Why We Never Forget Our Teen Years, with Lisa Damour

Our brains go completely WILD when we go through our teenage years. It’s a time where it feels like every disagreement with our parents turns into World War III, and every idea that could get us killed sounds like the most fun we could ever have. In this episode, we get into the science of what the brain is doing during the teenage years with clinical psychologist Dr. Lisa Damour. Lisa co-wrote the college textbook “Abnormal Psychology” and was a consultant on Disney's “Inside Out 2.” She takes us deep into the developing brain to explain what makes teens tick. Plus, we talk about mental health, how boys and girls are struggling in different ways, and tips for anyone who has big feelings. Find our transcript here: https://tinyurl.com/ScienceVsTeenBrain Check out Lisa Damour’s podcast, Ask Lisa: The Psychology of Raising Tweens & Teens, here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2GIh790via4L7oGAJ2mz1b In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Meet Lisa Damour (05:33) The teenage brain (11:20) Big feelings, what they mean, and how to respond (19:56) The teenage brain and abstract thinking (22:34) Teenagers and risk-taking (29:18) How long does adolescence really last?? (33:47) The different kinds of popularity (41:58) Should we be worried about kids these days? (46:57) How boys are struggling and how can we help (51:49) Oddball questions Credits: This episode was produced by Wendy Zukerman with help from Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, Rose Rimler, Michelle Dang and Meryl Horn. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Wendy Zukerman is the executive producer. Fact checking by Diane Kelly. Video editing and sound design by Bobby Lord. Music written by Bobby Lord, Bumi Hidaka, So Wylie, Emma Munger and Peter Leonard. Science Vs is a Spotify Studios Original. You can join us for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us and tap the bell for episode notifications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I have such a vivid memory of being 14 and looking in a mirror. I'm thinking, how do I know I'm not an alien who has been left here by my planet? Would I know if I were? And I remember freaking myself out. Like, I remember really, like, finding that pretty destabilizing. And then, you know, then you kind of move on.

• 0:26Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 0:27Speaker 00

  Turn 15 and you don't think that way anymore. But I have such a clear memory of that.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  Do do do. Science chats with our favorite nerds. Yeah. Hi, I'm Wendy Zukerman and this is Science Versus. Today on the show, the teenage brain. Being a teenager is such a weird and poignant time of our lives. Everything feels so heightened and important. What is happening in our brains during that time? And then, why, as we get older and become full-blown adults with jobs and podcasts and self-esteem? Why can what happened in high school still imprint on us?

• 1:15Speaker 01

  Why, if we bump into our high school bully while we're out in a park with our kids? Why does that still matter? What about bumping into your high school crush while you're out at the supermarket buying pickles? Why do we still care?

• 1:30Speaker 01

  To decode the mysteries of the teenage brain. Today, we are sharing my chat with the fabulous Dr. Lisa Demore. Lisa has been a clinical psychologist for more than 30 years and she specializes in teenagers. She co-wrote the college textbook of normal psychology and she has written not one, not two, not three. No, actually, three. She's written three bestselling books on the teenage brain. Her most recent one, right here, is The Emotional Lives of Teenagers. And I learnt so much about my own emotional life from it, even though I'm a big kid.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  If all of that doesn't impress you, Lisa was also a consultant on Disney's Inside Out 2. So after the break, my chat with Lisa Demore. We are going to talk about the mysteries of the teenage brain and also mental health more generally. How we can all live happier lives, whether we have to deal with Jordan in calculus or our boss. My chat with Lisa is coming up just after the break.

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• 4:48Speaker 01

  Welcome back. Today on the show, the teenage brain. And to tell us all about it is the fabulous and oh so wise Dr. Lisa Demore. Hi, Lisa, welcome to the show.

• 5:01Speaker 00

  Wendy, thank you for having me. It is great to be here.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  I'm so excited to chat with you. I've been gobbling up all of your books. You can see from the dog-eared nature of them.

• 5:12Speaker 00

  Oh, I appreciate that.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  So let's, let's get to know you a little. I heard that you wanted to become a psychologist when you were little, six or seven. I didn't even know what a psychologist was at six or seven. What sparked this for you?

• 5:31Speaker 00

  So what happened was, the early part of my life had a lot of disruption. My parents divorced when I was three. My mom remarried when I was six. And we moved overseas, all in that time. Like, by the time I was six, divorce, remarriage, move overseas. So a lot had happened.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:49Speaker 00

  And in the midst of all of this, we became family friends with someone who moved from Denver, where we were living, to London, where we moved overseas. By coincidence, happened to be making the same move in the same week. And she was a training psychologist. Her name is Carla. We remained very close. She was, you know, in graduate school. She was actually training with Anna Freud, Sigmund Freud's daughter, who really worked out child and adolescent psychology.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  That is wild. She was training with Anna Freud?

• 6:19Speaker 00

  She was, right in that developmental line.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  Your babysitter?

• 6:24Speaker 00

  Well, basically, actually, because my mom and my stepfather were, you know, sort of starting a new marriage, so they traveled a fair bit on their own. So whenever they would travel, I would stay with Carla in her grad school apartment. And I became incredibly fascinated with what she was doing. And I would just drill her with questions, you know? Who are your patients? Why are they there? What, why does therapy work? How does therapy work? And she, as someone who loved kids and smart and generous person, took me very seriously, gave me very meaningful answers. And somewhere in that age, six or seven, I returned back to our flat in London one weekend. And I was like, I'm going to do Carla's job. That's going to be my job.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  And then you focus on teenagers in your practice.

• 7:13Speaker 00

  I do, I do.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  What do you love about teenagers?

• 7:18Speaker 00

  They're the best. So I have always liked teenagers. I've always thought they were the most interesting human beings on the planet. I think they are so vibrant. There's so much going on. There's so much change happening really rapidly.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  So then, I want to jump into the science of what is happening in our brains when we're teenagers. Because it is this super profound time in our lives. And I think it's so fascinating that science's understanding of the teenage brain has changed so wildly very recently. So tell me, what is happening in the, in the human brain as we become teenagers?

