When does a person become an adult? From the point of view of the civil code of the Russian Federation - on the day of the eighteenth birthday. But from a neuroscience perspective, it's not that simple. Harvard professor Leah H. Somerville has studied how the human brain matures for years, and here's what she found out.
Professor Somerville is a frequent visitor to the courtroom. Lawyers ask her to tell about how a person makes decisions, and most importantly, from what moment a person can be considered an adult. “I am constantly asked the same question: when can the brain be considered finally formed? In fact, neither I nor my colleagues know the answer, "Somerville told the New York Times.
The human brain ceases to increase in volume by the age of ten, but the formation of neural connections and the debugging of the mechanisms of interaction between different parts of the brain continues for a long time. Over time, these processes slow down, but sometimes do not stop until old age. Somerville notes that most of the connections are finally formed by the age of thirty.
Teenagers are not inferior to adults in solving logical problems, but their brains still work in a different way. In children and teenagers, adjacent zones work simultaneously, while in the brain of people over thirty, neurons located in very different, sometimes quite distant places from each other work harmoniously.
Young offenders most often commit offenses under the influence of intense experiences.
Perhaps it is this trait that makes teens and children so hot-tempered and impulsive, Somerville writes. In one of her experiments, young adults, adolescents and people over 30 were asked to lie down in an fMRI machine and look at the screen, pressing a button at the moment when an image of a face with a certain expression appeared - for example, happy or angry. At the same time, some participants in the experiment were told that at the end they would hear a sharp loud sound. The older generation did the job equally well when they were unaware of the sound and when they were warned. But adolescents and 25-year-olds were distracted by worries, were nervous and performed the task worse than when they were allowed to work in a relaxed atmosphere.
Until about thirty years of age, the brain does not have time to line up the mechanisms that separate emotions from thoughts, Somerville said. Her opinion is confirmed by the statistics of crimes committed by young people: they are much more likely to commit offenses if they are angry, frightened or under the influence of alcohol and other drugs. Older offenders are more likely to be pushed into crime by cold calculation.
