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There may just be a scientific reason behind feeling like a teenager in your 20s. In fact, a University of Cambridge brain study suggests that the ‘adult brain’ may not activate until our 30s.
If you’re in your late 20s – or even early 30s (cough) – and still mentally feel like your high school self, you may not just be immature. There might just be more to it.
A new Cambridge study has mapped how our brain wiring shifts from birth to old age and found five distinct eras of brain structure. It points to the rough ages of 9, 32, 66, and 83 as being potentially pivotal, and offered up some surprising departures from our preconceptions of development.
The team used MRI diffusion scans from around 38,000 people aged from just a single year old to 90. By tracing how water moved through brain tissue, they were able to see how strongly different regions were wired together.
They also used 12 further measures, observing how efficient the brain network is, how modular it looks, and whether it relies on central hubs or a more diffuse web of connections. Once all the data was compiled, several discoveries were made about the body’s greatest organ.
From birth to age 9, the brain is in something of a consolidation frenzy. An explosion of synapses – the tiny junctions between neurons – gradually slows so the most active connections can be formed. During this time, grey and white matter growth is rapid, cortical thickness (the brain’s outer layer) peaks, and the cortex maps out its distinctive pattern of folds.
All of this frantic reorganising means that, paradoxically, the overall efficiency of the network isn’t great. So don’t be too hard on your children, nieces, or nephews for staring at the wall from time to time. Your adult colleagues, on the other hand, need to go to sleep earlier.
In way ahead of physical changes to the body, the adolescent brain era then supposedly kicks in from 9 right up until the age of 32. That’s right, i’m a teenager for another year yet.
Throughout this lengthy period, white matter continues to grow and connections are streamlined, leading to stronger cognitive performance. The term adolescent refers to the fact that networks are still actively refining instead of simply holding steady, and aren’t linked to behaviour or learning ability, so keep on revising.
That means that while you’re trying to get your shit together in your 20s, your brain is still basically in a decade-long rendering phase. The scramble to crystallise everything from our careers and housing, to our identities and relationships is probably is at odds with our neurological need to continue renovating; as impulse control, long term planning, and emotional regulation are becoming more refined but remain far from complete.
At 32, the biggest shift is said to kick in. Researchers say this marks the step into the adult era which will span more than three decades. As the brain’s wiring system becomes more stable, intelligence and personality tend to plateau, and brain networks compartmentalise.
