At 31-years-old, I am still a teenager. That is, at least, according to the popular neuroscience educator Nathan Wallis.
He informs me that as a male middle child, still under the age of 32, I could still be in the midst of my own adolescence.
It might explain the mood swings and predilection to video games.
'You are actually an adolescent yourself then,” Nathan insists. 'You won't have an adult brain until you are about 32.”
Nathan suggests his teen brain lasted well into conventional adulthood.
'I was sort of 33 when I thought: ‘I sort of get this whole grown up thing now and how to be an adult and what I want to do with my life'.
'Before that I very much felt like I was 15 and pretending to be an adult.”
Nathan is leading a seminar called The Teen Brain at Tauranga Girls' College this month with the aim of demystifying some of the myths surrounding teenage brain development.
He has grown-up children himself and is now enjoying life as a grandfather, so he knows all too well about the trials of raising a teenager.
As he explains, for much of a child's teenage years the frontal cortex part of the brain is ‘shut for renovations'.
'The whole brain isn't shut or they'd be dead!” Nathan jokes, 'but their ability to control emotions, their ability to organise themselves, is supposed to go backwards. Adolescence is, essentially, brain number four, the frontal cortex, and it is shut for renovations for about three years.”
With words such as frontal cortex and neuroscience flying around, the seminar sounds complex, but Nathan believes he has developed a way of cutting through the jargon and making the talk accessible to ‘anyone with a brain'.
'A big part of what the seminar is about is demystifying it. Taking out the big words and saying this is this.
'It is surprisingly and incredibly simple for what the topic is, which is complicated neuroscience.”
Nathan believes the talk will be beneficial to anyone - parents, teens, those who work with teens, or perhaps those who have suffered trauma in their youth may find the seminar helpful. He will also touch on the topic of alcohol and marijuana's impact on the teenage brain.
The promise of a top tip for parents might be worth the admission fee alone.
'I can teach parents in 10 minutes how to be in the top percentage of communicators,” he says. 'If they do that they will vastly improve the quality of their relationship with their teenagers.”
The Teen Brain seminar takes place at 7.30pm on February 28 at Tauranga Girls College. For more information, visit: www.nathanwallis.com