Twenty-five. A quarter of a century. That age when all your mates stop binge drinking every weekend, and take up running half marathons and crocheting instead. When you begin to feel out of place in the Pint Night line, but are officially safe from Leonardo DiCaprio. And now, according to TikTok, the age you wake up to a shiny new frontal lobe. The doors into the depths of your adult brain swing open and your perception of life is drastically and irreversibly altered. Suddenly, you’re able to file your tax return and have lost the desire to steal road cones. While this would certainly be convenient, neuroscience is a bit more complicated than that. Critic Te Ārohi is here to break the bad – but ultimately good – news.
Full-frontal nudes nodes
The frontal lobe (more specifically, the prefrontal cortex) is located beneath your mental breakdown bangs, just behind your forehead, and it’s a pretty big deal. It’s the home of executive thinking which is a fancy word for big-brain stuff. We’re talking about mental processes involved in problem-solving, planning, working memory, impulse control, and managing your emotions. It helps you navigate social relationships and make choices (for better or worse). It’s where you might weigh up the pros and cons of your situationship (before inevitably inviting them over again), or where you assess the jump-ability of that jagged corrugated iron fence between you and the Hyde Street Party. While it’s true that other regions of the brain also have a part to play in these tasks, the frontal lobe takes centre stage, believed to be the most responsible for an individual's personality. In other words, it’s the Daddy Grant of your noggin – overseeing and directing all the important shit.
Good (enough) things take time
Contrary to the famous pop culture factoid, there is little scientific consensus on when the frontal lobe reaches maturity, nor is there such a thing as a “fully-formed brain”. Much like marathon-training (or so your quarter-life crisis peers tell you), the brain’s progress isn’t linear. Brain cells and their connections are constantly in flux, as you encounter challenges and learn new skills throughout your lifetime. By no means are everyone’s frontal lobes in their final form the day they turn twenty-five. This is a good thing! Your older brother and his meathead friends have hope yet. Just like the growth of any other part of your body, brain development varies from person to person. Anything from childhood experiences to how much ket you do on the weekend can affect your brain development. Maturity itself is an iffy concept, with no scientific measure either. While it might be helpful to assess your Hinge date’s maturity by his choice of jorts or whether he refers to his female peers as “beezies”, it doesn’t necessarily correlate with his grey matter.
The evolutionary advantage of getting kicked out of U-Bar
While your frontal lobe may not reach its final form during postgrad, it won’t be exactly the same as when you were a fresher – back when missing every CELS191 lecture and cramming them all the night before the exam sounded like a solid plan. At the risk of sounding like a boomer, it’s pretty well known that our adolescent years are characterised by risk-taking and intense emotion. During our teen years and early adulthood, the reward centre of the brain is more sensitive. It means we chase pleasure (whatever that means to you), with our ability to assess the consequences of such adventures running a little behind.
But it’s not all bad. All that risky shit and the tsunami wave of feelings you ride is super important for developing your sense of self in this complex social environment. Back in our hunter-gatherer days, it’s believed the risk-taking of young people encouraged them to seek new opportunities, allowing them to find food and resources. Now, you might not be jumping on your flat’s roof or laying on the pool table in U-Bar (definitely not speaking from experience) to look for life-sustaining supplies, but making choices (good or bad) and learning their outcomes helps to form those all-important connections in your brain, and prune off those you don’t need.
It’s the neuroscience equivalent of trial and error. Responding to your environment in different ways contributes to the gradual sculpting process of your adolescent mind. As we stumble through those years, our frontal lobe is soaking it all up and slowly maturing. We become better at choosing larger long-term rewards over smaller short-term ones, planning and coping with our emotions more effectively. So, while it’s not like a switch gets flicked on your twenty-fifth birthday that makes you join running clubs and cry less, don’t be too gutted. Good things take time. And from what we’ve heard, brain development is the good-est.
Mind over matter
As the Critic grandma and nearing the big two-five, I thought I’d take this time to reflect on my own chaotic cerebral journey. I can’t say the past few years haven’t felt different. I’m more level-headed and I don’t put so much weight on what others think of me (hence why I could publicly admit to fancying a cartoon horse in this year’s Sex Issue). Situations that used to feel earth-shattering to my younger self are mere bumps in the road. Don’t get me wrong, I still do dumb stuff all the time. Just recently, I decided to attempt a particularly complicated move on the Carousel dancefloor (Critic’s own Angus Rees was on the decks, how could you blame me?), one that ended with me lying flat on the cold deck staring wistfully up at the open sky, wearing my gin and tonic.
Overall, though, things do feel a bit more steady (clearly my feet haven’t gotten the memo yet) these days. It certainly didn’t happen all at once. It’s only noticeable in hindsight or sometimes reflected back in the eyes of older family members and childhood friends. Above all, I find it strangely comforting to think that, despite all the scary stuff about growing up in today’s world (still confused about the kids I babysit saying “Skibidi toilet”), I’m becoming more mentally equipped to deal with it. Even if the world is on fire and Christopher Luxon builds a coal mine on the Union Lawn, perhaps by then our frontal lobes will be able to handle it… or something like that.