In your opinion what causes christians to believe in Jesus

[John 6IX Breezy]

The finding that adolescents actually suppress (if that's the right word) memory in order to explore the world more widely makes a lot of sense to me. Certainly I became more exploratory at that age (my parents would use a different adjective). And it fits nicely with what we've been saying about the dynamic nature of people's beliefs. It appears to be natural -- almost biologically demonstrable -- for people of that age to move away from the ideas they had taken for granted in childhood. Which works against the theory that children brainwashed as toddlers will be unable to deviate from their indoctrination later on. 

Yes, exactly. So, think of a schema as your general knowledge about scenes and events. And then distinguish this from your specific memories of having been in those scenes and events. You can both describe what houses look like as a category and also remember what your particular house looks like. And so, these two things are always in tension, but that tension is different depending on your age. Children are just trying to get their foot in the door, beginning to form schemas and memories. But in adolescence, your brain starts to suppress those schemas. In other words, it's allowing the brain to explore more freely and gather as much unfiltered information as possible. And then once we reach adulthood, we begin re-developing the connection between our schemas and our memories, optimizing the two.

This is also interesting in light of this conversation because we wouldn't survey 12-year-olds on the nature of the universe and take their answers as meaningful—but internally, that's what we do. Adolescence, not childhood, is when we first start forming and testing our own beliefs. And by early adulthood, we solidify our teenage beliefs. You are more likely to hear that someone questioned their religion as a 12 year old than a 40 year old, for example.