• 7:57Speaker 00

  A lot. Okay, but it's all fantastic. It's a little hard on the kid and it's a little hard on the people around the kid, but it's all normal development.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 8:05Speaker 00

  The way that, I'm not, I'm going to oversimplify this, you know? So, you know, if neurologists take issue, they're right. But the general outlines of what I'm saying are accurate.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:17Speaker 00

  So in the first part of life, zero to nine, roughly, there's a great flourishing of neurons. A lot of neuronal activity is generated, new neurons are created. The brain is sort of growing like a bush, right? Like, you know, tons and tons of branches and all sorts of leaves on those branches. And like, there's a lot going on. In adolescence, there's a pruning. There's a starting to get rid of dead weight, neurological dead weight. And so what happens is actually it makes the brain more efficient and more powerful. And there's also an increase in myelination, which is the coding on neurons that actually speeds the communication between neurons.

• 9:00Speaker 00

  So the adolescent brain, and this is part of why I love them, is getting faster, more powerful. It's also developing the capacity to see things in all new ways. In the sort of most kind of old school, but still holds up view of this, kids go from being concrete thinkers, they're like, I think what I think, and that's what I think, to abstract thinkers, which is like, well, I think this, but I can imagine that you might think that, right? That they can see things, have abstract reasoning, imagine things from different perspectives. All of that starts to happen around 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, whenever a kid is really sort of underway with puberty. And the pubertal changes in the brain happen before the body really starts changing.

• 9:42Speaker 00

  So like, you know, 10 and 11 year olds often have a lot of this going on. Now, what's critical for everyone to be empathic about is that the upgrading, the renovation in the brain, this speeding, this strengthening that happens, proceeds in the order in which the brain initially developed, which is from the lower order regions, which are basically above our neck, the back of our neck.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  The lizard brain.

• 10:09Speaker 00

  To the higher, yeah, the ancient brain down here, to the higher order regions, which are behind our forehead. So the tricky spot is that teenagers go through a phase of having what we kind of sometimes call a wonky brain, right? Or a gawky brain, a gawky brain, in that the lower order regions have been upgraded, that they are actually more powerful, more efficient, more responsive to the world around them. But the higher order regions haven't gotten their upgrade yet. And the problem being, our emotions are back here. Our emotions are in this more ancient part of the brain. So what it means is that emotionality is tremendously heightened for young people.

• 10:52Speaker 00

  If we almost think of that as like the psychological gas. But the brakes are still the old brakes. They're not as developed, as sort of renovated and upgraded, as the emotional centers. So what it means is they dysregulate really, really easily when they're in this gawky brain phase. And when we look at this on paper, dysregulation, you know, sort of falling apart emotionally, is at its absolute height on average around age 13. And then kids actually become more regulated as they move deeper into adolescence.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  Because they're getting more of those regular.

• 11:35Speaker 00

  Because the front of the brain is catching up. And so, you know, it's got this phenomenally interesting effect on family life because one thing that happens is a lot of parents think, okay, well, adolescence doesn't even begin until 13, because teen, teenager, when in fact, kids start acting like teenagers around 10 or 11. And we've always marked the onset of adolescence as psychologists around 11, because that's when the pubertal changes in the brain usually are starting. So the first thing that's happening in families is everybody, you know, the teenager starts or the kid starts acting like a teenager around 10 or 11, and the family's thinking, what's happening? We thought we had two more years.

• 12:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:13Speaker 00

  Which they didn't. And then they hit 13, and they are held together with Scotch tape, often coming apart, right? Getting really, really dysregulated very fast, having meltdowns because they can't find their pants, that, you know, they have 14 other pairs of pants they could wear, but it's the one pair of pants. And the family's thinking, holy moly, this is how we start the teenage years? Is like, we're coming out of the gate like this? And then they usually are thinking, oh, my gosh, and we're only going to go up from here? And the good news is, no, no, no, you go down from there.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  It gets better, fingers crossed.

• 12:48Speaker 00

  It gets better. But the other thing that we need to actually never lose sight of is, it's weird for the kid, too. The 13 year old who is in a fetal position on the floor, because they can't find the pants they were looking for, is also thinking, what is going on? Like, two years ago, I would just wear other pants. Like, why am I like this now? And so it's a time where there's a great deal of tenderness called for, because it's scary for the kid and scary for the parents.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  Now, you wrote in your book that adults shouldn't mistake the extreme emotional intensity that is natural to adolescence for psychological fragility. Tell me about this.

• 13:35Speaker 00

  So we do make this equation, right? That if you're emotional, it means you're fragile. And that's not really true, right? I, at this point, you know, I'll be weepy about anything. Like, the older I get, the more readily I move to tears by like, you know, an engagement on a television show. I'm like, oh, they're getting married, right? I'm pretty sturdy, right? I have very easy access to my emotions, and I am pretty tough emotionally. I can put up with quite a bit. So it's not a fair, it's not a fair equation to say that someone's emotional means that they're necessarily psychologically fragile. I think for kids, especially when it comes out of the gate so fast, especially when it's a very distinct departure from who they were six months ago, a year ago, and especially

• 14:20Speaker 00

  when families are in an environment where there's a lot of scary headlines about teenagers. You know, there's, especially in the wake of the pandemic, there's been so much concern about adolescent mental health, so much concern about adolescent suicide. You know, all of this is warranted, all of this is really important. But I have such empathy for a family who maybe has a 10 or 11 or 12 or 13 year old, who's starting to have that ramping up emotionality, and is becoming distressed about things they weren't distressed about before. And the folks are looking at headlines that are saying really scary things about teenagers. I think in those moments, it's really easy to worry that something's really wrong.

