A Letter to the Brain of a High School Graduate

The only advice I can offer as your journey continues after high school.

Dear Graduate:

Psychologists say that the human brain has two major seasons of development.

The first is when you are young — the prenatal and early childhood stages. Psychologists frequently discuss the necessity of developing a baby’s brain when they are young and prescribe that you ought to read to them, play imaginatively with them, and engage their motor skills because, for those first couple years, you have a small window of opportunity to establish the foundation of their brain.

The implication is that whatever isn’t established in those early years — the opportunity to manifest such exponential development — is now gone; the brain’s development slows, and who you are is now almost completely correlated with what was established in the first years of growth.

It sets the stage for who you become.

Until Now

There is one more season of development and that second season is, for you, just getting started.

Between the ages of 18–25, the brain enters into the second stage of development where the conditions almost mimic the malleability of the brain…