BDR wrote:

Ephraim wrote:

Abraham Maslow has said that people can't become truly self-actualized until their mid-thirties/early forties. I think it has to do with time available to contemplate your "self", and the need to have a certain degree of life experience behind you in order to make reasonable assessments of your existence. I personally also believe it has to do with the fact that your frontal cortex isn't even fully formed until your late twenties, and it takes awhile for you to get used to all those neurons available for future planning and executive decision making.

Whereas I don't actually disagree with this belief - the frontal cortex is the last major brain region to develop - it seems to be more a matter of myelination of the existing neurons that occurs in early adulthood as opposed to neuronal synthesis as you suggest. It might all come out in the wash in terms of what that process translates to in a mental/development sense anyway.