The Search for Executive Function

Who looks outside, dreams.
Who looks inside, awakens.
—C. J. Jung

For those of you just joining this particular conversation, I have recently been exploring the general nature of adolescence and the evolution of the teenage brain, with the expressed aim of investigating how adult stakeholders might help the children in their lives successfully navigate this tumultuous and sometimes dangerous maturation period.  We have finally reached the point where we are now ready to discuss that “how,” and it turns out that the key to managing a Pliocene brain in the modern world is a set of processes the brain performs known collectively as “Executive Function.”  These processes include response inhibition, cognitive flexibility, attending (also known as working or short-term memory), and emotional regulation. They occur almost exclusively in the prefrontal cortex and its neural pathways to the amygdala and hippocampus—which, you may recall, are the parts of the brain basically in combat during the teenage years with the then more mature limbic system; indeed, elements of this combat actually mature the prefrontal cortex and its eventual regulation of the limbic centers.

But in the in-between, how can teachers, parents, and other caregivers aid the development and maturation of executive function in their adolescent charges? Interestingly enough, there is a “low-hanging fruit” for starters that is so ridiculously easy that any of us could do it tomorrow:  increase a teenager’s daily amount of exercise.  Simply requiring adolescents to get off the couch and move improves their prefrontal cortices’ wiring and function, and a huge study in the United Kingdom has shown that for every 15 minutes of additional daily exercise, student academic performance—a reliable measure of executive function—improved the equivalent of a full quarter of a grade.  In fact, regular daily exercise can increase the size of the hippocampus (the seat of working memory) by as much as 2%, and thus “the difference between a B and an A depended on little more than teens closing books in a class and opening lungs in a gym” (p. 137)[i]. 

Furthermore, when daily training in mindfulness is added to all this exercise, all kinds of functional connectivity in the brain starts to change, all promoting executive function.  “We know, for example, that the amygdalae, those almond-shaped structures that supervise experiences like fear, start to lose weight (they actually shrink) [which] in turn weakens many of their functional connections to other regions of the brain” (p.192).  In addition, the prefrontal cortex gets thicker (i.e. grows more synaptic connections) while simultaneously uncoupling from the part of the brain responsible for the subjective elements of feeling pain.  Thus:

Taken together, a remarkably detailed neurological picture is emerging about why mindfulness can be so powerful.  It’s changing the way the brain looks at fear and pain while at the same time strengthening regions associated with controlling them.  The neural substrates that mediate executive function are being rewired, all because you’ve decided to concentrate on the lovely contours of your earlobe (p. 193).

Therefore, what seems to be the bottom line for promoting adolescent executive function is to buy them a good pair of sneakers and a meditation app. But of course, the situation cannot be dealt with quite that blithely, and I write that oversimplification partly in jest and partly because another way we actually do—or do not—help the teenagers in our lives mature their executive functioning is much more challenging:  we must examine what kind of relationships we are having with them. 

And we must do so because as a social species, our very survival has depended on having positive relationships with other humans.  Thus, it should come as no surprise that the formation of executive function in the brain—as well as its overall strength!—directly depends on the quality of our caregiver interactions with children.  Indeed, courtesy of the pandemic, we have already seen the dark side of this fact from the negative impact on student learning of the numerous school closures, and in fact, “modern cognitive neuroscience reveals that subtracting this critical interpersonal ingredient is done at the students’ peril” (p. 84).  Furthermore, “since children’s survival is dependent for years on adult caregivers, it’s in the child’s interest to constantly monitor how the adults are doing” (p. 84), and that is why divorce can have such a negative impact on the development of executive function.

What is needed, then, is for caregivers to form the kind of healthy and functionally effective relationships with their teenagers that famed developmental psychologist Diana Baumrind calls “authoritative parenting” and which educator Zaretta Hammond calls “warm demanders.”  And note that the term is “authoritative,” not “authoritarian.”  Because what distinguishes the former from the latter—a parenting style that sadly does exist—is that authoritative parents balance a demandingness where behavioral rules are maintained (even at the risk of angering their children) with a consistent engagement in verbal consultation that explains the “why” of any particular rule, along with an openness to negotiating more autonomy as a child matures. 

Basically, authoritative parents:

Preserve the best elements of parental responsiveness, remaining accessible to their children always, and listening with warmth and acceptance (different than approval).  They seem to realize that, regardless of teen reactions, what they do as parents absolutely matters.  And what matters most is that the kids know they feel loved—and safe.  They are regularly willing to risk their relationship with their teens in the service of a higher behavioral goal.  It’s the only Darwinian thing to do, after all (p. 97).

Similarly, Hammond’s “warm demanders” are teachers with clearly articulated high expectations—both behavioral and academic—who maintain what I have described and explored elsewhere as appropriately intimate rapport and who “possess one of the hardest perspectives for adults to achieve with teens:  a growing respect for their autonomy” (p. 110).  Warm demanders ask much of their students, achieving just the right balance of stretch with support (see Chapter 3), and the decades of research data about such classrooms is clear: impulse control and attentional states (two critical features of executive function) improve and student IQs actually go up.  However, the research is equally clear that a teacher’s negative view of their students can flip that same IQ “off” like a light switch, and so whose classroom a teenager inhabits has enormous implications for that child’s brain’s capacity for executive functioning and the corresponding academic success.

Which brings me to the intersection between parents and teachers.  Part of being a warm demander as an educator is maintaining a safe learning environment.  Yet safety starts at home, and therefore the “who” who arrives in my classroom depends entirely on the parent delivering their child to me.  Wounded children are all too common in our society, and the consequent impact on their executive functioning places an enormous impact on their learning.  The reason why is because without social-emotional well-being, the adolescent brain struggles to learn empathy, and empathy, it turns out:

[Forces] students to think critically about “other perspectives.”  This “otherness” translates not just to friendships outside one’s own experience, but to concepts outside one’s own experience.  It promotes cognitive flexibility, which in turn leads to more elaborately conceived—and often quite unique—problem-solving abilities.  Reasoning, it seems, involves taking other perspectives (pp. 161-162).

Thus, without a capacity for empathy, teenagers risk failing to develop and mature one of executive functioning’s most critical processes: the ability to be cognitively flexible.  Yet, empathy is something the research of Sherry Turkle and others suggests our younger generations are losing, and therefore, the final way I will share that we could all be helping our adolescents grow their executive functioning to thrive as adults is to develop social-emotional learning programs in our schools.  Doing so is a way that the educator side of the equation could be addressing this empathy issue, and school stakeholders providing the necessary funding for such programs is the other.  Together, we can help every teen become the best adult version of themselves.

We just have to remember that we must be the best adult version of ourselves in order to do it.

References

Baumrind, D. (1995) Child Maltreatment and Optimal Caregiving in Social Contexts.  Oxford: Routledge.

Baumrind, D., et al. (2008) Parenting for Character: Five Experts, Five Practices.  Arlington, VA: ASCD Books.

Hammond, Z. (2014) Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students.  Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Medina, J. (2018) Attack of the Teenage Brain. Arlington, VA: ASCD Books.

Rosenthal, R. & Jacobson, L. (2003) Pygmalion in the Classroom: Teacher Expectation and Pupils’ Intellectual Development.  Bethel, CT: Crown House.

Turkle, S. (2017) Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, 3^rd Edition.  New York:  Basic Books.

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[i] All quoted material for this essay is from Medina’s Attack of the Teenage Brain.