Diary of a teenage brain

What's going on in teens' heads? Scientists working on a country-wide study following thousands of young people have spent the last decade trying to answer that question. Guests: Raul Gonzalez Jr., psychology professor at Florida International University This series was made possible by support from the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Vox had full discretion over the content of this reporting. For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠⁠ We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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  I'm Anna Garten, and each week on Happy Hour, I invite new and old friends for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. On this week's episode, I'm joined by Chloe Mal. We talk all about her taking on the top job at Vogue, finding her personal style, and her favorite lunch order in the iconic Conde Nast cafeteria. New episodes of Happy Hour are available every Wednesday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Cheers.

• 1:41Speaker 00

  All right, Julia. Julia Longoria, co-host of Unexplainable.

• 1:45Speaker 02

  Byrd Pinkerton, here we are.

• 1:47Speaker 00

  Here we are.

• 1:48Speaker 02

  At the doorstep of my maternity leave. Literally, it begins tomorrow.

• 1:54Speaker 00

  But before you go, you have one last story to tell me.

• 1:58Speaker 02

  One last story. Yes, and appropriately, it's about the youths. Come on. Hi. Nice to meet you. I'm Julia. This is a part of our team. So I went to the FIU, the Florida International University's Center for Children and Families. And I met with a researcher named Raul Gonzalez.

• 2:22Speaker 02

  These days, when I meet people in person, I am a real conversation starter.

• 2:27Speaker 03

  I know, I'm like really pregnant. I'm very pregnant.

• 2:30Speaker 04

  You do not look

• 2:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:32Speaker 04

  at the stage that you're at.

• 2:34Speaker 03

  But I actually am.

• 2:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, from what you told.

• 2:36Speaker 03

  Say it again, keep telling me.

• 2:37Speaker 04

  It is true, it is true.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  So yeah, I was immediately a fan of Raul Gonzalez. He could tell me I don't look that pregnant all day long. What is he research? So he is the head of the Miami chapter of a really fascinating national study about teen brains.

• 2:56Speaker 04

  I'm a professor of psychology, psychiatry and immunology. And my area of research over the last 20-plus years has focused on risk factors and consequences for drug use and addiction. And for the last little over 10 years, my life has been fully dedicated to the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study.

• 3:18Speaker 02

  The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, A B C D for short. Have you ever seen the movie Boyhood? So it starts with a child actor and they film the same boy as he's growing up over the years. Sure. Yeah, the A B C D study is the boyhood of adolescent brain studies. They followed the same cohort of nearly 12,000 kids across the US for almost a decade. The A B C D kids that Raul's been following are now entering college. Wow. So the A B C D study was first born when the NIH asked an age-old question. Are the kids all right?

• 4:01Speaker 02

  Or more specifically, if they end up being not all right, why? What are the risk factors that lead to substance abuse? This was a question that Raul was studying in his little corner of the field. But it was tricky. Sample sizes were small.

• 4:18Speaker 04

  There was this recognition that to really move the field forward and understand what is a risk factor as compared to a consequence of substance use, we really needed to start with a huge study. That started with adolescents before they started experimenting or using drugs.

• 4:38Speaker 02

  So when he heard there was going to be a national study following thousands of kids across the country over the course of their entire childhoods, he was in.

• 4:48Speaker 04

  It was going to be the study that anybody would ever want to do, but nobody would ever have the resources to do.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  Raul became the head of the Florida site, one of 21 sites across the nation. They recruited kids at around age nine. And over time, they'd take MRIs of their brains and ask all kinds of questions to kids and their parents about their lives.

• 5:13Speaker 04

  We can get a really great understanding of who they are, what their life is like, from how their brain works to what's their family situation like, their personality, mental health assessments.

• 5:26Speaker 02

  They're also looking at brain shapes.

• 5:28Speaker 04

  Neuroimaging data, brain structure, but also brain function. We have them do tasks while they're in the scanner to see how their brain is functioning as they're trying to solve problems.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  It also collects urine samples, hair samples.

• 5:43Speaker 04

  Talking about things we collect, you know, we also collect baby teeth.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  Really?

• 5:46Speaker 04

  Yes, sounds kind of gross and weird, right? To have a baby teeth collection. But baby teeth are really cool because they're like the barks of a tree. And they can tell us about exposure to all sorts of heavy metals and toxins from birth.

• 6:02Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 6:03Speaker 04

  We have genetics. We look at all sorts of different stress hormones. I mean, we can't get everything, but we try.

