Full PreFrontal: Exposing the Mysteries of Executive Function

Send us a text“In order to avoid buying those unnecessary items, don't go shopping at those stores.” Says a financial adviser Michael Markey. But anyone who is not a stranger to temptations knows that it takes a lot to resist the holiday shopping season, starting with Black Friday to Cyber Monday and until the day-before Christmas eve, the online as well as brick and mortar retailers craft seductive deals to trap every eager consumer and last-minute shopper. For every ad, e-blast, and coupon that goes out into the cyber space, the self-help realm bulges with tips and suggestions for us to curtail powerful craving, desires, and temptations. Today, my guest Phil Zelazo, Ph.D. discusses two distinct systems – a top down a reflexive versus a bottom up more of a deliberate that blocks the onslaught of internal chatter and external distractions.* This is Dr. Zelazo’s first Podcast where he discusses brain’s Executive system that is activated by engaging conscious awareness and deliberate intentionality.About Philip Zelazo, Ph.D.Philip David Zelazo (PhD, Yale, 1993) is currently the Nancy M. and John E. Lindahl Professor at the Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota.  He was previously on the faculty in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto, where he held the Canada Research Chair in Developmental Neuroscience.  Professor Zelazo’s research has helped shape current scientific understanding of executive function and its development, including the key roles of reflection, rule use, hierarchical complexity, mindfulness, and emotion (hot versus cool EF). This work has led to the design of widely used standardized measures of EF skills (e.g., the NIH Toolbox measures of EF) and to the creation of effective interventions for promoting the healthy development of EF in early childhood.  Professor Zelazo’s research has been honored by numerous awards, including a Boyd McCandless Young Scientist Award from the American Psychological Association (APA), and a Canada’s Top 40 Under 40 Award. He is a Fellow of APA, the Association for Psychological Science (APS); Senior Fellow of the Mind and Life Institute; and Scientific Advisor for Vroom and Understood.org. He serves on numerous editorial boards (e.g., Development and Psychopathology), was lead editor of the Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness (2007) and was editor of the two-volume Oxford Handbook of Developmental Psychology (2013).Websiteshttp://www.cehd.umn.edu/icd/people/faculty/Zelazo.htmlBooksBudwig, N., Turiel, E., & Zelazo, P. D. (2017). New perspectives on human development. New York: Cambridge University Press.Zelazo, P. D., & Sera, M. (2013). Developing cognitive control processes: Mechanisms, implications, interventions. New York: Wiley.Zelazo, P. D. (2013). The Oxford handbookAbout Host, Sucheta KamathSucheta Kamath, is an award-winning speech-language pathologist, a TEDx speaker, a celebrated community leader, and the founder and CEO of ExQ®. As an EdTech entrepreneur, Sucheta has designed ExQ's personalized digital learning curriculum/tool that empowers middle and high school students to develop self-awareness and strategic thinking skills through the mastery of Executive Function and social-emotional competence.Support the show

Send us a textWhat does a fatal plane crash by a veteran pilot and a patient death from a wrongful dosage by an expert nurse have in common? They both might have been interrupted in the middle of critical procedures and may not have remembered to come back to where they left off. While processing information in working memory, your attention acts like a 360° searchlight and whatever it happens to illuminate is what gets attended. Even though we cannot multitask or ‘multi-attend,’ our mind foolishly persuades us that we can. Today, my guest, world-renowned working memory expert, Dr. Randy Engle, discusses how the secret of training our working memory lies in managing our attention and intention.About Randall Engle, Ph.D.Randall W. Engle, went to W. Va. State College because it was the only school he could afford to attend but it was one of the transforming experiences of his life. State was a public all-black college prior to 1954. As a consequence, most of his faculty were outstanding scholars who could not get jobs at top universities. He graduated with nearly as many hours in zoology and math as he had in psychology so it was probably inevitable that he gravitate to experimental psychology. The job market was tough in 1972 and Engle was lucky to land a job at King College in Tennessee. His two years there, with 10 classes per year, made him a teacher. Fortunately, two of his classes each year were senior research seminars, which he used to conduct experiments. At the end of two years, he had two publications, enough to land him a job at the University of South Carolina where he spent the next 21 years.He moved to the School of Psychology at Georgia Institute of Technology as Chair, a position he held for 13 years. He stepped down as chair to found the GSU/GT Center for Advanced Brain Imaging (CABI) on the Georgia Tech campus. He is editor of Current Directions in Psychological Science and has been on the editorial board of numerous other journals over his career. His research for the past 30 years has explored the nature of working memory, the nature and causes of limitations in working memory capacity, the role of those differences in real-world cognitive tasks, and the association of working memory capacity and cognitive control to fluid intelligence. His work has been funded by various agencies including the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and Office of Naval Research. His work has been highly influential across a wide array of areas including social psychology, emotion, psychopathology, developmental psychology, psychological testing, and has contributed to modern theory of cognitive and emotional control. Harzing’s Publish or Perish shows that Engle’s work has been cited over 17,000 times. He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association, Association of Psychological Science, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Society of Experimental Psychology, and the Memory Disorders Research Society. He has served as Chair of the Governing Board of the Psychonomic Society, Chair of the Board of the Council of Graduate Departments of Psychology (COGDOP), and President of Division 3 of APA. He received the first APA Division 3 Lifetime Achievement Award.About Host, Sucheta KamathSucheta Kamath, is an award-winning speech-language pathologist, a TEDx speaker, a celebrated community leader, and the founder and CEO of ExQ®. As an EdTech entrepreneur, Sucheta has designed ExQ's personalized digital learning curriculum/tool that empowers middle Support the show

