Diary of a teenage brain

Summary

Unexplainable – "Diary of a Teenage Brain"

Date: December 8, 2025
Podcast: Unexplainable (Vox)
Host(s): Bird Pinkerton, Julia Longoria
Featured Guest: Dr. Raul Gonzalez, Professor and Head of the Miami site of the ABCD Study
Teen Participant: Briana

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the mysteries of the teenage brain through the lens of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study—one of the largest and most ambitious longitudinal studies following teens across the U.S. The Unexplainable team dives into how the study works, why understanding teens is so difficult (and important), and what early findings are revealing about risk, substance use, and normal adolescence. Woven into the science is the story of Briana, a participant in the ABCD study since childhood, providing a real teen’s perspective.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The ABCD Study: "The Boyhood of Adolescent Brain Studies"

• Origins and Ambition (03:11–04:32)
  • The ABCD Study follows nearly 12,000 U.S. kids from about age 9 for at least a decade, tracking their development through MRIs, cognitive tasks, surveys, and biological samples.
  • Dr. Raul Gonzalez describes the motivation:

    "There was this recognition that to really move the field forward... we really needed to start with a huge study that started with adolescents before they started experimenting or using drugs." (04:11)

  • What began as an initiative to understand substance abuse risk rapidly snowballed as other researchers recognized the value of this comprehensive data set, folding in questions about sleep, mental health, physical activity, screen time, and more (06:51).

The Nuts and Bolts: Collecting Data from Teens

• Making It Work (05:06–06:11)

  • Every year, researchers collect extensive data: MRIs, cognitive tasks, urine/hair/baby teeth samples, surveys, and more, aiming to capture the complex picture of adolescent development.
  • Dr. Gonzalez on the data’s breadth:

    "We covered so many things that we thought were important as risk factors for substance use and addiction." (06:11)

• Getting Teens to Show Up (08:26–09:28)

  • It’s challenging to cajole thousands of teens to consistently participate. Julia recounts the very real struggle of waiting in a car for a late teen participant (08:26).

Inside a Teen’s Experience

• Meet Briana (12:13–14:00)

  • Briana, now 18 and entering FIU as an art student, was signed up for the study by her mother.

    "My mom was really intrigued... by the concept of seeing my brain develop... so she signed me up for it." (13:28)

  • She remembers being taught about the study “to a fifth grader,” and staying involved because it was ultimately her choice.

• Motivations to Participate (14:00–15:03)

  • While initial anxiety centered on MRIs (“I was just scared of... not having to move..."), compensation and games (with cash prizes) became a big draw.
  • Gonzalez describes the risk-seeking games as:

    "Pretty much... [like] you’re taking the preteens to the A version of the casino." (15:02)

• Being Studied: The Questions (15:28–17:23)

  • Over a decade, Briana’s been asked detailed questions about everything from sleep and diet to relationships and increasingly complex substance use.

    "They asked me if I smoked once, and I was like, 'I'm nine.'" (16:17)

  • On honesty: Briana admits if she were hiding something from her mom, she might not tell the truth to researchers either.

The Truth About Teens’ Answers

• Self-Report Limitations & Biological Checks (17:53–18:47)
  • Dr. Gonzalez explains self-report is often inaccurate:

    "Do we have evidence that everybody’s telling us the truth? We have evidence that everybody is not telling us the truth... we collect hair samples... about 10% of our participants have had positive hair toxicology results but reported no use." (18:00–18:42)
    Julia quips:
    "10% are liars." (18:42)

Early Findings from the Data (19:54–23:24)

• What Predicts Early Substance Use? (20:22–21:13)

  • The study has begun releasing data, with over 1,400 papers so far.
  • Initial findings: Psychological, social, and family variables are stronger predictors of experimenting with substances than brain scans alone.

    Dr. Gonzalez: "Its explanatory value in predicting future behavior is not as strong as some other factors that we're measuring now." (21:13)

  • Brain function scans might have more value, but not dramatically so.

• Is Early Experimentation Dangerous? (21:58–22:15)

  • Experimenting (“trying a sip of beer or a puff of weed”) does not doom a teen to addiction—“the vast majority… do not develop a use disorder.” (21:58)

The Hope: A Map of Risk and Intervention

• Using Data for Prevention (22:32–24:07)

  • The ultimate goal: Detect patterns (e.g., does more sleep reduce substance issues in certain teens?) to design interventions and help kids avoid problem trajectories before harm sets in.