• 6:11Speaker 02

  Basically, this study was going to be an adolescent data treasure trove to end all treasure troves.

• 6:18Speaker 04

  We covered so many things that we thought were important as risk factors for substance use and addiction.

• 6:25Speaker 02

  So was that the main impetus is like, is substance use and addiction was the kind of...

• 6:30Speaker 04

  That's how it started, Julia, but it's been a wonderful slippery slope.

• 6:34Speaker 02

  Once word got out to the field of adolescent brain research that the NIH was going to collect data from a huge national dataset over the course of years, other researchers, not just substance abuse researchers, wanted in on it.

• 6:50Speaker 04

  More folks started wanting to chip in and add additional things to the protocol.

• 6:55Speaker 02

  Wanting to ask more questions and collect more data.

• 6:58Speaker 04

  We've been contributing to areas of sleep and mental health, screen time and mental health, physical activity and its role, risk factors for obesity. What is typical brain development in youth and adolescents? We don't know.

• 7:20Speaker 00

  All right, let's pause here for a second. This is Bird, by the way, because Julia is out on her maternity leave now. But when she first told me about this study, it kind of boggled my mind. The idea that there has been this enormous science experiment running for a decade to figure out what's going on inside teens' heads is kind of amazing to me. I feel like people have been trying to figure out teens for a long time.

• 7:49Speaker 05

  Why can't he act his age?

• 7:50Speaker 00

  With limited success.

• 7:52Speaker 05

  In years, they're young men. But sometimes, in their behavior... They act like children? That's it.

• 8:02Speaker 00

  And so I wanted to know more about what these ABCD researchers were finding. But I also wanted to understand how it all works. Because I couldn't help but think that, sure, teens can be the coolest and most articulate people you've ever met in your life. But they can also clam up completely, right, and tell you absolutely nothing. Like, it is sometimes hard to even get a teen to show up to something to begin with, as Julia, in fact, experienced.

• 8:33Speaker 02

  OK, I am sitting in my car.

• 8:36Speaker 00

  After she met Raul, Julia wanted to meet with one of the teens in the study.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  It is 1:10 PM on a Monday. And this teen told me that she would be here between 12:30 and 1:00. So...

• 8:53Speaker 02

  Maybe I'm getting a text message. What's that interference?

• 8:58Speaker 02

  Nope, that's not her.

• 9:00Speaker 00

  Listening to Julia waiting in her car, it really did make me wonder, how do you get 10,000 or so kids to show up and answer questions or get their brains scanned year after year? How do you get them to talk to you about their lives honestly?

• 9:19Speaker 02

  Still waiting.

• 9:22Speaker 00

  Fortunately, the teen did arrive and Julia did get some answers to these questions. But we are going to have to wait just a little bit longer to hear them. Approximately the length of an ad break.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  Teenagers, am I right?

• 9:45Speaker 00

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• 13:10Speaker 05

  Why doesn't he grow up? Why does he still behave as a child?

• 13:16Speaker 03

  So, my name is Brianna. I am an artist and I've been doing art since I was eight years old.

• 13:21Speaker 02

  Brianna is 18 years old. She has dark eyes, dark, long, black hair. She's wearing a FIU t-shirt where she'll be enrolling next semester to study art.

• 13:32Speaker 03

  I like to do painting, drawing, sometimes sculpting here and there, but I mostly work with material called gouache. And yeah, yeah, I like to draw cars.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  Her dream is to someday design cars for a luxury car brand.

• 13:46Speaker 03

  But also, I would like to also work with more affordable brands for cars. So more people that don't have the luxurious money can also buy those cars that I created. Yeah.

• 13:58Speaker 02

  To make things easy, we met at her future alma mater, FIU, in the very same office where the ABCD study takes place. It feels a lot like a doctor's office. A little lobby to welcome people, they're playing soft jazz. There's a maze of rooms that feel like doctor exam rooms, some with a bunch of chairs set up for interviews. There are snacks like mac and cheese and goldfish, stickers for prizes you can win. She remembers the original reason she joined the study was not exactly her choice at first. It was her mom's.

• 14:31Speaker 03

  My mom was really intrigued by it, how like she was intrigued by the concept of seeing my brain develop and like, you know, like how the adolescence develop. And so she signed me up for it.

• 14:43Speaker 02

  She mostly remembers her mom coming home with a folder full of pamphlets. And then she ended up here, in this office.