Send us a textIf life was a play, some activities would be the star of show and others would be just ‘extras’. The mind is often full of thoughts about the upcoming main act while plowing through the mundane, such as unloading the dishwasher, taking out the garbage or rescheduling a doctor’s appointment. But no matter what the task is we are always deploying Working Memory. Working Memory is the fine-china of cognition on which you either serve an ordinary burger and fries or a rib-eye steak. On today’s podcast, Dr. Randy Engle will talk about the fascinating ‘system’ that let’s you hold on to, for example, a riddle, “Throw away the outside and cook the inside, then eat the outside and throw away the inside” and solve it without getting distracted by cars honking, people talking, or computers humming.About Randall Engle, Ph.D.Randall W. Engle, went to W. Va. State College because it was the only school he could afford to attend but it was one of the transforming experiences of his life. State was a public all-black college prior to 1954. As a consequence, most of his faculty were outstanding scholars who could not get jobs at top universities. He graduated with nearly as many hours in zoology and math as he had in psychology so it was probably inevitable that he gravitate to experimental psychology. The job market was tough in 1972 and Engle was lucky to land a job at King College in Tennessee. His two years there, with 10 classes per year, made him a teacher. Fortunately, two of his classes each year were senior research seminars, which he used to conduct experiments. At the end of two years, he had two publications, enough to land him a job at the University of South Carolina where he spent the next 21 years.He moved to the School of Psychology at Georgia Institute of Technology as Chair, a position he held for 13 years. He stepped down as chair to found the GSU/GT Center for Advanced Brain Imaging (CABI) on the Georgia Tech campus. He is editor of Current Directions in Psychological Science and has been on the editorial board of numerous other journals over his career. His research for the past 30 years has explored the nature of working memory, the nature and causes of limitations in working memory capacity, the role of those differences in real-world cognitive tasks, and the association of working memory capacity and cognitive control to fluid intelligence. His work has been funded by various agencies including the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and Office of Naval Research. His work has been highly influential across a wide array of areas including social psychology, emotion, psychopathology, developmental psychology, psychological testing, and has contributed to modern theory of cognitive and emotional control. Harzing’s Publish or Perish shows that Engle’s work has been cited over 17,000 times. He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association, Association of Psychological Science, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Society of Experimental Psychology, and the Memory Disorders Research Society. He has served as Chair of the Governing Board of the Psychonomic Society, Chair of the Board of the Council of Graduate Departments of Psychology (COGDOP), and President of Division 3 of APA. He received the first APA Division 3 Lifetime Achievement Award.About Host, Sucheta KamathSucheta Kamath, is an award-winning speech-language pathologist, a TEDx speaker, a celebrated community leader, and the founder and CEO of ExQ®. As an EdTech entrepreneur, Sucheta has designed Support the show

Send us a textFame and success is not necessarily an antidote to self-doubt. Oscar-winning singer-songwriter, Sam Smith, once said, “I still doubt myself as a singer every day. Every time I step off the stage, I have ask someone what it was like. ...I really think I need to work on it.” The young performer’s life has seen some ups and downs, such as losing anonymity and putting his foot in his own mouth in front of 9 million people by inaccurately stating a fact during his Oscar acceptance speech, for which he was heavily criticized. Reading about Sam Smith you can learn that if you channel that self-acceptance through artistic courage into creating personal and confessional songs, people will respond to it and you yourself grow from it.My client, Trevor Belmont, opens up to his vulnerabilities that have made his educational journey arduous as a young student with ADHD, depression, and Executive Dysfunction. This episode will give you an insight into Trevor’s process of reconciling with the fact that his talents and smarts were clogged in the funnel self-demonstration by his inabilities and weaknesses. And yet he has prevailed!Support the show

