675
Remember being 15
(lemmy.blahaj.zone)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2024
675 points (96.3% liked)
tumblr
3482 readers
3 users here now
Welcome to /c/tumblr, a place for all your tumblr screenshots and news.
Our Rules:
-
Keep it civil. We're all people here. Be respectful to one another.
-
No sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia or any other flavor of bigotry. I should not need to explain this one.
-
Must be tumblr related. This one is kind of a given.
-
Try not to repost anything posted within the past month. Beyond that, go for it. Not everyone is on every site all the time.
-
No unnecessary negativity. Just because you don't like a thing doesn't mean that you need to spend the entire comment section complaining about said thing. Just downvote and move on.
Sister Communities:
-
/c/TenForward@lemmy.world - Star Trek chat, memes and shitposts
-
/c/Memes@lemmy.world - General memes
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
We really need a middle zone... Human brains don't reach full maturity until around age 25 when the prefrontal cortex is done developing, and quite frankly I think it could be argued that the thing that makes a human a human is the prefrontal cortex. However, that part of the brain "turns on" at the onset of puberty. It takes about 12 years for the human brain to really master the whole controlling a human body thing, and another 12 for it to master the whole thinking and conceptualizing and thinking ahead (and a bunch of other stuff). That second 12 year span should be treated differently than both the first span and adulthood.
Actually that "brain stops developing at 25" is a misconception, the study that spawned it just ran out of funding when the subjects were 25 and didn't see the brain development slowing down, iirc (no source on hand it's past midnight here).
25 isn't a hard line. The reality is that our brains continue to change forever. But, to use a metaphor, around our mid 20s is when it's done "cooking", but just like you might let meat "rest" on the counter for a bit after it's done cooking, your brain keeps changing, just not to the same degree. Maybe some day if brain scanning technology gets better, and we have a real healthcare system, people could get scans to see when their brain seems to have reached full maturity, especially if they've committed a crime. Of course "full maturity" will always be sort of an arbitrary choice because as I said, our brains are never truly finished.
I know that you mean well, but honestly, I’m really getting quite tired reading this particular piece of misinformation about brains maturing at age 25.
25 isn't a hard line. The reality is that our brains continue to change forever. But, to use a metaphor, around our mid 20s is when it's done "cooking", but just like you might let meat "rest" on the counter for a bit after it's done cooking, your brain keeps changing, just not to the same degree. Maybe some day if brain scanning technology gets better, and we have a real healthcare system, people could get scans to see when their brain seems to have reached full maturity, especially if they've committed a crime. Of course "full maturity" will always be sort of an arbitrary choice because as I said, our brains are never truly finished.
Thanks for the reply, I apologise if I come across as rude, I have been personally affected quite a lot by the whole ‘brain development’ conversation because I am disabled and I have had this kind of thing used to take away my human rights. So I find it a little bit upsetting to talk about - which probably means that I shouldn’t talk about it to preserve my own well-being, but I find it really hard to just let discourse that I feel is really harmful to persist in our society.
Some people might be ‘cooked’ at 16, others might not be done until they’re in their 30s. Some are never finished no matter how long they’re in the oven.
The root problem is that we’re desperately trying to find a correlation between “number of years alive” and “level of responsibility” where one doesn’t really exist.
I'm sorry you're going through that, that sucks.
I think we're trying to find a level of neurological development that describes a level of consciousness we'd mostly agree is sufficient to warrant responsibility for ones actions... For instance if a toddler shoots and kills someone, we know there's no way it was intentional, it was an accident or at least there's no way the toddler knew what they were doing or could grasp the consequences. But at some point in the development of that brain something changes. At puberty a whole section of the brain starts developing rapidly, and it just so happens it's the part that processes decision making. Exactly the part that changes us from what kids are to what adults are. So figuring out what a fully developed vs not yet fully developed one looks like seems pretty important. Then making scans regular procedure for when you need to determine if someone is developed enough to be responsible. But like you said, when a particular person gets there varies a lot, based on a lot of factors. I would hope a simple scan could help you prove you don't need your rights taken away.