much longer because i want to keep it short and sweet for you guys.
Um yeah, i hope you enjoyed this episode.
I actually had so much fun researching it.
I feel like some of my favorite episodes are where we get to myth bust certain psychology things because you get to go into so much history as well, like the history of the death penalty in the US.
Who would know?
Who would think that the death penalty in the US and Leonardo DiCaprio memes would have the same origin point, which is this one study done in freaking in the early 2000s.
So there you go, fun fact to end or start your day with.
Make sure that you are following us on instagram.
Make sure that you, if you enjoyed this episode and you want to watch some episodes Not this one unfortunately, but many, many others
You can actually watch us on Netflix.
I feel like a lot of my regular listeners know this by now.
But yes, all of our episodes, our video episodes are available on Netflix for you to watch.
So you can go and see our cool backdrop, our cool little studio.
It's very, very cute.
What else do I have to say?
Substack.
I don't, oh my God, I always forget.
There's always like so many things on the list now of like, who do I need to thank?
Thanks to you guys for listening.
There you go.
You guys never get a thank you.
You can have a thank you today.
Thank you for listening.
Thank you for making it to the end if you made it this far.
Leave a little brain emoji down below if you are listening on Spotify.
But yeah, until next time, be safe, be kind, be gentle with yourself.
We will talk very, very soon.
Hey, what's good y'all?
You're listening to learn the hard way with your favorite therapist and host, kia games.
This space is about black men's experiences having honest conversations that it's really not safe to have anywhere, but you're having them with a licensed professional who knows what he's doing.
How many men carry a suit of armor.
It signals to the world that you not to be played with and just because you have the capability, that does not mean that you need to listen to learn the hard way on the iheart radio app, apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast In 2023.
Bachelor star Clayton Eckerd was accused of fathering twins.
But the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Ms.
Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Gregory alone.
I'm stephanie young.
This is love trapped laura, scottsdale police.
As the season continues, laura owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to love trapped podcast on the iheart radio app, apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts 2.
That's the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available.
I'm Michael Easter and on my podcast 2 I break down the science of mental toughness, fitness and building resilience in our strange modern world.
Put yourself through some hardships and you will come out on the other side a happier, more fulfilled, healthier person.
Listen to two percent, that's two percent on the iheart radio app, apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, They take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to The Girlfriends Trust Me Babe on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
On the Look Back At It podcast.
1979, that was a big moment for me.
84 was big to me.
I'm Sam Jay.
And I'm Alex English.
Each episode we pick a year, unpack what went down and try to make sense of how we survived it with our friends, fellow comedians and favorite authors.
Like Mark Lamont Hill on the 80s.
84 was a wild year.
I don't think there's a more important year for Black people.
Listen to Look Back at It on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
This is an iHeart Podcast.
Guaranteed human.