Send us a textJung-ah Choi writes that during a parent-teacher conference she discovered that her son was misbehaving in his kindergartner class. Upon further inquiry it turned out that her son was having a hard time complying with the class rule about not invading other people’s personal space. The teacher called it the “do-not-pop-the-bubble” policy. Choi’s son did not know how best to achieve the balance of engaging his classmates playfully without grabbing onto their hands or pulling them closer. A teacher expects her students to cooperate in the class, meet the policy expectations, and those who can’t or don't know how to ‘not-pop-the-bubble’ often get in trouble. When such trouble escalates, it leads to suspension or even expulsion. This episode, my guest, Clancy Blair, Ph.D. will talk about ways to promote fundamental abilities, which helps children meet the classroom expectation of HOW to regulate yourself.About Clancy Blair, Ph.D.Clancy Blair, PhD is a Professor of Cognitive Psychology in the Department of Applied Psychology in Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University. He earned a BA at McGill University and an MPH in maternal and child health, and MA and PhD in developmental psychology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He has been conducting research on the development of self-regulation in early childhood for over two decades. The specific focus of this research has been on the development of executive function abilities. This research has demonstrated that executive functions are central to school readiness and school achievement in the elementary grades, are substantially influenced by experience and by the characteristics of the family and the home environment, and highly interrelated with the regulation of stress response physiology. An important focus of this research is on the ways in which experience ‘gets under the skin’ to influence the development of executive functions through the stress response. This mechanism is one that appears to be particularly relevant to the effect of poverty on children’s development and may be one primary route through which childhood poverty exerts long-term influence on cognitive and social-emotional development into adulthood. Blair is currently completing a trial of a parenting program designed to foster self-regulation including executive functions in parents and children participating in Early Head Start programs (funded by the US Administration for Children and Families), is collecting normative data on a computer-based assessment of executive functions that he developed with his colleague Michael Willoughby (funded by IES), and is in the beginning stages of a study designed to examine prenatal and early postnatal influences on the development of executive functions in children (funded by the National Science Foundation). He serves as a consultant on numerous research projects and in addition to serving as a scientific advisor to the Urban Child Institute, serves on the advisory boards of several initiatives focused on early childhood education and child wellbeing including First Things First in Arizona; the Early Childhood Comprehensive Assessment System, in Maryland and Ohio; the Exploring Implications of Emerging Insights from Psychology for Self-Sufficiency Programs project, Mathematica, Washington DC; and the BUILD K-3 Formative Assessment Consortium, North Carolina.About Host, Sucheta KamathSucheta Kamath, is an award-winning speech-language pathologist, a TEDx speaker, a celebrated community leader, and the founder and CEO of ExQ®. As an EdTech entreSupport the show

Send us a textAt age 6, his mother said to him, “Why don't you just kill yourself? You’re such a burden to me.” At age 9, his mother drove him away from home to the unfamiliar part of Baja, California and walked him into an orphanage saying that she found this orphan kid and left him there for 90 days before his grandmother got a hold of him and brought him back. Throughout his elementary school she beat him senselessly. This is a story of a gangster, Sergio, from the roughest neighborhood of LA as told by father Greg Boyle in his book, Barking to the Choir. This gut wrenching and sad story traces the roots of a young man turning to the streets to escape his misery. Children who grow up in poverty, unstable homes, and highly unpredictable circumstances experience chronic and unabating stress, which takes a toll on the very shock-absorbing system in the brain, the Executive Function. Today, my guest, Clancy Blair, Ph.D., will discuss the distinction between acute and short lasting stress that buffs the adaptive and resiliency skills and chronic stress which dismantles it.About Clancy Blair, Ph.D.Clancy Blair, PhD is a Professor of Cognitive Psychology in the Department of Applied Psychology in Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University. He earned a BA at McGill University and an MPH in maternal and child health, and MA and PhD in developmental psychology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He has been conducting research on the development of self-regulation in early childhood for over two decades. The specific focus of this research has been on the development of executive function abilities. This research has demonstrated that executive functions are central to school readiness and school achievement in the elementary grades, are substantially influenced by experience and by the characteristics of the family and the home environment, and highly interrelated with the regulation of stress response physiology. An important focus of this research is on the ways in which experience ‘gets under the skin’ to influence the development of executive functions through the stress response. This mechanism is one that appears to be particularly relevant to the effect of poverty on children’s development and may be one primary route through which childhood poverty exerts long-term influence on cognitive and social-emotional development into adulthood. Blair is currently completing a trial of a parenting program designed to foster self-regulation including executive functions in parents and children participating in Early Head Start programs (funded by the US Administration for Children and Families), is collecting normative data on a computer-based assessment of executive functions that he developed with his colleague Michael Willoughby (funded by IES), and is in the beginning stages of a study designed to examine prenatal and early postnatal influences on the development of executive functions in children (funded by the National Science Foundation). He serves as a consultant on numerous research projects and in addition to serving as a scientific advisor to the Urban Child Institute, serves on the advisory boards of several initiatives focused on early childhood education and child wellbeing including First Things First in Arizona; the Early Childhood Comprehensive Assessment System, in Maryland and Ohio; the Exploring Implications of Emerging Insights from Psychology for Self-Sufficiency Programs project, Mathematica, Washington DC; and the BUILD K-3 Formative Assessment Consortium, North Carolina.About Host, Sucheta KamathSucheta Kamath, is an award-winning speech-language pathologist, a Support the show

