Dr. Mark D'Esposito

And there's a number of psychiatric disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and schizophrenia and depression that are thought to be frontal lobe dysfunction.

But when you're sleep-deprived and when you're stressed and just normal aging, the frontal lobe seems to be the first system that's affected because it really is involved in the highest level.

So when we're having a bad day, when we're having difficulties sort of setting priorities, when we're having difficulties achieving goals

the goal that we've set out.

When we get distracted, you know, when we're not able to sort of adapt and be flexible, these are all the type of things that reflect that our frontal lobes are not functioning optimally.

Yeah, I mean, it's a really tough question to know when they're fully developed because these studies haven't been done.

When MRI was introduced and we were able to sort of image the brain in a non-invasive way, then studies did start to come out trying to sort of map out at what age does your frontal lobes fully develop.

And it seemed like it was early into your 20s.

You know, I always say that it's not surprising that you can't rent a car until you're 25.

The insurance companies knew before, neuroscientists did, as to when your frontal lobes have, you know, when your decision-making skills

at their highest.

And so that's probably about right into your 20s is probably before your frontal lobes are fully developed.

And it's really interesting question is why does it take so long?

It's the area of the brain that takes the longest to develop and why is that?

And I think there's a reason.

I think that this sort of slow development of frontal lobes allows us to explore, allows us to think about novel ways of solving problems, allows us to take in

the world, if they were shut off earlier, it would lead to maybe a much more sort of rigid kind of, you know, less flexible kind of behavior that we've seen things.

So I think that it helps to take a long time to develop, but also it obviously leads to some problems sometimes in adolescence as we see sometimes.

Yeah, it's hard to say.

I mean, the frontal lobe is a big territory, and we can get into it.