• 15:05Speaker 00

  And the way I would have parents reassure themselves is to ask a few questions. So first, is the child coping, the teenager coping, in a way that brings relief and does no harm, right? So distress is happening, it's part of life, even sort of out of the blue, bigger than one would expect distress. So long as teenagers are doing things that come at no cost and actually bring relief, like crying, crying is great, it brings relief, does no harm, cuddling the family pet, putting on their favorite playlist, sometimes a sad playlist when they're sad, going outside, wanting to talk about their feelings, wanting to go back to bed, sometimes they'll just

• 15:50Speaker 00

  get under their covers, wanting to do a facial, you know, like, these are the things teenagers do when they're upset. And if it comforts them and brings relief, and they feel better, that's health. Like, that's health. It's not the presence of distress that is a sign of mental, you know, concerns about mental health, it's the presence of poor coping.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  This is very interesting, because I think we have this idea, even beyond teenagehood, as a grown up, every time I'm having a bad day, to be honest, or just feeling crappy, I do worry about my mental health. I might use words like, oh, I was a bit anxious today, I had anxiety today. But is this true, this is true for all of us? If we are coping, that's actually life and mental health? Is that right?

• 16:40Speaker 00

  That is mental health. So the way I wrote about it in this most recent book is, you know, mental health is not about feeling good. I mean, it's nice to feel good, but that's not how we define mental health as psychologists. It's about having feelings of what's happening and then managing them well. So if you're having a crappy day, it's usually because something went wrong, right? So maybe, you know, you got stuck in traffic, or maybe you weren't feeling well physically, or maybe somebody was a jerk at work, you know, or something like that. Those are, you know, the various miseries of life, this is natural to life. If somebody's unpleasant to you, and you're like, that's cool, I don't mind, it's fine, I feel great, like, that's actually more concerning than if you're like, ow, that hurt, like, what's going on, right?

• 17:25Speaker 00

  And I try to help families see this, right? If a kid messes up a test, right, an important test, and is upset about it, that's what we want to see. What we don't want to see is a kid who messes up an important test, is like, whatever, I don't care. So not only is distress natural, most of the time, it's proof that people work exactly like they're supposed to.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  And then, so how do we know that, whether it's teenagers or big kids like you and me, how do we know that we're coping well? Because there is, there is this sort of story you hear, that every bad emotion you have, not only should you not really have it and try and whisk it away as quickly as possible, but you should talk about it with your therapist, with your friends, you've got to talk about it to death. And I'm not going to talk, Elisa, but.

• 18:16Speaker 00

  It's okay.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  Is it okay? So how do we know if it's okay to just slam on the music, have a cry? What's a good coping mechanism and what's not so good?

• 18:26Speaker 00

  So the not so good basically are defined very similarly to the good ones. So the good ones are they bring relief and do no harm. The not so good ones bring relief but come at a cost, right? That there's a price tag attached. So say you've had a really bad day, and you're like, you know what I could go for is a glass of wine. And one glass of wine does the job, relaxes you, lets you let it go, and you leave it at that, and no harm is done, that's fine, right? That's fine. Now, if that always becomes the strategy, if there's no reflection on what went wrong, no effort to choose, you know, to try to fix it, then it could start to be a strategy that does harm. If it's seven glasses of wine, now we have a problem, right?

• 19:09Speaker 00

  So even, and the kid equivalent is something like video games. Like, a lot of kids will have a really rough day at school, feel very frustrated, and they'll come home and they'll want to get on their video game. Because if they get on their video game, they don't have to think about what happened, and they want to stop thinking about it for a little bit.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:25Speaker 00

  Now, if it's something the kid cannot fix, and they actually do need to change their mental channels so they can just sit down and get their homework done after playing video games for a little while, video games are a perfectly reasonable strategy in that moment.

• 19:40Speaker 00

  If however, every time the kid's upset, they're like, I want to be on my video game. Or every time the kid's upset, they're like, I'm going to be on my video game for four hours and not get my homework done. Now you have a problem.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  Is there a cost? This is, it's a really helpful way to look at it.

• 19:54Speaker 00

  Is there a cost? Right, okay, so substances, you know, can be very costly. Taking it out on other people, right? You have a bad day at work and you come home and you kick the dog. Or you come home and you're, you know, unpleasant to your partner. This comes at a very high cost. Taking it out on yourself, right? What is wrong with me? I'm the worst. I, you know, I hate myself. I never get anything right. You know, that gives a sense of control, which is why people do it, but it doesn't feel good and it's not going to help them. And then the last one is people who use avoidance to manage anxiety, right? Like, I'm nervous about this thing, so I just won't do it. Right? If we do that repeatedly, our lives get narrower and narrower. So the goal, my whole goal of my whole career, I can't make distress go away.

• 20:38Speaker 00

  I can't prevent the people who feel distress, like, and I don't want to. There's so much value, even if it's uncomfortable, in having the full range of emotions, being sad when there are losses, being angry when we're hurt, being disappointed when things don't go our way. I mean, that's, that's exactly how we're built. We're built to do that.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  I've heard you say that you do PR for distress these days.

• 21:05Speaker 00

  I'm all for it. I'm all for, I mean, like, not unnecessary distress, but like, I'm certainly trying to counterbalance, frankly, a wellness industry that I think has sent the message that distress is inherently bad.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  In your book, you talk about kids who are coming to you and talking to you about this specifically, and I find it very relatable. What are they telling you about kind of the wellness industry, the messages they're getting?

• 21:30Speaker 00

  That they're like failing at self-care, right? Like, if only my self-care were better, I would be in this state of ongoing emotional zen. And I'm like, are you kidding me? You're like 16. Like, there's no ongoing emotional zen at any point in life, and definitely not at 16. And so, but it's amazing how much better kids feel instantly when we say, your feelings make sense, they're super uncomfortable, also, they're only feelings. You can handle them, we're here to help you handle them.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  Now, going back to the teenage brain, our gawky brains as we're teenagers, you mentioned that we start to really develop abstract thinking as when we're teenagers. This sort of gets ramped up. Do you remember as a teenager having that sort of come online for you?

