The Brain's "Air Traffic Controller"

Today Kate, Kim, Renee and I gathered in the conference room for a free lunchtime webinar on executive function ("EF") led by Dr. Bill Jenkins and sponsored by Scientific Learning, where he is Chief Scientific Officer (and also a Founder). Dr. Jenkins is a former associate professor at the Keck Center for Integrative Neuroscience at UCSF, and he keeps a very interesting blog on all things neuroscience. Pleasantly, he didn't try to sell or push the company's products, but instead remained focused on the nueroscience of executive function. 

Dr. Jenkins described EF as containing three distinct and inter-related components that function as the "air traffic controller" of the brain. Working memory allows us to do tasks such as hold and manipulate information for a short period of time, hold multiple step instruction without reminders, and make decisions in social interaction such as turn-taking. Inhibitory control allows us to master and filter thoughts and impulses, hold of distractions, and select and focus attention. Cognitive flexibility helps us switch gears, adjust to new demands and experiences, consider new perspectives and change our speech and actions based on context. To give an example of how all three parts work together, consider the situation in which working memory allows you to hold two rules in mind, cognitive flexibility allows you to select which rule to follow in the moment, and inhibitory control prevents the "off" rule from being followed.

The stand-out takeaways for me from the webinar included the importance of providing scaffolding for students (such as establishing routines, providing cues, and breaking large tasks into discrete units); that EF takes decades to fully develop; that EF skills aren't automatically developed and because children will not necessarily outgrow certain behaviors, explicit intervention might be needed; and that EF development underlies success both socially and academically. The webinar concluded with some suggestions for developing EF, including allowing children to select high-interest topics for some schoolwork, providing both quiet time and time for detailed, extensive work at school, and encouraging participation in both team sports and/or drama activities as ways to learn to manage complex sets of rules and behaviors, and thus develop EF.

Update: Check out this video on adolescent brains sent to me by Kim, in follow-up to this webinar.