What’s actually going on in a teenager’s head? What happens in peoples’ brains as they transform from children into adults? What makes young brains so quick to pick up, say, instruments or languages? And why on Earth do teenagers make some of the absurd choices they make? What were they even thinking?!

These questions might sound like the domain of parents or teachers, but they’ve also been explored by scientists.

And a fair warning that should be pretty obvious: Scientists don’t have perfect answers to any of these questions. But, they do have some really interesting techniques for trying to better understand teenaged brains. They’ve even been taking away some lessons from developing brains that they’ve tried to apply elsewhere.

In our latest series from Unexplainable, Vox’s science podcast, we’ve picked several researchers’ brains to understand what we know — and what we are still trying to figure out — about teen brains and how best to study them.

How do you even go about understanding teenaged brains?