• 22:18Speaker 00

  I do. And it's funny, I think, I have very vivid memories in my adolescence, I think, more than most adults, which I don't know why I do, but I, I don't think that's an accident that I've ended up in my job. But I have such a clear memory, because what I know now through my training is it's very jarring when basically this like new dimension is added to your mind, right? It's very jarring. I'll give you an example clinically, like, I remember caring for a 14-year-old who became suddenly like absolutely flipped out about human mortality. Like, you know, she, of course, before 14, she knew people would die. Like, she knew that. But at 14, like, the sort of existential meaning of this descended on her.

• 23:02Speaker 00

  And that her parents were eventually going to die, and the dog was eventually going to die. And she was just beside herself. Like, she, like, so that kind of like, seeing the depth and complexity of things can be very, very, like, complicated.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  Yes, I remember that now that you mention it, absolutely. And what's it all for? If we're all

• 23:26Speaker 00

  What's it all for?

• 23:26Speaker 01

  gonna die.

• 23:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  Still a question that comes up as a teenager. It's very pronounced.

• 23:34Speaker 00

  It's very profound and very destabilizing. It's very destabilizing. And I've had other kids say like, how do I know this isn't all like a big joke and everyone's in on it but me? Right? Like, the ability to kind of have those thoughts is new. So mine, I have such a vivid memory of being 14 and looking in a mirror. Mine's weird, but like, I think a lot of people have weird ones, but mine's pretty weird. I'm thinking, how do I know I'm not an alien who has been left here by my planet? How do I know? Would I know? Would I know if I were? And, and I remember freaking myself out.

• 24:19Speaker 00

  Like, I remember really, like, finding that pretty destabilizing. And then, you know, then you kind of move on.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 24:27Speaker 00

  Turn 15 and you don't think that way anymore. But I have such a clear memory of that.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  Wow, wow, wow. And so another thing that teenagers do is quite famously is risk-taking. And I was sort of delighted to read while I was researching for this interview that rats and mice, when they're teenagers, also risk-take more, and they go and visit places that might be a little bit dangerous, more so than when they're adults or when they're kids. And a sort of, a study that I think we can all relate to found that even teenage mice drink more alcohol when they're with their friends, something that both teenagers do tend to be more risky when we're with our friends. And adult mice don't do that.

• 25:12Speaker 01

  And sort of in the context of risk-taking and also your childhood, tell me about glitching, Lisa?

• 25:20Speaker 00

  Oh my gosh, I cannot believe I did this. Okay. So the risk-taking in teenagers, the best way to think about it is novelty-seeking, right? That's what it is. The teenage brain is driven towards novelty, right? Like, if you think about like, who invented fire? I'm sure it was teenage K people, right? They're like, what does this do? Right? I mean, like, they, they want to sort of try new things, see what happens. So they make risky choices. Okay. I have to tell you, when I was writing about this in my book, I actually had to call friends from Denver, and I was like, did we actually do this? Because it's like so bananas, what we were doing. So I grew up in Denver, Colorado, which at the time was a very small town. It has since become a very populated city.

• 26:04Speaker 00

  But it was this tiny town and, you know, not a lot of folks and not a lot of traffic. And, you know, it's in the mountains of Colorado. And we would get a big snow, and sometimes so much that it became packed on the street, you know, sort of like there was a two or three inch pack of snow that you could drive on. We would, we were able to drive, we were 16 and older, go out at night. And one of us would drive, and two or three of us would hold on to the back bumper of the car in this crouched position in snow boots. And while our friend drove, and we would just sort of like, hold on and like, you

• 26:49Speaker 00

  know, like

• 26:50Speaker 01

  Back to the Future? Were you inspired by Back to the Future? Doesn't anyone, Bonnie McFly?

• 26:54Speaker 00

  Do something like that. I think with a skateboard, right? So we were doing that. But then the other thing we would do is like, two, like, usually a couple of kids would sit in the trunk of the car and talk to the kids on the bumper. Like, it was like And then eventually, like, your hands get tired and you fall off and you sort of tumble in the snow. And the job of the driver is to watch in the rearview mirror until they can see that everybody's off the car, and then you back it up and you go get everybody again. And it's like, we would do this in like the middle of the night. And I know, I mean, like, it sounds really dangerous. I'm sure it wasn't smart. Because you're like, how did you not like end up under a tire?

• 27:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:35Speaker 00

  You're not really, you're kind of behind the car.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, sure.

• 27:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. So it's sort of like, you know, it's funny, like, the other thing I can't believe that we did. So I, I had a great adolescence because we mostly were skiing. Like, that was our weekend activity, and it was actually perfect. But Wendy, the thing I think about now, and I still, I go out to Colorado, my folks are still there. We were 16-year-old drivers, driving up to, over Berthold Pass, which is the continental divide of the United States. It is a sheer drop on lousy roads. We were new drivers. I had a 1979 diesel Volkswagen Rabbit that I bought myself for $900 when I was, when I was a teenager. I like won't do this now, like, as an adult.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  No. Do you know this is so wild? Because the studies in teenage rats, what they do is they put them on an elevated maze with sometimes a bit of a drop, and they love it.

• 28:33Speaker 00

  And they don't care.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  The teenage little mice snooping around, look at you go. What were you doing?

• 28:39Speaker 00

  I mean, and I do this now, and I'm like, what? Who let me drive on this at 16?

• 28:47Speaker 01

  Do we know why the teenage brain loves novelty?

• 28:52Speaker 00

  Probably for evolutionary reasons.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:55Speaker 00

  Right? That, you know, if we think about it in an evolutionary frame, for the species to survive, teenagers need to be out and about finding other teenagers and, you know, engaging with them. You know, if they stay, if all the teenagers stay home in their cave, this, this, the culture does not survive. The species does not survive. But you also mentioned something else about adolescent mice drinking more in the company of their adolescent mice peers. We have other studies showing the same. There's actually a really brilliant series of studies done by Lawrence Steinberg, who's a researcher who's done beautiful work on teenagers, where you put teenagers in driving simulators and ask them to drive.