Send us a textIn 1885, William Bentley placed a snowflake under his camera lens and took a first-of-its-kind photo only to then spend the next 50 years of his life capturing snowflakes with these incredible, vibrant designs. Apparently, the crystal of a snowflake starts as a tiny spec of dust or even pollen that attracts water vapor to form a preliminary hexagon called "diamond dust." After that, it’s sheer randomness how all the rest of the shape expands to form a beautiful and yet unique structure. The scientists know that factors such as temperature and humidity have some influence, but they are not completely certain as to why each snowflake is unique.We can apply the scientific truth behind the statement, "no two snowflakes are alike," to the human brain as no two brains are alike. At this point, we are not certain what makes each child’s brain unique and how it influences the development of self-regulation. Today, our guest, Dr. Fred Morrison, will shed light on the fact that we do know that when our students become self-regulated learners we will have more engaged learners in the classroom, greater ease in navigating the classroom instructions, and direct ways of impacting students’ abilities to persist.About Fred Morrison, Ph.D.Dr. Morrison is currently Professor of Psychology, Professor in the Combined Program in Education and Psychology and Research Professor in the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. In recent years, his research has focused on understanding the nature and sources of children’s cognitive, literacy and social development over the school transition period. The work ranges from conducting basic research studies utilizing natural experiments and large-scale longitudinal descriptive studies of children’s developmental trajectories to developing, implementing and evaluating  two major school-based interventions aimed at improving children’s learning during the preschool and early school years. Recently, he has been exploring schooling effects on brain and behavioral measures of children’s self-regulation. He has been recognized for his contributions to development and education, being awarded the Dina Feitelson award for the second time, for the best research article published in 2005 and 2015. He has been continuously funded by federal grating agencies for 25 years. Over that period, he has served on national review panels at NICHD, NSF and IES.  He has mentored approximately 50 graduate student and 8 post-doctoral fellows.BookImproving Literacy in America: Guidelines from ResearchAbout Host, Sucheta KamathSucheta Kamath, is an award-winning speech-language pathologist, a TEDx speaker, a celebrated community leader, and the founder and CEO of ExQ®. As an EdTech entrepreneur, Sucheta has designed ExQ's personalized digital learning curriculum/tool that empowers middle and high school students to develop self-awareness and strategic thinking skills through the mastery of Executive Function and social-emotional competence.Support the show

