According to a sweeping 2025 study from Cambridge, our brains actually pass through five distinct life-stage epochs — childhood, extended adolescence, adulthood, early aging, and late aging — with major neurological “re-wiring” turning points at roughly 9, 32, 66, and 83 years. Check out The Guardian article on this topic.
What matters for us now: the so-called “adult brain” — the architecture supporting stable cognition, personality, and emotional regulation — doesn’t kick in until about age 32. Not before 25, not before 30 — 32.
That insight redefines midlife. If adulthood fully arrives in the early 30s, then our 40s, 50s and 60s aren’t about decline; they’re about stability, maturity, and real potential. The decades of learning, pattern-recognition, emotional labor, relationships, mistakes, successes — all accumulate to form a brain that’s wired not just to survive but to create, to guide, to mentor.
When you hit midlife, you’re not slowing down. You’re arriving. You’re walking into the second act with a wiring that’s more refined, a mind that’s seen patterns and learned wisdom, a capacity for discernment that younger selves don’t yet possess.
This is the message of MEA’s mission: midlife isn’t crisis — it’s evolution. It’s the time when experience catches up with ambition, when wisdom emerges from the complex wiring shaped over decades. If we honor this, then aging becomes not a fear to resist — but a region of life to embrace.
Because if our brains move through epochs, then midlife isn’t the end of the climb. It’s the summit. Here’s another article on the variety of ways the brain ages, going through four particular times of change.
-Chip