Reseachers at the Universities of Chicago and Iowa have pin-pointed the the ventromedial area of the prefrontal cortex of the brain (a good-sized chunk of the brain just above your eyes) as the area responsible for making you pause and consider information before you accept it as fact. What’s interesting is that this area of the brain doesn’t fully develop until after your teen years, and then starts deteriorating later on life. It’s the last area of the brain to fully develop and the first to deteriorate, which means that young adults and the elderly are more likely to believe baseless information like political propaganda, Internet folklore and advertising than the middle-aged are. Researchers, however, were unable to explain why the world “gullible” isn’t in the dictionary. Oh, you didn’t know that? Yeah, it’s crazy …