• 29:37Speaker 00

  And then you put 30-year-olds in driving simulators and ask them to drive. So you get a baseline of them driving alone in the simulator. Then you bring in a whole bunch of teenage friends

• 29:47Speaker 01

  And you bring in the mice?

• 29:48Speaker 00

  To hang out next to the

• 29:49Speaker 01

  Get them to drive.

• 29:49Speaker 00

  No, no mice. This is all humans. So then, the second round of the study is, then you bring in a bunch of 17-year-olds to watch a 17-year-old drive, and a 30-year-olds to watch a 30-year-old drive. The 30-year-old drives the same with a whole bunch of 30-year-olds watching as they did alone. The 17-year-old gets significantly riskier with peers in the car. And there's two really important things that come from this. One is this understanding of an idea of hot and cold reasoning. That cold reasoning is this very logical, cautious, smart, mature reasoning that happens when teenagers are not with their peers.

• 30:27Speaker 00

  Hot reasoning is they get with their friends and social and emotional pressures change their judgment. And that's what this study really demonstrates. So like, you might have a kid, you know, at five o'clock on Friday, they're like, I'm going to Billy's house tonight. And the parents say, don't drink. And he's like, I will not. It is nuts at Billy's. And then he gets to Billy's and someone's like, have a beer. He's like, okay. Right? He wasn't lying at five. It's that the conditions change.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. And we've all been, we've all been at Billy's at 5:00 P. M.

• 30:56Speaker 00

  Hundred percent.

• 30:57Speaker 01

  I have such a clear memory of the first time someone offered me a cigarette and being like, that is the dumbest thing I could possibly do. Thank you. And then it was in my hand and my, I don't know how to puff to this, I don't know how to inhale. I was coughing. I didn't inhale. It was in the bin, you know? So, so interestingly, just to sort of cap off this discussion of the teenage brain in development, there was a super interesting study that came out last year that looked at 4,000 people from basically zero, straight out to 90. And they analyzed their brains looking for patterns and found that basically our brain

• 31:41Speaker 01

  is in, it changes throughout the course of our life. But for the purpose of this discussion, the chunk of change that they, the sort of phase that hits adolescence, they found probably started around when we're nine years old, all the way up to when we're 32, in this study, which is very interesting. What did you make of that?

• 32:06Speaker 00

  Yeah. Um, what I made of it is I don't think they should have called it adolescence.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 32:12Speaker 00

  Um, yeah, because what the study really said was, for that entire window, from nine to 32, the brain is actually becoming more and more integrated, more and more sophisticated, more and more capable.

• 32:27Speaker 01

  Yes, having that, like, you were talking about the pruning, the pruning of synapses.

• 32:32Speaker 00

  And the power and the, and the, you know, the areas of the brain connecting very quickly to each other, you know, like that, that is, that is just improving and improving and improving through that window of nine to 32.

• 32:46Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 32:47Speaker 00

  And then at 32, actually, it starts to decline. That that's really what the study found is that then more, you know, thinking becomes more localized to certain areas, like that really sophisticated integration that has been, um, you know, really accelerated by the adolescent process and then moved into young adulthood, like, the brain kind of peaks in a way at 32, is what that paper really showed. And so, um, you know, not that you can't do good work after that, because, and a lot of some, as we say, like, yeah, the brain may lose some of its, um, you know, just incredible nimbleness, right? That may happen, but it's offset by experience, right? Like, other things come in to help us still do good cognitive work and be very capable thinkers well into, you know, later adulthood.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 33:33Speaker 00

  But I was, I was sort of fascinated that they decided to call that whole thing adolescence, because I, I think, Wendy, and this is something I really struggle with, it then sort of gives it a negative tinge, because we have a negative tinge about adolescence, right? Like, that this is, this is like a fascinating thing to me, that we, we tend to sort of advance negative stereotypes about teenagers. And the one that I hear all the time about brains is like, oh, their brains don't even work, you know, until they're, you know, it used to be 25, their brains don't really work, they don't really, and I'm like, no, no, wait a minute, like, until 25, and 25 is often the number that we've talked about where, you know, um, adolescence ends is increasingly what people are saying.

• 34:13Speaker 00

  What happens at 25 is the upgrade is complete and there's good balance between the front and the back of the brain. And strong emotions don't knock the brain offline, the front, the front of the brain offline so readily.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 34:28Speaker 00

  But, you know, when a 15-year-old is calm, when they're not contending with big feelings, they reason beautifully, right? Or, I look at a piece of art made by an 18-year-old and I'm like, tell me that kid doesn't have a working frontal lobe, or like, Lord, right? The singer?

• 34:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:45Speaker 00

  When she broke out with those unbelievable songs, she was 17.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 34:52Speaker 00

  The, they don't, their brains don't work. I'm like, are you kidding me?

• 34:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:55Speaker 00

  Are you kidding me? Their brains are more vulnerable to being derailed by strong emotion until 25. Um, but I, I always feel a little prickly when people are dismissive of teenagers' neurological capacities.

• 35:13Speaker 01

  After the break, more of my chat with Dr. Lisa Demore. There's a lot of worries about kids these days, a lot of reasons to be worried, the mental health crisis, social media, gambling. But how worried do we need to be? Coming up.

• 35:38Speaker 03

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• 36:35Speaker 05

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• 37:02Speaker 01

  Welcome back. Today, we're talking all about teenagers with clinical psychologist Dr. Lisa Demore. Let's jump back in.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  And now I kind of want to zoom into the more social side of being a teenager. And I was fascinated to read that scientists have these fancy words for the different kinds of kids in the schoolyard. So, um, there is something called sociometric popularity, the popularity of if you just ask kids anonymously, who's, who's genuinely liked, they have sociometric popularity. But then there's perceived popularity, which refers to, I'll quote from a study here, prestige, visibility, and dominance, AKA Regina George. It's the mean girls.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  It, which kind of astonishes me that there is this sort of universality, so much so that we have fancy science words for these concepts. And I'm sure our listeners will immediately know from their high school who had the perceived popularity and who had the sociometric popularity.

