We Can’t Keep Making “Adulthood” a Narrower and Narrower Category

Your personhood isn’t determined by an MRI scan.

Devon Price

11 min read

·

1 hour ago

--

By now many of you have probably seen the news reports of a scientific study in Nature supposedly showing that people actually become neurologically ‘adult’ at the age of 32 years old — not 25, as fans of the frontal lobe myleination theory of adulthood would have it, or 18, as the purely legalistic definition of adulthood would, or even 13 or 15, as many cultural rites of passage have variously held it to be.

No, now that some entirely exploratory research has discovered that the average, non-developmentally-disabled brain tends to enter a new phase of functioning and connectivity around the early 30s, we have a new random spot on the ground for pop scientists and those seeking to limit the rights of marginalized young people to draw a target around, and act like they were aiming for it the entire time.

In sum, researchers Alexa Mousley, Richard Bethlehem, Fang-Cheng Yeh, and Duncan Astle reviewed a large pool of nearly 4,000 MRI brain scan results, filtered exclusively for neurotypical participants, and found that, consistent with prior research on the subject, the density of neural connections tends to peak around age 30 for most people, as does topological efficiency (in essence, how long a distance…