THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYare so stroppy when their liberties are so compromised. Epstein also
highlighted research conducted by the anthropologists Alice Schlegel
and Herbert Barry III, examining teenage-hood in 186 pre-industrial
societies. They found that that sixty percent didn’t even have a word
for “adolescence”, and that antisocial behaviour in male teens was
completely missing in around half. Historical analysis, Epstein further
argued, shows that the very concept of what we think of as the teenage
period is barely a century old, and he concluded that “we need to replace
the myth of the immature teen brain with a frank look at capable and
savvy teens in history, at teens in other cultures and at the truly extraor-
dinary potential of our own young people today”.
Adulthood, retirement and old age
For most people, the time between the end of adolescence and retire-
ment is filled with a succession of monumental events – such as going
to university, getting a job, finding a partner, having children, getting
divorced, coping with bereavement, moving house, getting fired and
so on. Some psychologists have posited that adulthood itself consists
of several discrete sub-stages. The late Daniel Levinson, for example,
proposed that men live through several “seasons”: the first from 17 to
22 involving the acquisition of independence; the second, a period of
establishment, finding a career and perhaps starting a family; then a
few stressful years of reassessment and reality-checking, characterized
by a fear that dreams might not be achieved; and finally, from about 33
onwards, a period of settling down in both work and family life.
As far as the brain is concerned, no sooner has it finished maturing
than it begins to decline – at about the age of 27 or 28. Atrophy sets in
and the brain starts to slow down, memory deteriorates and we gradu-
ally become less mentally agile. This decline is like the mirror opposite
of our earlier development. The brain regions that were the last to fully
mature, such as the frontal cortex, are the most vulnerable to the effects
of ageing. Similarly, whereas through childhood and adolescence many
functions became increasingly localized in one brain hemisphere or
the other, ageing witnesses the reverse, as the hemispheres increasingly
share the workload.
As people get older and more forgetful it’s natural for them to start
worrying that something could be seriously wrong. However, it’s worth
recognizing that everyone makes mistakes whatever their age. In 2007,
Maria Jonsdottir and her Icelandic colleagues set out to establish just