On our post about the 00s (see, when you’re writing, you don’t have to figure out what to call them), Stupendousness, who had one heck of a decade, writes this from her 27-year-old perspective:
I feel like a very different person from my 17-year-old self. I believe part of that is clearly due to the continuing maturation of my brain, which is just biological. The way my brain works has changed enough to affect my personality to an extent, and some of that has been involuntary, but I’ve also consciously changed many of my thought-patterns. Or tried. I am much less cynical these days, for example.
Yes. The brain develops a lot between the teenage years and 25 or so. Some of the mistakes we make in our teens and early 20s are the result of lack of experience — but some are due to the simple fact that your brain works about as well as the beater cars most of us were driving at that age. It’ll get you where you want to go most of the time, but it’s not always reliable. Your capacity for executive functioning kind of fades in and out for a while like an AM oldies station two towns over.
I was aware of that myself, in my teens and 20s. I didn’t let myself have a credit card until I was 25. But I sure didn’t know the biology of it, and I bet that, Stupendousness, made your experience rather different. How did you learn about brain development? And it makes me wonder what it would be like if this kind of thing were taught in schools more. It seems (and please, if anyone knows different, tell me) that schools offer a lot of coaching (or at least nagging) about good study and health habits, deferral of gratification, career planning, and the like, without ever explaining to students why it’s going to be hard for them to learn these skills, and why sometimes they’ll find themselves doing exactly the thing they know they shouldn’t. I don’t think students would take this as an excuse to skive off (“Dude! Give me a break! My brain’s not finished yet!”). I think the more dutiful ones — and most young folks do want to be responsible — will give themselves a much-needed break from time to time. And I think it makes the process of learning boring, unfun things more interesting, because you would know you are actually programming your brain.
(Please don’t misunderstand me — I’m not saying that once you’re 25, you’ll never make a regrettable impulse buy, impolitic comment at work, or pitcher of grain-alcohol punch again. We all do things we know we shouldn’t, take short-term pleasures over long-term gain. But certain kinds of judgment really are, biologically, more difficult to sustain before the mid-20s.)
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4 Comments to 'In ur consushness, watchin ur brane'
January 29, 2010
I wouldn’t say I really know much about brain development. I read lots of science journals as a teen (introverted nerd loner here), and I know I read about the emerging evidence for continued brain development in teenagers in one of those periodicals, though not sure which exactly, in the late 90s. The article really surprised me because I didn’t know that the prevailing thought at the time was that brain development stopped before puberty. I assumed our brains kept developing well into adulthood, into the 30s even, and I probably based that assumption on all of my elders often telling me that I would get wiser as I got older. To me, wisdom isn’t just about learning more facts, so I tied that into a biologically more mature brain.
Anyway, so I knew by my late teens that teenagers take more risks, are not so in control of their emotions, and that sleep is very important, among other things. The last two were of great concern to me because my mother and I were not getting along due to neither of us controlling our emotional outbursts (me: teenager, her: bipolar), and I developed insomnia at age 16. That’s why, when I moved away at age 18 and was still feeling extremely cynical, pessimistic, and generally bitchy at the world, I knew I was going to have to put forth great effort to rein in the impulse to think negatively. I was afraid that having been pissed off for the majority of my teenage years may have hardwired that mindset as my permanent personality. Not living with my mom made this goal much easier to attain, and I feel I was pretty successful by age 21 (I can bring out The Bitch when needed though).
I no longer have horrible insomnia, but I believe, without any hard proof, that it permanently degraded my memorization ability. I was an all-A honor student who didn’t have to work too hard at school from pre-K through grade 9. I hope that doesn’t sound like bragging because I know it was pure genetic good fortune. Then I started struggling big time, not being able to memorize worth a damn, and that turning point coincided with an illness that may have been meningitis and the beginning of the insomnia close to my 16th birthday.
Once I reached university courses in which the majority of the assignments were essays or research papers that required critical thinking and analysis with little memorization, I did great, despite still having insomnia. I sleep so much better now, but I rely on written lists to keep me on track.
So that’s all of the very subjective data I had that has informed my behavior. I’ve never been a big risk-taker or one to cave to peer pressure (actually, being pressured to do something makes me NOT want to do it even more), and I’m not sure if that was also due to genetics or my parents not sheltering or coddling me. For example, they assumed their kids would get drunk while underage at some point, just like they did, so they only encouraged us to do so as safely as possible. I ended up not drinking alcohol as a minor or doing any drugs ever. I got drunk for the first time at age 20-something but not pass-out drunk.
However, I did take some risks when it came to relationships, especially concerning physical intimacy. At age 16 and 17, my hormones were full steam ahead, and I clearly remember having almost out-of-body experiences during heavy make-out sessions, thinking to myself, “Do I really have my hands down this guy’s pants?! WTF am I doing?” and having a very difficult time stopping myself, though I did before doing anything I regretted. My emotional feelings definitely made things complicated because I had no clue how to parse my physical and emotional desires from each other. As in, do I love this guy because he makes me so horny? Or am I just so damn horny that I’m mistaking it for love? No teenager understands that stuff, and I wish someone had talked to me about emotional intimacy in addition to standard sex-ed (though I am grateful for the thorough physical health-related sex educated I did get). I knew the health risks of being sexually active, but I had no clue about the mental health risks associated with the same. That’s why I so despise the state of sex education. Not only do we let teenagers run loose with raging hormones and little information about their own bodies, we also fail to talk to them about the things they have on their minds and the psychological wringers they will be going through in the next decade. I’m not sure a school is the best place to impart this knowledge; I would hope that we adults who have already traversed through the teenage years and 20s could relate our experiences (without embarrassing details, if desired) to the younger generations. That’s my plan for my own future child, even my nieces. I wouldn’t dictate to them, as in “This is what you are or will be feeling…” but more like, “This is what I felt and did and what I was thinking at the time. This is what my friends were dealing with. I hope you feel you can talk to me about what’s on your mind because I probably can relate and will not judge you.”
/hogging your comment section
January 30, 2010
I also waited until I was in my mid-twenties and had paid off my student loans before applying for a credit card. Unfortunately, those loans didn’t count towards my thus non-existent credit score, so I couldn’t get a good credit card when I was ready for one. It took years to get a balance large enough to buy plane tickets on line. Compare that to the flood of offers I got back in college…
Our society doesn’t build much of anything around the principles of cognitive development. Stupendousness’ insomnia was probably aggravated by an early high school start time, when we *know* teenagers go to sleep and wake up later than children and adults do. Abstinence-only education when our hormones are about as messed up and confusing as they get? Nice.
January 31, 2010
Kua, yes, to derail my own topic, I then had the same problem. I was what’s called a “credit ghost” and HAD to get a charge card and use it, because I was unable to buy a car or lease an apartment without my parents’ co-sign. This is what we got for being responsible!
And I agree with both your points and Stupendousness’s.
Stupendous, I hope you’ve saved that comment of yours to your own computer–it’s an awfully good mini-biography that you might want to have sometime. I’m still impressed with your ability at a young age to stand outside yourself and watch your mental processes unfold. That is really unusual.
February 3, 2010
Schools don’t teach students about brain development because that would require teachers to know a little elementary psychology. As a parent of two offspring who survived public school, and as a holder of a master’s degree in psychology, I say with some authority that elementary learning theory (conditioning, behaviorism, things like that) much less neuroscience are completely absent from most “professional” teachers’ toolboxes.
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