“The brain volume, the total volume, doesn’t really change, but we lose about 1% of gray matter starting around 13 and we gain about 1% of white matter at the same time, and that trade off keeps going,” Shatkin said. Jess Shatkin, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the Child Study Center at NYU Langone Medical Center, who was not involved in the new paper. Then, as your body prepares for puberty, your brain starts to prune back some of that gray matter and amp up its production of white matter, which allows different parts of the brain to share information better and faster, said Dr. So, why can’t the brain reveal whether you’re an adult or not? Different parts of your brain mature at different times, Somerville said. “The reason I think it’s important to discuss this issue is because policies impacting youth have begun to pay more and more attention to the concept of neurodevelopmental maturity, so neuroscientists have begun to get engaged in these complicated discussions,” such as debates about when to charge a child with an adult crime or when to permit aging out of the foster care system. “However, it is safe to say that by almost any metric, the brain is continuing to develop actively well past the age of 18,” she said. “There is no agreed-on benchmark that, when reached, would allow a neuroscientist to say ‘Aha! This brain is fully developed,’ ” said Leah Somerville, an associate professor of psychology at Harvard University, who wrote the paper. However, from a scientific perspective, adulthood is an unsolved mystery.Įven neuroscientists don’t know when adolescence ends and adulthood begins in the brain – after all, our brains are constantly changing, according to a new opinion paper published in the journal Neuron on Wednesday. You’re legally an adult when you turn 18, in most of the United States.
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