• 14:50Speaker 03

  But the first session, I came here and they explained to me, to a fifth grader, which was honestly really great experience. And I really continued with it because my mom, like, she wouldn't force something upon me, like it's something with my choice as well.

• 15:03Speaker 02

  As a nine-year-old, she remembers she liked the idea of learning about her own brain. She wasn't thrilled about the idea of the MRI at first.

• 15:12Speaker 03

  I was just scared of like the feeling of not having to move because in the MRI, you can't really move, so you have to stay still.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  But she was into the idea of winning some money. Participants do get compensated and kids would win prizes. So she was in. One of the main things that sticks out in her memory are the games they played on the iPad. Like a memory game she played once. Or one that Raul had mentioned to me. He said these games are meant to help researchers assess how much different kids are willing to take big risks with prizes on the line.

• 15:48Speaker 04

  There is visuals and you're clicking on things and you're picking this versus that. And sometimes you pick here and you win some money and sometimes you lose some money. So it draws for sort of this reward-seeking behavior.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  Is it sort of like you're taking the preteens to the version of the casino?

• 16:04Speaker 04

  You know, pretty much.

• 16:07Speaker 03

  I remember one time I won like $35, which was a lot. And I think the maximum that you could have won was like 40, so I was pretty happy.

• 16:16Speaker 02

  This brings us back to the original purpose of the study. The researchers wanted to assess risk-taking behavior of youths to see if there were risk factors that might lead to substance abuse down the road.

• 16:31Speaker 02

  I was wondering if Brianna had gotten any hints that the researchers were trying to suss out if she'd made any questionable choices. She told me they've asked her a lot of different kinds of questions over the last 10 or so years.

• 16:45Speaker 03

  Personal questions and also general questions about like what I eat.

• 16:49Speaker 02

  How much she sleeps.

• 16:50Speaker 03

  How many times do you drink caffeine?

• 16:52Speaker 02

  How much does she exercise?

• 16:53Speaker 03

  How many times I go to school, how many times I use my phone? How many hours of the week do I use my phone?

• 16:59Speaker 02

  What does she use her phone for? And as she got older and it got more appropriate, they also started asking other questions.

• 17:10Speaker 03

  So they'd ask me like, oh, do you have a boyfriend? How long have you guys been together?

• 17:15Speaker 02

  She told me the most surprising question she got came early on.

• 17:20Speaker 03

  They asked me if I smoked once and I was like, I'm nine.

• 17:24Speaker 02

  And as she got older.

• 17:26Speaker 03

  They went more in depth of the drugs. So like different types of drugs, like edibles. And so they went more in depth of those, fentanyl and all of that.

• 17:37Speaker 02

  In-depth how, like what were they asking?

• 17:40Speaker 03

  I don't remember the names. It's like, it's like really like, like really intricate names of the different types of drugs.

• 17:46Speaker 02

  Asking you if you had done them?

• 17:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:49Speaker 02

  Or if you'd heard of them or?

• 17:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Or if I've done any of them. It was mostly that.

• 17:58Speaker 02

  This line of questioning was really fascinating to me. Because, sure, these kids are told all their answers are going to be confidential, unless they say something concerning about endangering themselves or others. But still, what teen is going to willingly admit to doing drugs to an adult on the record? Brianna told me she does not and has not done any drugs, and I do believe her.

• 18:27Speaker 03

  Nothing serious with alcohol or drugs or anything like that. I know my parents saw me well to not play with that, and so I've always respected that.

• 18:34Speaker 02

  Do you think if you were smoking, you would have told the truth?

• 18:40Speaker 03

  Honestly, I don't know. It depends if I would tell my mom or not. If I didn't tell her, then I wouldn't say the truth. But if I did, then yeah, I would have said it. But yeah, no.

• 18:51Speaker 02

  Didn't this seem like a real flaw in the study? I posed that question to Raul.

• 18:56Speaker 04

  That is a great question, and I actually have some answers for this.

• 19:00Speaker 02

  Yeah?

• 19:01Speaker 04

  You can sink your teeth in.

• 19:02Speaker 02

  OK, cool.

• 19:03Speaker 04

  Do we have evidence that everybody's telling us the truth? We have evidence that everybody is not telling us the truth. And that's not unique to this particular study. But we have some things to try to assess, measure, and control for this. So a subset of our -- we collect hair samples from all our participants, that we're able to collect hair samples from. There's money to sample some of them. So we do hair toxicology testing for presence of drugs in the hair, which is a very reliable way, and it can capture it quite a while back. About 10% of our participants have had positive hair toxicology results, but reported no use.

