While most laws believe that at the age of 18, 16, or 17 in some states/countries people are considered adults and the legal age, neuroscience confirms your brain doesn’t actually develop fully till the age of 25. At 18, individuals are adults by law but mentally their brains are still trying grasp and mentally, their brains aren’t done maturing and developing. If you also weren’t aware of this, sixty percent of human brain is made of fat which makes it the fattiest organ in our body while the acid is crucial to our brains performance as well.
As much as a teenager may think their “officially an adult “his or her brain development says otherwise, according to inverse.com, adolescent brains move fast: They can say “yes” to this and “no” to that, all without looking up from their phones. But that cognitive agility — specifically the brain’s ability to identify patterns and do it quickly — peaks around 25. Earlier this year, researchers asked participants between the ages of 9 and 91 to play seemingly random games, like coin tosses and dice rolls. The results, published in the journal PLOS Computational Biology, show that after 25 the ability to identify these patterns begins to decline. Though your fast cognitive reflexes may be slowly eroding, at 25, your risk management and long-term planning abilities finally kick into high gear.
In May, scientists explained in Nature Neuroscience that the parts of your brain that control basic functions like eating, sleeping, and breathing are more or less formed in utero, but the prefrontal cortex — the seat of so-called executive decision making — takes a while longer to develop. Scientists believe that the prolonged path to maturity explains why teenagers are the exasperating way they are, as National Geographic-famously documented in 2011. By the time we’re 13, our brains have reached their full size, but they’re also undergoing a giant, expansive internal remodel. White matter grows thicker, synapses are pruned, and slowly — very slowly — the ability to think strategically about our needs and the needs of others develops.
Coming from a 24 year old to be 25 this year myself, this evidence definitely resonates with me and makes total sense especially with how I look at myself now mentally compared to when I was a naïve 18 year old thinking I knew it all when I was still growing mentally, learning, and mostly maturing it’s the age where you’re still gaining wisdom and I don’t think some people will understand it till life actually hits them and they live it through it and mature.
https://www.inverse.com/article/33753-brain-changes-health-25-quarter-life-crisis-neurology/amp
https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/encyclopedia/content.aspx?ContentTypeID=1&ContentID=3051
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