Executive Functions, Education and Alzheimer’s Disease

I just read a very inter­est­ing arti­cle in Newsweek: Exec­u­tive Func­tions: The School Skill That May Mat­ter More Than IQ. A few quotes:

- “But recent advances in psy­chol­o­gy and brain sci­ence are now sug­gest­ing that a child’s abil­i­ty to inhib­it dis­tract­ing thoughts and stay focused may be a fun­da­men­tal cog­ni­tive skill, one that plays a big part in aca­d­e­m­ic suc­cess from preschool on. Indeed, this and close­ly relat­ed skills may be more impor­tant than tra­di­tion­al IQ in pre­dict­ing a child’s school performance.”

- “EF (exec­u­tive func­tions) com­pris­es not only effort­ful con­trol and cog­ni­tive focus but also work­ing mem­o­ry and men­tal flex­i­bil­i­ty the abil­i­ty to adjust to change, to think out­side the box.”

- “When the teacher holds up a cir­cle they clap, with a tri­an­gle they hop, and so forth. The kids are taught to talk them­selves through the men­tal exer­cise: “OK, now clap.” “Twirl now.” This has been shown to flex and enhance the brain’s abil­i­ty to switch gears, to sup­press one piece of infor­ma­tion and sub in a new one. It takes dis­ci­pline; it’s the ele­men­tary school equiv­a­lent of say­ing “I real­ly need stop think­ing about next week’s vaca­tion and focus on this report.”

The main points: exec­u­tive func­tions are cru­cial for suc­cess in life, AND they can be trained. I could­n’t agree more with the arti­cle in that cog­ni­tive train­ing should be part of the edu­ca­tion cur­ricu­lum and receive more research dol­lars to deter­mine exact­ly how to best do so.

I read anoth­er very inter­est­ing arti­cle on Alzheimer’s Dis­ease. Which may look like a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent top­ic than the one above…but please bear with me. There is more in com­mon than may meet the eye.

Ear­li­er diag­no­sis giv­ing Alzheimer’s a new voice (Yahoo News):

- “Hayen is part of a grow­ing new move­ment in Alzheimer’s: Patients diag­nosed ear­ly enough to still be artic­u­late and demand bet­ter care and bet­ter research.”

- “They are giv­ing a voice to a dis­ease whose vic­tims until now have remained large­ly silent, and powerless.”

- “It’s a shift with big ramifications.”

- “Diag­no­sis can be dif­fi­cult. There is no sin­gle test for demen­tia. Mem­o­ry prob­lems aren’t always even the obvi­ous first symp­tom; Hayen cites unpro­voked anger and disorientation.”

Those symp­toms can be seen as deficits in exec­u­tive func­tions, com­mon in Alzheimer’s patients, and the brain’ frontal lobes get weakened.

What are Exec­u­tive Func­tions? What are the Frontal Lobes? Exec­u­tive Func­tions are a set of cog­ni­tive skills involved in plan­ning and self-reg­u­la­tion, most­ly involv­ing our frontal lobes (behind our fore­head). This area is the most recent part of our brains in evo­lu­tion­ary terms, and the least hard-wired (or the most “plas­tic”). The lat­est to mature, the ear­li­est to decline. Some exec­u­tive func­tions include:

- Plan­ning: fore­sight in devis­ing mul­ti-step strategies.

- Flex­i­bil­i­ty: capac­i­ty for quick­ly switch­ing to the appro­pri­ate men­tal mode.

- Inhi­bi­tion: the abil­i­ty to with­stand dis­trac­tion, and inter­nal urges.

- Antic­i­pa­tion: pre­dic­tion based on pat­tern recognition.

- Crit­i­cal eval­u­a­tion: log­i­cal analysis.

- Work­ing mem­o­ry: capac­i­ty to hold and manip­u­late infor­ma­tion “on-line” in our minds in real time.

- Fuzzy log­ic: capac­i­ty to choose with incom­plete information.

- Divid­ed atten­tion: abil­i­ty to pay atten­tion to more than one thing at a time.

- Deci­sion-mak­ing: both qual­i­ty and speed.

A high­ly rec­om­mend­ed book, if you are inter­est­ed in learn­ing more about Exec­u­tive Func­tions and Frontal Lobes, is The Exec­u­tive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civ­i­lized Mind, by our co-founder Dr. Elkhonon Gold­berg. You can read an in-depth inter­view with him here.

What is excit­ing about the Cognitive/ Brain Fit­ness field is the grow­ing amount of research and inter­ven­tions to improve cog­ni­tive skills. I am inter­view­ing Dr. Arthur Kramer in a few days. He will tell us about his research on how to improve exec­u­tive func­tions. Please stay tuned!