• 19:45Speaker 02

  10% are liars.

• 19:46Speaker 04

  It's -- you know, or they may be waiting to tell us the truth, right?

• 19:51Speaker 02

  That's a nice way to put it.

• 19:57Speaker 00

  All right, bird again. So the answer to the question, how do you get answers from teens? Is you ask them questions, but you also test their hair. You have them play games with some prize money on the line. You scan their brains to see if there are any answers hiding out in there, right? The next thing I wanted to know, though, was what researchers working on this giant science experiment had actually figured out? It turns out, a fair amount. There have been over 1,400 papers published so far on teens' relationship to caffeine and sleep and gaming, on the effects of family conflict and puberty timing, all kinds of

• 20:42Speaker 00

  interesting stuff. I called Raul to learn a little bit more about his part of things, so the questions of drug use and addiction. And he says, they're still waiting on some of the most interesting data, because the kids are in their late teens now, so 18, 19, 20. But it'll take a while for the data from their current lives to be cleaned up and ready to use. So he told me that researchers have spent their time so far looking at the data coming in from the kids when they were tweens and early teens, up to about 16 or so.

• 21:15Speaker 04

  That's why a lot of the studies now, because of their age, are focusing on sipping, alcohol sipping behavior, vaping, puffs.

• 21:25Speaker 00

  Stuff that's not heavy substance use, but more like testing the waters. Researchers working with ABCD study data can now look through everything that's been collected and see what might make someone more likely to have tried a substance. So, for example, some researchers looked at data from ABCD study 12-year-olds.

• 21:46Speaker 04

  Social demographic variables, psychosocial variables, things like religion, race, ethnicity, income, peer factors, parent factors, the family environment, hormones, cognitive functioning, and then also structural brain imaging.

• 22:03Speaker 00

  And what they found, in this study at least, was that the psychosocial factors and the kind of family variables We're better or like more useful predictors of trying substances than the brain structure stuff.

• 22:17Speaker 04

  Not that the neuroimaging is meaningless or we're not learning more about the brain and how it works, but its explanatory value in predicting future behavior is not as strong as some other factors that we're measuring.

• 22:32Speaker 00

  Now, another study did find that brain function scans might be more useful for predicting early substance use. But all brain scans aside, if you're thinking, is it a big deal to try a substance? It's a fair question, right? Raul is not saying that trying a single puff of weed or a single sip of beer, or even a whole beer, is going to doom you to a life of substance abuse.

• 23:01Speaker 04

  Oh, no, absolutely not. Most people who have a full drink do not develop an alcohol use disorder. The vast majority of people that smoke, adjoin, or consume cannabis do not develop a cannabis use disorder.

• 23:18Speaker 00

  But this data about early substance use should be helpful to the researchers when they finally get their eyes on the data they're collecting now from older teenagers. This period is when Raul says we tend to see more heavy drug use start and more problems with drug use.

• 23:35Speaker 04

  Folks are starting to become independent. They're starting to start their own lives. So being able to continue following the youth into their 20s and seeing where they go, what they do, how they're functioning in the real world once the training wheels, you know, come off is going to be incredibly valuable data.

• 23:57Speaker 00

  Raul's hope here is that if they comb through enough variables, enough brain scans and genetic data points and questions about sleep, basically if they do a good enough job of peering into kids' heads, then down the line, it could lead to a kind of roadmap for navigating the risky behaviors that so many teens engage in. A map that could help them see where teens tend to take wrong turns so they can help figure out what interventions might be effective.

• 24:27Speaker 00

  Like, let's say that the study had some kids who had very similar lives, right? They had a similar friend network, similar background. But some of them slept six hours a night and some of them slept eight hours a night. If the data showed that the kids who slept more tended to have fewer problems with alcohol, then maybe for kids with this kind of profile, getting more sleep could be an effective intervention.

• 24:54Speaker 04

  That's exactly right. And we can even go one step further. We could then even say, what were some of the things that are contributing to poor sleep? We might find that more screen time, less physical activity. We can start working our way backwards to try to disentangle the associations among these variables.

• 25:10Speaker 00

  Again, at the end of the day, the hope for Raul and his colleagues is that what they've learned from the ABCD study will help teens out in the world.

• 25:22Speaker 00

  In his conversations with Julia, though, Raul mentioned that he has a personal stake in trying to understand the teenage brain.

