Support for this show comes from the Working Forests initiative. The Working Forest industry is committed to planting more trees than they harvest. More than 1 billion seedlings are planted in US working forests every year. From biologists to GIS analysts, hiring managers, accountants, working forest professionals have dedicated their focus towards sustainability, using their expertise to help ensure a healthy future for America's forests. They say they don't just plan for the future. They plant it. You can learn more at Working ForestsInitiative.com. Julia Lungoria, co-host of Unexplainable. Bird Pinkerton. Here we are. Here we are. At the doorstep of my maternity leave, literally, it begins tomorrow. Before you go, one last story. One last story. Yes. And appropriately, it's about the youths. Come on. Hi. Nice to meet you. I'm Julia. This is all part of our team. Hi. So I went to the FIU, the Florida International University Center for Children and Families. I met with a researcher named Raul Gonzalez. These days when I meet people in person, I am a real conversation starter. I know. I'm like, really pregnant. I'm very pregnant. You do not look at the stage that you're at the end. You're, yeah, from what you told me. No, it is true. It is true. It is true. 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. 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. The adolescent brain cognitive development study, ABCD for short. I've 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. Yeah, the ABCD 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 ABCD kids that Raul has been following are now entering college. So the ABCD study was first born when the NIH asked an age old question, are the kids all right? 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. It was tricky. Sample sizes were small. 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. 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 wasn't. It was going to be the study that anybody would ever want to do, but nobody would ever have the resources to do. 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. 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. They're also looking at brain shapes, 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. It also collect to urine samples, hair samples. Talking about things we collect, we also collect baby teeth. Really? Yes, sounds kind of gross and weird, right? To have a baby teeth collection, but babies that are really cool because they are like the barks of a tree and they can tell us about exposure to all sorts of heavy metals and toxins from birth. Wow, we have genetics. We look at all sorts of different stress hormones. I mean, we can't get everything, but we try. Basically, this study was going to be an adolescent data treasure trove to end all treasure troves. We covered so many things that we thought were important as risk factors for substance use and addiction. So was that the main impetus is like, is substance use and addiction was the kind of? That's how it started, Julia, but it's been a wonderful slippery slope. Once word got out to the field of adolescent brain research that the NIH was going to collect data from a huge national data set over the course of years, other researchers, not just substance abuse researchers, wanted it on it. More folks started wanting to chip in and add additional things to the protocol. Wanting to ask more questions and collect more data. 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 adolescence? We don't know. 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 once you first told me about this study, it kind of bogged 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. Why can't he act as age? With limited success. In years they're young men, but sometimes in their behavior they act like children. That's it. 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 claim 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. It is really that, in fact, experienced. Okay. I am sitting in my car. After she met Raul, really I wanted to meet with one of the teens in the study. It is 1.10 pm on a Monday and it's teen told me that she would be here between 12.31. So I'm getting a text message with some interference. Nope, that's not her. 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 brain scanned year after year? How do you get them to talk to you about their lives? Honestly, still waiting. 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. Teenagers, am I right? Why doesn't he grow up? Why does he still behave as a child? So my name is Brianna. I am an artist and I've been doing art since I was eight years old. 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. 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. Her dream is to someday design cars for a luxury car brand. 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. To make things easy, we've 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. Do you remember as the original reason she joined the study was not exactly her choice at first. It was her mom's. My mom was really intrigued by it how she was intrigued by the concept of seeing my brain develop and how the adolescents develop. So she sent me up for it. She mostly remembers her mom coming home with a folder full of pamphlets. And then she ended up here in this office. 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 would have forced something upon me like it's something with my choice as well. 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. 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 say so. 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 play. And the iPad, like a memory game she played once or one that Raoul 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. 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. Is it sort of like you're taking the preteens to the, a version of the casino? Pretty much. 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. 