Young People + Not-Fully-Formed-Brain = Recklessness!

Y’know how your auto insurance cost a lot more before you were 25 (even if your parents paid it at the time)?

And how you can’t rent a car until you’re 25?

Well, this is because folks under that age have way more car crashes than afterwards.

Teenagers are four times as likely as older
drivers to be involved in a crash and three times as likely to die in
one, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

This likely has a biological basis–in the brain.

Contrary to the initial expectations of some (obviously clueless) NIH researchers, brain development does not peak by age 18.

"We’d thought the highest levels of physical and brain maturity were
reached by age 18, maybe earlier — so this threw us," said Jay Giedd,
a pediatric psychiatrist leading the study, which released its first
results in April. That makes adolescence "a dangerous time, when it
should be the best."

I don’t know what kind of pediatric psychiatry idealization-of-youth rhetoric this guy has been smoking, but he’s clearly out of touch.

People as far back as Aristotle (and before!) have pointed out that young people are reckless and like to have fun, and that’s a dangerous combination.

In any event, Dr. Giedd has to be given credit for being willing to recognize what their new neurological data showed them: A part of the brain that inhibits risk-taking behavior ain’t fully formed until age 25; hence, your auto insurance rates don’t got down until that age and you don’t get to rent a car until that age.

In a related study, young people of different ages were asked to play a simulated driving video game in which the goal was to get through a particular course as quickly as possible while not hitting anything. They also brought friends to the event and were tested both with and without their friends present.

The study showed that, with the presence of youthful companions, the young people were more responsible as they had others’ lives riding (virtually) of what they did as drivers, and so they took more precautions, right?

Ha!

Of course not! They were worse drivers with friends present.

An interesting aspect of all this is the gap between the onset of puberty and the maturing of the brain’s risk-inhibiting functions:

Temple’s Steinberg said the NIH/UCLA research supports his theory that
teen recklessness is partly the result of a critical gap in time —
starting with the thrill-seeking that comes in puberty and ending when
the brain learns to temper such behavior. Since children today reach
puberty earlier than previously, about age 13, and the brain’s
reasoning center doesn’t reach maturity until the mid-twenties,
Steinberg said, "This period of recklessness has never been as long as
it is now."

GET THE STORY.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live." View all posts by Jimmy Akin