  • Gonzalez:

    "We can start working our way backwards to try to disentangle the associations among these variables." (23:50–24:07)

The Human Side: Parenting and Uncertainty

• Dr. Gonzalez as a Parent (24:19–25:30)

  • Gonzalez has a 16-year-old daughter now navigating adolescence:

    "I sure want her to make plenty of mistakes while I’m still around... Mistakes are opportunities to learn." (25:30)

• Limits of Prediction (26:21–27:03)

  • Even with mountains of data, the art of parenting—and luck—still rule individual outcomes:

    "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." (26:40)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the audacity of the ABCD Study:
  "It was going to be the study that anybody would ever want to do, but nobody would ever have the resources to do."
  – Raul Gonzalez (04:41)

• On teens hiding the truth:
  "Do we have evidence that everybody’s telling us the truth? We have evidence that everybody is not telling us the truth... about 10%... have had positive hair toxicology results but reported no use."
  – Raul Gonzalez (18:00–18:42)

• On parenting risk-taking teens:
  "I cannot stop my daughter from engaging in risky behaviors. And then also, 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."
  – Raul Gonzalez (25:30)

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Important Timestamps

• 01:34–03:43 – Introduction to the ABCD study and its scale
• 05:06–06:11 – Explanation of the types of data collected from participants
• 12:13–14:00 – Briana’s introduction as a long-term study participant
• 15:03–15:13 – Briana wins $35 in a risk game; motivation to continue participating
• 17:53–18:47 – Methods for checking the accuracy of teens’ self-reported data
• 20:22–21:13 – Key findings: social factors predict experimentation better than brain scans
• 23:24–24:07 – How data could inform interventions to improve teen health
• 25:30–25:57 – Dr. Gonzalez talks candidly about parenting his own teenager

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Tone & Style

The episode weaves warmth, curiosity, and genuine grappling with scientific and personal uncertainty. Both hosts and guests speak conversationally, candidly, and with humor—never shying away from complexity or admitting the limits of knowledge.

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Conclusion

This episode paints a vivid picture of both the practical and existential challenges in studying adolescents. From massive scientific undertakings and rigorous data collection to the lived, messy complexity of individual teens like Briana, Unexplainable brings listeners into the heart of research—and reveals that while we may never fully "explain" the teenage brain, we're making progress, one data point and one honest conversation at a time.

Transcript

[Sponsor Announcer]

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[Bird Pinkerton]

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

[Julia Longoria]

Pinkerton Here we are. Here we are at the doorstep of my maternity leave. Literally. It begins tomorrow.

[Bird Pinkerton]

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

[Julia Longoria]

One last story. Yes, and appropriately, it's about the youths.

[Raul Gonzalez]

Come on.

[Julia Longoria]

Hi, nice to meet you. I'm Julia.

[Raul Gonzalez]

This is part of our team.

[Julia Longoria]

So I went to the fiu, the Florida International University center for Children and Families.

And 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 am very pregnant.

[Raul Gonzalez]

You do not look at the stage that you're at.

Least keep telling me it is true. It is true.

[Julia Longoria]

So yeah, I was immediately a fan of Raul Gonzalez. He could tell me I don't look that pregnant all day long.

[Bird Pinkerton]

What does he research?

[Julia Longoria]

So he is the head of the Miami chapter of a really fascinating national study about teen brains.

[Raul Gonzalez]

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.

[Julia Longoria]

The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study. ABCD 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 ABCD study is the Boyhood of Adolescent Brain Studies. They've followed the same cohort of nearly 12,000 kids across the US for almost a decade. The ABCD kids that Raul's been following are now entering college.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Wow.

[Julia Longoria]

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 alright, 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.

[Raul Gonzalez]

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.

[Julia Longoria]

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.

[Raul Gonzalez]

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

[Julia Longoria]

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.

[Raul Gonzalez]

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.

[Julia Longoria]

They're also looking at brain shapes, neuroimaging.

[Raul Gonzalez]

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.

[Julia Longoria]

It also collects urine samples, hair samples.

[Raul Gonzalez]

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

[Julia Longoria]

Really?

[Raul Gonzalez]

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.

[Julia Longoria]

Wow.

[Raul Gonzalez]

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

[Julia Longoria]

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

[Raul Gonzalez]

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

[Julia Longoria]

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

[Raul Gonzalez]

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

[Julia Longoria]

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 in on it.

[Raul Gonzalez]

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

[Julia Longoria]

Wanting to ask more questions and collect more data.

[Raul Gonzalez]

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.

[Bird Pinkerton]

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. It's kind of amazing to me. I feel like people have been trying to figure out teens for a long time.

[Unidentified Male Commentator]

Why can't he act his age with.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Limited success in years?

[Unidentified Male Commentator]

They're young men, but sometimes in their behavior, they act like children. That's it.

[Bird Pinkerton]

And so I wanted to know more about what these ABCD researchers are 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.

