Welcome to Who-ville

Have you heard? The age range for adulthood is changing. It’s possible our brains are not reaching peak efficiency until the age of 32. What does that mean for who you are today? What else has the new study thrown up? Take a look at all that the brain gets done by the age of 9, how differently it works after 83, and more

- Kanika Sharma

Joan of Arc was in her teens when she led a platoon into battle.

These were prodigies, certainly. But given how low life expectancy was until the modern era, researchers now believe that a large share of humanity's most dramatic discoveries—harnessing fire, the wheel, smelting, and plenty more — were likely made by people who were quite young.

Necessity drove invention, and necessity meant there were few rules about the burdens young people could carry.

The rules society has evolved are, of course, vital. But new studies indicate that, amid current societal structures, the threshold of adulthood may be moving further up. We are now at the point where humans may not be maturing into full adulthood until the age of... 32.

A study by neuroscientists at Cambridge University suggests that most individuals reach true adulthood in their early 30s.

That is when the brain's process of pruning and rewiring its neural networks reaches peak structural efficiency. This peak holds for a few years, and then a gradual decline begins, often in the mid-30s.