• 25:29Speaker 02

  You have a 16-year-old.

• 25:31Speaker 04

  I do.

• 25:32Speaker 02

  How is that going?

• 25:34Speaker 04

  I'm loving it. I feel like I hit the jackpot with her. She's got great judgment, but she's a teenager. And I see her now approaching all of these things that we often, as adults, refer to as risky behaviors.

• 25:47Speaker 00

  Stuff that he might want to steer her clear of, but stuff that also might be fine, or at least normal.

• 25:54Speaker 04

  Meaning that

• 25:56Speaker 04

  a significant proportion, if not half, or maybe even more than half of other teens also engage in similar behaviors.

• 26:05Speaker 00

  How much should Raul worry if his teenager tries a sip of alcohol? Right? Or even a whole drink? Like, so many parents of so many teens before him, he has to try and figure out what's kind of dumb, but ultimately maybe fine for his daughter to do, and what is too risky and might lead to serious problems for her someday. When I called him up, I asked him if he struggles watching her make potential mistakes.

• 26:33Speaker 04

  Oh, well, yes. I mean, I think I struggle like any parent, but, boy, I sure want her to make plenty of mistakes while I'm still around and I can still kind of catch her before she falls, or let her fall and experience natural consequences from mistakes and learn. Mistakes are opportunities to learn. So I cannot stop my daughter from engaging in risky behaviors. And then also, you know, why would I? Risk is an inherent part of the human condition. What I can do is try to mitigate the risks and hope that in the face of risk, we can still get great outcomes.

• 27:11Speaker 00

  And obviously, she's a few years behind the cohort here, but she's close enough to them that you can't, you know, you don't have all of the data right now that you would hope to have in like a decade.

• 27:24Speaker 04

  And even if I did, Bird, I wouldn't know how to apply it to an individual, right? You know, like, for her specifically, I would have to, that would be the art of parenting, right?

• 27:34Speaker 00

  But you don't, you don't feel like if you waited a decade, you would have like a perfect roadmap or something?

• 27:43Speaker 04

  I think I'd have a better roadmap. I don't know if I'd have a perfect roadmap. There's too much serendipity involved. But I do hope we can get better at understanding these various paths. So there are things, this is good for like general policies, public health, these are things that can move the health of an entire population.

• 28:06Speaker 04

  But then applying some of these group level findings to the individual, you're better off than being uninformed. But it may not work out exactly how it worked out in the paper for the group for that one kid. But now, you know, apply it over thousands of kids and then, you know, it's different.

• 28:27Speaker 00

  And see what happens.

• 28:34Speaker 00

  If you want to learn more about the ABCD study and its findings, we will link to their website in the transcript. If you want to learn more about developing brains, stick around because this is actually the first in a two-episode series about teen brains. This week, we talked about what we're learning about teen brains. Next week, we'll talk about what we might learn from them. Until then, this episode was reported by Julia Longoria with some help from me, Byrd Pinkerton, and it was produced by Julia and by me. Julia, we're all sending our love to both you and your baby. This episode was edited by Sarah Kate Kramer.

• 29:14Speaker 00

  Jorge Just, Joanna Solotaroff, and Meredith Hodnot helped keep this project running smoothly with all kinds of guidance, and Joanna is running the show. Christian Ayala did the mixing and the sound design. Noam Hassenfeld wrote the music. Kim Slaughterback checked our facts. Sally Helm and Amy Padula are the fact that some birds can see ultraviolet light. And I am always, always, always grateful to Brian Resnick for co-founding the show with me and with Noam. Thanks also this week to Bator Turani for his time, and this series was made possible by support from the Annie E. Casey Foundation. If you have thoughts about this episode, if you've got thoughts about teen brains,

• 29:55Speaker 00

  say, or if you're participating in a longitudinal study that you think we should know about, please don't hesitate to reach out at [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you. If you'd like to support the show and the journalism that Vox does, we would love it if you would become a member. This holiday season, your membership actually goes further. When you join Vox as an annual member, we will gift a complimentary membership to a reader facing financial barriers. You can read more about all of this at vox.com/members. If you can't join our membership for whatever reason, it would also mean a lot if you would leave us a nice review on your podcast platform, five stars, or a written review, that'd be

• 30:40Speaker 00

  nice, too, or just tell someone in your life that they might want to listen to the show. Those things make a real difference. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we will be back on Wednesday with another episode about teen brains.