Send us a textThe Google search for “how to teach a child to tie shoes” comes up with approximately 7.5 million hits. Obviously, parents and adults in general have recognized that folding over the shoelaces, crossing the bunny ears, and looping them to tie a knot needs to be taught with great care. However, you walk into any hallway in elementary, middle, or high school and two distinct trends appear. The shoes with laces are completely replaced with Velcro and many of those who ARE wearing shoes have their laces untied. Developing self-assessment to know when the shoelaces are untied and then engaging the impulse control to stop everything and tie the shoelaces to prevent a potential fall, is the hallmark of self-regulation. But a great deal of individual variability in learning self-control can pose a grave challenge to parents and teachers. My guest Fred Morrison, Ph.D., will discuss how to think about self-regulation and Executive Function as a volitional self-directed control across the lifespan.About Fred Morrison, Ph.D.Dr. Morrison is currently Professor of Psychology, Professor in the Combined Program in Education and Psychology and Research Professor in the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. In recent years, his research has focused on understanding the nature and sources of children’s cognitive, literacy and social development over the school transition period. The work ranges from conducting basic research studies utilizing natural experiments and large-scale longitudinal descriptive studies of children’s developmental trajectories to developing, implementing and evaluating  two major school-based interventions aimed at improving children’s learning during the preschool and early school years. Recently, he has been exploring schooling effects on brain and behavioral measures of children’s self-regulation. He has been recognized for his contributions to development and education, being awarded the Dina Feitelson award for the second time, for the best research article published in 2005 and 2015. He has been continuously funded by federal grating agencies for 25 years. Over that period, he has served on national review panels at NICHD, NSF and IES.  He has mentored approximately 50 graduate student and 8 post-doctoral fellows.BookImproving Literacy in America: Guidelines from ResearchAbout Host, Sucheta KamathSucheta Kamath, is an award-winning speech-language pathologist, a TEDx speaker, a celebrated community leader, and the founder and CEO of ExQ®. As an EdTech entrepreneur, Sucheta has designed ExQ's personalized digital learning curriculum/tool that empowers middle and high school students to develop self-awareness and strategic thinking skills through the mastery of Executive Function and social-emotional competence.Support the show

Send us a textPeople like Dr. Mae C. Jemison live by the dictum, “if you're bored, you are not paying attention.” That philosophy has served her well as she is a former NASA astronaut and the first woman of color in the world to go to space. She could pay attention and direct her curiosity in whichever direction she wanted. Dr. Jemison got work done and kept on achieving. This was not the case for my client, "Scott Joplin," whose learning struggles began as a child when he was diagnosed with not one, not two, but multiple developmental disabilities which made his learning very laborious and paying attention quite exhausting. Scott had no shortage of intelligence and creative imagination, but the access to his own full capacity was upstaged by his difficulty in expressing his comprehension and delivering work when needed. He needed someone like me to untangle learning from learning-to-learn and the results were outstanding! Scott is a charming, caring, and very successful computer scientist whose commitment to self-development has payed off.About Host, Sucheta KamathSucheta Kamath, is an award-winning speech-language pathologist, a TEDx speaker, a celebrated community leader, and the founder and CEO of ExQ®. As an EdTech entrepreneur, Sucheta has designed ExQ's personalized digital learning curriculum/tool that empowers middle and high school students to develop self-awareness and strategic thinking skills through the mastery of Executive Function and social-emotional competence.Support the show

Send us a textHave you ever tried to point out mistakes in someone – maybe in your child, spouse, employee, or even your boss? And what do you get? A sharp rebuttal or a strong push back. Peace comes to those whose self-concept and behaviors are in harmony with each other. If not, the result is cognitive dissonance. When you do something wrong, your brain is wired to try and relieve the tension it feels by immediately making up excuses for you. On this show, our guest, Dr. Carol Tavris, will give us some tips to handle this subconscious process so that we can learn and grow from our mistakes instead of simply denying and self-justifying.About Carol Tavris, Ph.D.Carol Tavris is a social psychologist, writer, and lecturer who has sought to use the contributions of psychological science to dispel some of the harms of pseudoscience. Her book with Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me), explains why people don’t change their minds, recognize the harms they inflict, or give up useless practices simply because the evidence says they should. Carol is also author of the classic Anger: The misunderstood emotion and The Mismeasure of Woman:Why women are not the better sex, the inferior sex, or the opposite sex. She has written hundreds of articles, essays, and book reviews on topics in psychological science, and she currently writes a column, “The Gadfly,” for Skeptic. Carol has given lectures, workshops, and keynote addresses to diverse audiences around the world. She is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science; her other awards include an honorary doctorate from Simmons College for her work in promoting critical thinking and gender equity; an award from the Center for Inquiry, Independent Investigations Group, for contributions to skepticism and science; and the Media Achievement Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.BooksMistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)Anger: The Misunderstood EmotionAbout Host, Sucheta KamathSucheta Kamath, is an award-winning speech-language pathologist, a TEDx speaker, a celebrated community leader, and the founder and CEO of ExQ®. As an EdTech entrepreneur, Sucheta has designed ExQ's personalized digital learning curriculum/tool that empowers middle and high school students to develop self-awareness and strategic thinking skills through the mastery of Executive Function and social-emotional competence.Support the show