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.
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.