• 38:08Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 38:08Speaker 01

  Is this something you see, you talk to a lot of kids, you talk at a lot of schools, do you see these dynamics playing out?

• 38:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:19Speaker 00

  Much as I absolutely adore Tina Fey, um, I, I always like, the, the phrase mean girls a little bit, like, because first of all, there's no equivalent for boys, even though, and this is not a good thing for anybody, like, boys are actually statistically quite a bit more aggressive than girls, both socially and physically.

• 38:35Speaker 01

  That's right. In, in your book, you point out that there, when you look at this sort of, uh, almost manipulative meanness, we kind of associate

• 38:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:44Speaker 01

  girls as having, um, yeah, that more manipulative, and whereas boys will just punch each other and that's how they're mean. But you write that actually, that's not true, that both boys and girls.

• 38:55Speaker 00

  Girls do not have the market cornered on that. And what boys do, and, and I, this, this pains me terribly for them. And, you know, families with sons will talk about this, they do tremendous teasing, like tremendous. Um, and, you know, like, giving each other a hard time, um, really needling each other quite a bit. And, you know, if a kid reacts to it or gets hurt, then they'll, I was just joking, I was just joking, like, why, you know, like, so this is not nice.

• 39:26Speaker 01

  Oh, my God, Lisa, that, when you said that, I'm just joking, I'm just joking, I literally just this proustian response of the mean boys in, in my high school that absolutely used to tease me for wearing pants. Yeah. But it's the same, it's the same phenomenon.

• 39:44Speaker 00

  And a lot of kids outgrow really fast. And I, I don't love labels for kids that they can't shake.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  Yes. So then tell me, as we grow up and we become full-blown adults with our own self-esteem and our own jobs and our own podcasts, why does the crap that happens in teenagehood seem to uniquely affect us? Why did, when you just said, I'm just joking, I'm just joking, why did this have this visceral reaction in me? What, what's going on there?

• 40:16Speaker 00

  I think it is the heightened emotionality of adolescence.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 40:21Speaker 00

  Right? That, um, that things leave a mark in a different kind of way.

• 40:28Speaker 00

  And what's interesting is the highs are higher and the lows are lower.

• 40:35Speaker 00

  So, you know, it's very funny, and I don't know what was going on, I don't think it involved a boy, but there's this old, like, Boys of Summer song by, like, Don Henley, maybe, or something? And I know it came on when I was upset once when I was an adolescent, I don't know what I was upset about, I hate the song. I still hate the song.

• 40:54Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 40:55Speaker 00

  And same thing, like, it just takes me back to this very vivid experience of being distressed. And I think it's just the vividness of that distress

• 41:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 41:03Speaker 00

  that is so unique.

• 41:07Speaker 00

  The flip of it is, you know, Colorado is beautiful. Like where I grew up was so beautiful. And I did have this $900 Volkswagen diesel that I bought from working as a bus girl. And like, my favorite thing in adolescence was to put the windows down, to be driving in the beauty of Colorado and like playing music. And, you know, like listening to a song. And like, I, like, that was like a transporting experience for me. And like, that, I cannot recapture that in, you know, in middle age.

• 41:42Speaker 01

  I was reading about this study the other day where they asked a bunch of 70-year-olds, they gave them some words and said, just tell me any memory that this word inspires in you. And then later said, what years of your life did these memories come from? And the more recent times, they got a lot of memories, but then there was this bump in teenagehood and early, in our early 20s.

• 42:05Speaker 00

  That makes sense.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  This reminiscent bump. Um, okay, so, so Lisa, on this point of the power of teenagers, I got bullied by some teenagers the other day. I want to tell you the story and then I want you to psychoanalyze me, please. Um, so, so I was at a lake and there was some teenagers there. And one of the teenagers was throwing rocks at the ducks, aiming for the ducks.

• 42:36Speaker 00

  Cool.

• 42:37Speaker 01

  And the other teenagers around him said, don't throw rocks at the ducks. So I was like, great, I can, I don't need to do anything here. But then the kid hits a duck. And I said, tried to be, hey, right? I said, come on, don't throw rocks at the ducks. And he, and he went, I wasn't. I said, yeah, you were. And then he sort of had a smile. We had an arrangement, no more throwing rocks at ducks. But then, Lisa, the other kids, they turned on me and they started going, uh, don't throw rocks at the ducks, don't throw. And then they sat, and then I was there, so aware of my body and what I was saying. And then I kept talking to my friend as if I didn't care what the teenagers thought of me.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  And then everything that came out of my mouth, they'd be like, uh, uh, uh. They were bullying me and I didn't like it. And if they were grownups, I would have told them where to stick it. But because they were teenagers, something inside me still wanted them to like me. And I'm embarrassed. Why did they, why did any of that happen? Why was I scared of the teenagers?

• 43:43Speaker 00

  I'm sorry, it happened. You did the right thing. They knew you were doing the right thing. I promise you that they knew, they knew full well that you were on the right side of this. What was happening, I swear, in that moment, I am sure, is they were protecting their friend.

• 44:02Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 44:03Speaker 00

  That their friend was appropriately maybe feeling a bit of shame and humiliation about being called out for doing something that was out of line.

• 44:15Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 44:16Speaker 00

  And in, I really mean this, I'm not trying to sugarcoat this, and I think what was an effort at a loving and protective gesture towards their friend, they sided with him and made you the bad guy.

• 44:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:32Speaker 00

  And, um, it's, I, you know, they don't care. You're not, you were a bystander to this. Like, it wasn't really about you. It was about you calling him out appropriately.

• 44:47Speaker 01

  Which is, I mean, I like that for them. I like that tribalness for them. And then, you know, there is a lot of concern these days that, about teenagers, about kids, you know, with social media and the mental health crisis, body image issues. Yet on some level, and I've heard you talk about this, kids are healthier than ever before. You know, they're having less sex, which, you know, I guess you could think about in many ways, but the teenage birth rates are falling.

• 45:16Speaker 00

  Plummeting.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  They're smoking less, vaping more, but still, are you worried about the kids these days?

