This is EVERYTHING you can blame your frontal lobe for, according to psychologists
From impulsive purchases, rash break ups and poor fashion choices Gen Z have been blaming their behaviour on their brain not being fully developed.
The frontal lobe has once again been trending on social media in recent weeks.
On Tiktok, #frontallobe has amassed tens of millions of views, with the latest trend seeing people using the lack of frontal lobe development as the reason why their teenage relationship were doomed from the start.
The theory is that the prefrontal cortex, or frontal lobe, which is responsible for reasoning and rational thinking is not fully developed until the age of 25 so any rash decisions before that can easily be explained away.
Experts though have their doubts.
Dr Luct Vanes, a neuroscientist and psychology expert, at Kings College London, said: ‘no brain region works in isolation or is responsible for only one thing.
‘The frontal lobe, as any other region, functions in concert with networks of other regions distributed across the brain.
‘In this way, the frontal lobe is involved in a range of higher order cognitive functions – such as decision making, problem solving, planning and organising behaviour, inhibiting impulses; but also regulating emotions and initiating motor actions’.
At the simplest level we can divided the brain into lobes which are responsible for emotions and reason, sensory information, memory, and visual perception
Like many social media trends though there is some element of truth to the trend.
Professor Sophie Scott, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London, said: ‘Through adolescence and your early 20s one of the big changes to your brain is how it is “wired”.’
Known as myelination, it is when a protective sheet forms around nerve endings, which improves connectivity between different regions of the brain.
This process begins in the womb but continues into early adulthood.
‘This process does not happen uniformly and the very front of the frontal lobe is the last region to get fully myelinated and this happens in your early 20s, which is why people have associated rational decision making with this period,’ says Professor Scott.
‘However this does not mean after the age of 24 all decisions that we make are completely rational, we always keep an emotional element to decision making.’
Dr Vanes, adds: ‘There is some truth to the suggestion that differences between adolescent and adult behaviour relate partly to ongoing frontal-lobe maturation.
‘For example, adolescents show higher risk taking compared to adults, and some aspects of prefrontal development are related to declines in this risk-taking behaviour with age.
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‘However, many other factors also play a role in the changes in behaviour: different exposures and experiences, stress, or social factors that are different in adulthood all shape behaviour.
‘So frontal lobe development is only one piece of the puzzle. It is perhaps also worth noting that adolescent behaviours can be perfectly appropriate in adolescence: an element of risk taking may actually be more adaptive in adolescence than in adulthood.’
Experts do dispute that there is a hard cut off after the age of 25 for the development of the brain, and that this is the same for everyone.
‘Different frontal lobes will mature at different times; and the whole process is gradual, rather than something that would finish abruptly. Similarly, even a “mature” brain continues to develop and change throughout the rest of life,’ says Dr Vanes.
Earlier this week a study by researchers at the University of Cambridge revealed that the brain actually goes through five distinct stages – key turning points at ages nine, 32, 66 and 83,
Around 4,000 people up to the age of 90 had scans to reveal the connections between their brain cells.
Researchers showed that the brain stays in the adolescent phase until our early thirties when we ‘peak’.
‘The brain rewires across the lifespan. It’s always strengthening and weakening connections and it’s not one steady pattern – there are fluctuations and phases of brain rewiring,’ the lead author of the research, Dr Alexa Mousley, one of the authors of the study, told the BBC.