[Julia Longoria]

Okay, I am sitting in my car.

[Bird Pinkerton]

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

[Julia Longoria]

It is 1:10pm on a Monday, and this teen told me that she would be here between 12:30 and 1.

[Briana]

So.

[Julia Longoria]

Maybe I'm getting a text message. What's up? Interference?

No, that's not her.

[Bird Pinkerton]

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?

[Julia Longoria]

Still waiting.

[Bird Pinkerton]

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

[Julia Longoria]

Teenagers. Am I right?

[Sponsor Announcer]

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[Roelof Bother]

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[Sponsor Announcer]

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[Roelof Bother]

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[Raul Gonzalez]

Many of the best things we've learned.

[Roelof Bother]

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[Unidentified Male Commentator]

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

[Briana]

So my name is Briana. I am an artist and I've been doing art since I was 8 years old.

[Julia Longoria]

Briana 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.

[Briana]

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.

[Julia Longoria]

Her dream is to someday design cars for a Luxury car brand, but also.

[Briana]

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.

[Julia Longoria]

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.

[Briana]

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

[Julia Longoria]

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

[Briana]

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.

[Julia Longoria]

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.

[Briana]

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.

[Julia Longoria]

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 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.

[Raul Gonzalez]

There's 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.

[Julia Longoria]

Is it sort of like you're taking the preteens to the A version of the casino, you know what I mean?

[Raul Gonzalez]

Pretty much.

[Briana]

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.

[Julia Longoria]

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 Briana 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.

[Briana]

Personal questions and also general questions about.

[Julia Longoria]

Like, what I eat, how much she.

[Briana]

Sleeps, how many times do you drink.

[Julia Longoria]

Caffeine, how much does she exercise, how.

[Briana]

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

[Julia Longoria]

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

[Briana]

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

[Julia Longoria]

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

[Briana]

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

[Julia Longoria]

And as she got older, they went.

[Briana]

More in depth of the drugs. So, like different types of drugs, like edibles and so they went more in depth with those fentanyl and all of that. In depth how?

[Julia Longoria]

Like, what were they asking?

[Briana]

I don't remember the names. It's like really.

Intricate names of the different types of drugs that they asking.

[Julia Longoria]

You if you had done them.

[Briana]

Yeah, exactly.

[Julia Longoria]

Or if you'd heard of them or.

[Briana]

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

[Julia Longoria]

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. To doing drugs to an adult? On the record, Briana told me she does not and has not done any drugs, and I do believe her.

[Briana]

Nothing serious with like alcohol or drugs or anything like that. I know my parents taught me well to not play with that, and so I've always respected that. Do you think if you were smoking.

[Julia Longoria]

You would have told the truth?

[Briana]

Honestly, I don't know if 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.

[Julia Longoria]

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

[Raul Gonzalez]

That is a great question, and I actually have some answers for this. You can sink your teeth into it.

[Julia Longoria]

Okay, cool.

[Raul Gonzalez]

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.

[Julia Longoria]

10% are liars.

Or they may be.

[Raul Gonzalez]

Waiting to tell us the truth.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Right.

[Julia Longoria]

That's a nice way to put it.

[Bird Pinkerton]

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 4, 1400 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 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.

[Raul Gonzalez]

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

[Bird Pinkerton]

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.

[Raul Gonzalez]

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.

[Bird Pinkerton]

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

[Raul Gonzalez]

Not that the neuroimaging 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.

[Bird Pinkerton]

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.

[Raul Gonzalez]

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.

[Bird Pinkerton]

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.

[Raul Gonzalez]

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.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Raoul'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.

[Raul Gonzalez]

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.

[Bird Pinkerton]

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.

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

[Julia Longoria]

You have a 16 year old?

[Raul Gonzalez]

I do.

[Julia Longoria]

How is that going?

[Raul Gonzalez]

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.

[Bird Pinkerton]

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

[Raul Gonzalez]

Meaning that.

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

[Bird Pinkerton]

How much should Raoul 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.

[Raul Gonzalez]

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. From engaging in risky behaviors. And then also, 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.

[Bird Pinkerton]

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

[Raul Gonzalez]

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.

[Julia Longoria]

Right.

[Bird Pinkerton]

But you don't feel like if you rated a decade, you would have like a perfect roadmap or something to.

[Raul Gonzalez]

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.

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.

[Bird Pinkerton]

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 Bird 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, Jorge Just Joanna Solotaroff and Meredith Hadnot 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 Battar Torani 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 unexplainableox. 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 [e-mail] 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 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.

[Ryan Reynolds]

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[Mint Mobile Announcer]

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[Bird Pinkerton]

Com.