• 45:25Speaker 00

  I mean, yeah, because it's my job to worry about them.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  What do you?

• 45:31Speaker 00

  But I think one of the worries I have is this sort of presiding stereotype right now we have, that they are fragile, that they are damaged, right? I mean, I think there are certainly kids who suffer and we're seeing numbers that are higher than they have been in the past. On the whole, teenagers are great and they're doing great and they're thriving and they're forward looking. I mean, I think that that story doesn't get told. Or I had, I had the best opportunity, a couple of years ago, I was given a Gallup poll. Gallup is a big polling company here in the US that I could use for anything I wanted. So I asked teenagers a whole bunch of feeling, questions about their feelings. And one of the questions I asked was, what did you feel a lot of yesterday?

• 46:15Speaker 00

  And I don't have the numbers in front of me yet, but these are very close approximates. But like, you know, like 43% said I felt anxious and 32% said I felt stressed and like 23% said they felt sad and 23% said they felt angry. 94% said they felt happy also.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 46:32Speaker 00

  So, you know, if you add those numbers up, it's way more than 100, right? So that, yes, they are anxious and side by side with that, the overwhelming majority of kids said, I also felt happy yesterday. So I think we tend to report the elevated numbers in terms of distress.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:52Speaker 00

  And we tend to focus on kids who are having very significant problems, which we should, right? If we're going to focus on anybody, we want to focus on the kids who are really struggling. Those are the stories that we should tell and pay attention to.

• 47:03Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 47:04Speaker 00

  But that can come at the cost of looking at a bigger picture, which is, this is the best behaved generation of kids we've ever had.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 47:14Speaker 00

  Also, lower drug use, they use way fewer drugs than their parents' generation did. Some of that may be that they don't go out as much. Some of the sexual findings may be because kids can have a pretty steamy relationship without leaving their house, just using their phone, right? I mean, so, you know, there's, it's not all upside, but especially like the drug numbers and the pregnancy numbers, I'm like, having cared for young people who have had bad, bad drug outcomes or dealt with early pregnancies, like, having those numbers drop is great, right? And like, we can poke holes in it a little bit, but like, on whole, like, I'm, I'm pretty psyched about that.

• 47:57Speaker 01

  So what does worry you about this generation coming up, the teens?

• 48:03Speaker 00

  So, I do worry that we're kind of behind the, like, we sort of are walking back technology now. Like, it got out ahead of us.

• 48:16Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 48:18Speaker 00

  You know, we, there's been a wonderful, and I fully, you know, fully supported movement to get phones out of the school day. I think it's a great idea. There's no reason for kids to have phones during their school day. But like, we didn't get our hands around that early, right? We've, that's something that we're sort of trying to put that horse back in the barn.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I feel like your kids were actually the generation that was caught in the middle, right? You've got teenage kids now.

• 48:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's right. I have a 22-year-old and a 15-year-old, right? So like, you know, my 15-year-old does not have phones in the school, but my 22-year-old did, right? When she was coming up through middle and high school. So that was unfortunate and I worry about that. I think there's other norms that we should establish that should have been established early. Like, I don't really think kids need tech in their bedrooms, right? Maybe to do their homework, but there's no upside to it and there's a lot of downsides for kids having tech in their bedrooms, kind of ever, but definitely overnight, right? So we're working to sort of establish norms about where these things go and where they belong and how big a part of kids' lives they should be. But we're walking stuff back, right? And we, we didn't do that right for a whole bunch of kids. I worry about that.

• 49:26Speaker 00

  I also think kids are asking questions adults really are having a hard time answering these days. Questions about the climate, questions about what AI means for their futures as workers, as thinkers, the value of their education. I don't know that there's ever been a time, generationally, where the kid's experience of growing up was so different from the parent's experience of growing up. I don't think there's ever been a time, generationally, where the child's future looks so different from what the parent remembered their own future looking forward to.

• 50:07Speaker 00

  So I think it's a tough time in that kids have really fair questions about what's ahead for them that adults are actually struggling to find.

• 50:19Speaker 01

  When we, I think about sort of charting the concerns we've had for the teens, for the teens, first it was a lot of worry about girls, now it's switched, I think, to boys and concerns around toxic masculinity. What is your one tip, you would say, to parents raising young boys right now?

• 50:42Speaker 00

  I think we want to not assume that boys are doing just fine. When boys suffer, they tend to display their suffering through acting out, or being irritable, or getting themselves in trouble. And we don't ask questions about that. Or if we ask about it, we see it as a disciplinary issue as opposed to an emotional issue. So I still worry about girls, but I think we're having, there's a lot of evidence that boys are struggling with, you know, questions about what it means to be a man, how to think about what's ahead for themselves. A lot more body image questions are coming up for boys. There's a lot of content online around masculinity, low body fat. You know, these kids are being offered

• 51:27Speaker 00

  and, you know, like advertised all of these supplements, all of this stuff from all over, right? So there's, there's no reason to think, unfortunately, that anyone's getting off easy here. And we don't want to assume that just because a boy's acting in a way that may be off-putting to adults, that he's just being naughty, right? We should, we should take that as evidence that he's struggling in one way or another.

• 51:51Speaker 01

  I loved in your book, you pointed out that one really important thing to do is to have male adults in their life talk about their emotions. Why is that important?

• 52:02Speaker 00

  We know that by about age eight or nine, if not earlier, boys start to, you know, many boys, not all boys, but start to sort of consolidate the sense of being a boy and masculine and wanting to be masculine. And at that, around that time, they tend to associate it with like not being like a girl. That's sort of their definition.

• 52:23Speaker 01

  The strongest definition of being a man is not a girl.

• 52:28Speaker 00

  Not being like a girl. Exactly, right? That that sort of becomes the organizing force.

