Brain Development

In the brain images shown above, all the areas that are NOT blue indicate the as-yet under-developed brain – all the way up to age 20. Our brains aren’t fully developed until around the mid-twenties  (Graphic is downloaded from PNAS 101: 8174-9, 2004)!

The parts of your brain that help you (1) to control your emotions, (2) make well-reasoned decisions, and even (3) to assess situations are simply NOT all there during your ‘formative’ years. Think about how many of your strongly held beliefs got based on very inadequate reasoning.

Concrete Thinking

This video demonstrates just how limited (concrete) childhood reasoning is. Now, consider how negative feedback in your childhood might’ve gotten explained (by you) using some really concrete ALL or NONE reasoning (i.e., It’s all my fault; I’m a failure). Even when we got positive feedback as children, we tend to use the ‘negative bias’ we formed from earlier learning. These explanations tend to harden into our core beliefs … about ourselves, others, and the world.

A typical child on Piaget's conservation tasks

Video can’t be loaded because JavaScript is disabled: A typical ...