When people say "the brain is still developing until you're 25" it means "your brain is noticeably worse at learning after the age of 25". Noting that, should people learn self-control in the presence of social media before 25, or after 25?
> When people say "the brain is still developing until you're 25" it means "your brain is noticeably worse at learning after the age of 25".
No, it means that your prefrontal cortex—which is involved in a wide range of higher-order cognitive functions (planning, decision making, working memory, personality expression, moderating social behavior, risk processing)—is still developing, so until it does fully develop (colloquially at age 25, but it can vary per individual), you may lack those skills because you physically lack the plumbing for them to be present:
> They also found important clues to brain function. For instance, a 2016 study found that when faced with negative emotion, 18- to 21-year-olds had brain activity in the prefrontal cortices that looked more like that of younger teenagers than that of people over 21. Alexandra Cohen, the lead author of that study and now a neuroscientist at Emory University, said the scientific consensus is that brain development continues into people’s 20s.
My Dad taught me how to play video games when I was around 6. By “taught”, I mean he just let me play, but enforced a rule that I’d have to stop playing if I couldn’t hold an attentive and emotionally appropriate conversation with him while I was playing Ninntendo.
This was hard for me! I had a natural instinct to tunnel vision into the game and not hear anything anyone was saying to me. I’d also get upset at the game and get angry in my conversations.
Training this into me at a young age really helped my emotional regulation and ability to socialize around / during games and not get too sucked into them. This was especially important because I was quite ADHD and that adds a lot of emotional disregulation.
I believe the part of the brian that deals with impulse control isn’t fully developed until early 20s.
We don’t willingly and willfully let kids have access to alcohol and heroin. By your reasoning it seems like we should so that they can learn self control.
I mean a lot of Europe has fairly low age limits for purchasing alcohol, and even lower for drinking it in private.
I believe 16-year olds can still buy wine and beer at the grocery stores in Denmark. I’ve heard it’s fairly common for 14-year olds to drink at home in the UK - though the 14-to-16 range may be delaying on average since ~2010.
I don’t believe many countries allow adults access to heroin. I believe prohibition does more harm here due to lack of quality control and testing but reasonable minds could disagree.
Age of first exposure is a fairly open question across the globe. Everyone is experimenting with whats best and whats tolerable.
We agree then that limiting access to alcohol is appropriate at some age level. Different countries do it at different ages. What is optimal is society dependent.
I gather then that we are in agreement that limiting access to social media is appropriate at some age level. We perhaps disagree at what age that ought to occur.