• 52:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:33Speaker 00

  And they start to associate talking about feelings as a gruel thing, right? That they'll sort of be like, girls do that, girls talk about feelings like guys don't, real guys don't. And one of the things, so there's that piece of information, so there's that data point. Another data point is in two parent heterosexual homes, the person most likely to talk about feelings is the mother, right? Because of socialization, like women are socialized to talk more fluidly about their feelings. And so, you know, if you put these two data points together, a boy who's decided like the most important thing, you know, in the world is to not be like a girl, and then goes home, and the only person who's really doing a whole lot of feelings talk is their mother, it confirms their assumption that like, oh, talking about feelings is for girls.

• 53:18Speaker 00

  And now we're off to the races of masculinity does not necessarily include talking freely about one's feelings. So the one solution, I'm sure there's others, is, uh, uh, uh, the men in boys' lives, be it their fathers, or their coaches, or their teachers, or their uncles, or their priests, or whoever, need to talk about their own emotions, need to be curious about the boy's emotion. So this idea that feelings are for girls doesn't actually get reinforced at home.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  So you have a, you have a podcast called Ask Lisa.

• 53:53Speaker 00

  I do, it's called Ask Lisa, The Psychology of Raising Tweens and Teens. And every week, we just go through a letter from a family, a real letter, about one of the challenges that teenagers face, or their families face, and just unpack it and.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  What's been your most memorable or surprising question recently?

• 54:12Speaker 00

  Um, you know, we're getting a lot about gambling. There's a lot in the US, online gambling has been made legal. And unsurprisingly, because they like novelty, a lot of teenagers are gambling.

• 54:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:25Speaker 00

  And so this has become a big issue. And one again, it's gotten out ahead of us, and we need to find a way to reel it back in.

• 54:31Speaker 01

  What's your tips?

• 54:34Speaker 00

  My tips are, you need to talk to kids about it, and need to help them understand the science of why gambling is addictive, you know, that it's really designed to plug into our reward systems. It's designed to make us feel not like we lost, but like we almost won, and you want to keep going. But it needs to be a conversation.

• 54:53Speaker 01

  Gosh, it never ends, doesn't it? We're worried about social media, and then sports betting pops up.

• 54:58Speaker 00

  Yep, yep, no, I have a great job. There's always something new.

• 55:03Speaker 01

  All right, to cap this off, Lisa, thank you so much for your time and your wisdom. We're going to have a lightning round of oddball questions. What was your favorite title to a scientific paper that you read while researching this book?

• 55:21Speaker 00

  It's such a funny paper. It's an old psychoanalytic paper from the 70s, and the title is Nagging, Spreading Excitement and Arguing. And it's about, I mean, it's like the language of it is very old school psychoanalytic theory, but the, the resonant ongoing value of the paper is this idea that like, sometimes when kids are stirred up on the inside, they just stir stuff up on the outside.

• 55:45Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. All right, finish this sentence. Now that I know blank, I'll never look at blank the same way again.

• 55:52Speaker 00

  Now that I know the neurological basis of why breathing calms anxiety, I will never look at my accelerated heart rate and my, my breathing the same way again.

• 56:07Speaker 01

  Oh my, tell me more.

• 56:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I, whenever, like, whenever somebody be like, oh, you know, a really good solution for anxiety is breathing, I would be like, oh, like I'd roll my eyes, I'd be like, that is like some woo-woo, you know, like not scientific stuff. But then, when I was researching the book before The Emotional Lives of Teenagers, it was a book called Under Pressure, I came across this research paper about how our lungs have stretch receptors on the surface of our lungs that are there to make sure that we're breathing, and they alert, they alert our brain if we're suffocating or not breathing well. So if we have a strong anxiety response, our amygdala, the ancient part of our brain, accelerates our breathing and picks up our heart rate to get more oxygenated blood out to our muscles.

• 56:52Speaker 00

  When we engage in deep breathing, we override that, and we basically hack into the nervous system on the lungs and send it the message, okay, now we're breathing deeply and slowly. Those nerves recognize that as evidence of safety, and they send a message up to the brain saying, you can turn off the anxiety alarm because we're breathing deeply and slowly, that means we're safe again.

• 57:15Speaker 01

  Wow. All right, last question. What is the funnest object sitting in your house right now?

• 57:21Speaker 00

  So it's not an object, but it is my 15-year-old daughter. I have a very fun 22-year-old daughter, but she's not, she's at college. My 15-year-old is the funniest person I have ever met. She, I'll give you, this, like, all day, it's like living with a comedian. Here's, this was her yesterday. She was at school, and for some reason, I think they had a substitute teacher, so they were all in class taking like written driving tests, like they were just trying them out. And she's almost 15 and a half, so she will soon be able to get a driver's permit. And she's like, yeah, I took a written driver's test today. I was like, how'd it go? She's like, it is clear that I'm probably not safe to even be a passenger in somebody's car. She was like, my, my understanding of driving seems to be that of a Dickensian urchin who has never seen a car.

• 58:06Speaker 00

  Right, like, this is my kid all day. She is so funny. She is an absolute riot. She was talking about that she and her friends were looking for a gift for a teacher who she's been complaining about. And I was like, oh, I thought you weren't so keen on that teacher. She goes, yeah, no, no, it's sort of a mix of pity and Stockholm syndrome. We're going to look for a gift for this guy. I mean, like, no, she is like, I'm like, trying to convince her not to go to college because I'm enjoying her so much.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  That is so lovely. What a wonderful way to.

• 58:36Speaker 00

  She's very funny.

• 58:37Speaker 01

  What a wonderful way to finish off our chat about the teenage brain. Thank you so much, Lisa. I, yeah, I really, really appreciate your time.

• 58:45Speaker 00

  Thank you for having me. This has been great.

• 58:48Speaker 01

  That was the fabulous Dr. Lisa Demore. Her latest book is The Emotional Lives of Teenagers, and her podcast is called Ask Lisa, The Psychology of Raising Tweens and Teens. Go check it out. I'm Wendy Zukerman, back to you next time.

• 59:32Speaker 04

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash apple watch series 12.

• 1:00:02Speaker 05

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way. Because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claud.ai slash Spotify and keep thinking. That's claud.ai slash Spotify.