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. I was wondering if Brianna had gotten any hints that the researchers were trying to sus 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. Personal questions and also general questions about like what I eat. How much she sleeps. How many times do you drink caffeine? How much does she exercise? How many times I go to school? How many times? How many hours of the week do I use my phone? What does she use her phone for? And as she got older and it got more appropriate, they also started asking other questions. So they'd ask me like, oh, do you have a boyfriend? How long have you guys been together? She told me the most surprising question she got came early on. They asked me if I smoked once and I was like, I'm nine. And as she got older, 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, but in all of that. In depth of how, like what were they asking? I don't remember the names. It's like really like like really intricate names of the different types of drugs that they asking you if you had done them. Yeah, if you'd heard of them or. Yeah, exactly. Or if I've done any of them, it was mostly that. 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 team is going to willingly admit to doing drugs to an adult on the record? Rihanna told me she does not and has not done any drugs. And I do believe her. Nothing serious with like alcohol or drugs or anything like that. I know I'm sorry, well, to not play with that. And so I've always just like that. Do you think if you were smoking, you would have told the truth? Honestly, I don't know if it depends if I would tell my mom or not. If I didn't tell it, then I wouldn't say the truth. But if I did, then yeah, I would have said it. But yeah, no. Didn't this seem like a real flaw in the study? I posed that question to Raul. That is a great question. And I actually have some answers for this. Yeah. Sink your teeth. Okay. Cool. 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 can capture it quite a while back. About 10% of our participants have had positive hair toxicology results, but reported no use. 10% are liars. Or they may be waiting to tell us the truth, right? It's a nice way to put it. 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 1400 papers published so far on teens' relationship to caffeine and sleep, gaming, on the effects of family conflict and puberty timing, all kinds of interesting stuff. I called Raoul 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 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 twins and early teens, up to about 16 or so. That's why a lot of the studies now, because of their age, are focusing on sipping alcohol, sipping behavior, vaping, puffs. 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. 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. And what they found, in this study at least, was that the psychosocial factors and the kind of family variables were better or more useful predictors of trying substances than the brain structure stuff. Not that the newer imaging is meaningless or we're not learning more about the brain and how it works, but it's explanatory value in predicting future behavior is not as strong as some other factors that we're measuring. 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? Rural is not saying that trying a single puff of weed or a single sip of beer or even a whole beer is going to do you to a life of substance abuse? 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 a joint or consume cannabis do not develop a cannabis use disorder. 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 Rural says we tend to see more heavy drug use start and more problems with drug use. 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 come off is going to be incredibly valuable data. Rural'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. 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. 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. Again, at the end of the day, the hope for Rural and his colleagues is that what they've learned from the ABCD study will help teens out in the world. And as conversations with Julia, though, Rural mentioned that he has a personal state in trying to understand the teenage brain. You have a 16 year old that too. How is that going? 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. Stuff that he might want us to hear her clear of, but stuff that also might be fine, or at least normal. Meaning that a significant proportion, if not half, or maybe even more than half of other teens, also engaged in similar behaviors. How much should Rural worry of his teenager tries to 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 someday? When I call them up, I asked him if he struggles watching her make potential mistakes. 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. 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. Oh, no, no, like a decade. And even if I did, bird, I wouldn't know how to apply to an individual, right? You know, like, like for her specifically, I would have to, that would be the art of parenting, right? But you don't, you don't feel like if you rated a decade, you would have like a perfect road map or something to I think I'd have a better road map. I don't know if I'd have a perfect road map. 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. 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, yeah, it's different. And see what happens. 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, Brad Pinkerton, and it was produced by Julia and by me. Julia, we're all sending our love to both you and your VB. This episode was edited by Sarah Kate Kramer, Jorge Just, Joanna Salotarov, and Meredith Hodnot helped keep this project running smoothly, with all kinds of guidance, and Joanna is running the show. Cristinae Ala did the mixing and the sound design. No, I'm Hassan Feld, Ruth Music, Kim Slotterbach, 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 Badar Taroni 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, 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 unexplainableatvox.com. 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 slash 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 nice to, 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.
