Full PreFrontal: Exposing the Mysteries of Executive Function

Send us Fan Mail Vincent van Gogh once wrote, “If I cease searching, then, woe is me, I am lost. That is how I look at it – keep going, keep going come what may.” Of course, this kind of striving and searching van Gogh is referring to is likely to guarantee one thing and that one thing is – encountering unsurmountable challenges. Sometimes we don’t even go looking, but still face unsurmountable ch...

Send us Fan Mail Children are an enigma! Full of surprises and full of promise. However, one can be easily baffled when their boisterous high energy turns into an unmanageable rambunctiousness disrupting the household and relationships. Until recently, it was unconceivable for kids to have a mental disorder which made it hard to navigate the impact of various conditions on overall behaviors; parti...

Send us Fan Mail The struggles of kids with ADHD are unmistakably unique and undoubtedly complex, but their lack of mental readiness to accept help is equally confusing. Nothing is more discouraging or draining for educators and parents than kids who resist direction instead of leaning into the help they receive. Since disrupted executive function in ADHD kids often interferes with their ability t...

Send us Fan Mail The brain’s prefrontal cortex is often described as the “work in progress” intimating that there exists a continuum of neural development shaped by an interplay between biology and behavior; each influencing the other. Naturally, Executive Function, a set of skills controlled by the prefrontal cortex, emerges slowly allowing humans to form future goals and gain independence in ord...

Send us Fan Mail Nothing about the COVID-19 pandemic is business as usual. In fact, the social and economic stressors are taking a toll on every single person’s sense of well-being. Those taking care of children and those in frail health have the added burden of creating a safe home environment while providing critical support with patience, compassion, and positivity; in spite of feeling the oppo...

Send us Fan Mail What do extinct dinosaurs, shrinking planet Mercury, pygmies from Africa, Mesopotamian pottery, Roman bath houses, and the COVID-19 virus have in common? These are topics that once children know about, can build their knowledge of the world and expand their world view. Considering that in modern America, education is the best hope in minimizing the effects of inequity, we are bett...

Send us Fan Mail There is a widespread acknowledgement that experts are made and not born and those who investigate how experts become experts that have studied the fields like surgery, computer programming, chess, ballet, music, or even firefighting agree that excellent training, deliberate practice, and exposure to masterful mentors are some key ingredients that seem to matter. So those who teac...

Send us Fan Mail The classroom neurodiversity happens to pose a challenge to educators not because we have a surge in the neurodiverse student body but more likely that we have acquired newer insights into how to differentiate different learners. The question remains however, what do we know about ways in which to impart knowledge and teach skills needed for their future? Since Executive Function...

Send us Fan Mail All parents want their children to grow up, be independent, and find happiness. Their conventional wisdom says, let me push my child to do well in school, work hard on stuff, and take part in various activities to “find” themselves. Because to a parent, the path to success has a formula “Education + Passion + Excellent Performance = Career” which equals to a life of bliss! And wel...

Send us Fan Mail Uncertainly, unceasing demands, and all around unrest can provoke the feelings of restlessness, a state of irritability, and intense worrying and general dissatisfaction. But clinically speaking, these feelings of being on the edge are the signs of anxiety and often when they exceed the threshold of bearability a sense of unending despair can follow. On today’s podcast, psychiatri...

Send us Fan Mail Randomly scattered stars light up the night sky, but it is human inventiveness and imagination that has connected these cosmic dots into the constellations we know so well. As the podcast Full PreFrontal: Exposing the Mysteries of Executive Function celebrates its 100th episode, we have the same pleasure of connecting the scattered ideas that experts have shared with us over the p...

Send us Fan Mail When you shoot before you aim you get bad results. But that’s what everyday impulsiveness looks like for someone with ADHD. Pencil tapping, restless legs, inability to sit too long, distracted mind, interrupting others, and getting bored too quickly are some additional commonplace behaviors that highlight the habits and symptoms of those with ADHD. But beneath the surface the mism...

Send us Fan Mail The answer to the question “What percentage of 16 million children living below the poverty line have a book in their home?” is 33%.  While that is devastating, the real question is, does this query truly capture the complexities of developing reading skills in children living in these disadvantaged circumstances and would the exposure to more books promote the development of read...

Send us Fan Mail Violet is the first to admit that people like her, who themselves have ADHD, suffer from “foot in mouth disease”. Getting herself in a jam by blurting out things, starting things but not finishing, procrastinating, and allowing chaos to continue without intercepting it with some remedy were a few things that made Violet’s life with ADHD harder than it needed to be. Becoming a pare...

Send us Fan Mail Thomas Wolfe said it best, “Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs”. A school culture and a home culture can have a profound impact on children’s social, emotional, and cognitive development. Executive Function engages the brain’s self-guiding system that takes us from challenges to mastery, from self-blindness to self-awareness, and from indifference to self-compassion....

Send us Fan Mail Well-cultivated attentional processes help orient us to the right information in the environment which in return, presents us with the greatest opportunities for learning and success. But research shows that those diagnosed with ADHD possess far less interest in tasks and particularly, those tasks that present with delayed rewards. The entire academic experience – working hard on...

Send us Fan Mail Ancient wisdom has rightfully identified problems with the human mind which is ill-fitted to deal with the perceptual ambiguity that includes frequent gaps between one’s perceptions and reality. This creates a tussle between the intuitive system of the brain versus the reflective one, which often results in a “self-blind” mind that doesn’t know itself. As a result, the human mind...

Send us Fan Mail 21st century living has put a strain on our brain’s capacity to plan for the future, process and retain information, and pursue the goals of a multifaceted life. And while moving through the highly-wired and totally connected world, one often wonders if we are truly benefitting from the advancements provided by the technology that has the potential to augment the brain’s limitatio...

Send us Fan Mail In their song “Stuck in the Middle With You,” Scottish folk rock band Stealers Wheel’s lyrics go something like  this –”Yes I’m stuck in the middle with you, And I’m wondering what it is I should do, It’s so hard to keep this smile from my face. Losing control, yeah, I’m all over the place.” These words capture the plight of a young and developing brain that often gets stuck in bl...

Send us Fan Mail According to Dr. Stuart Brown, “divinely superfluous neurons” orchestrate a seemingly purposeless voluntary act that we call play. But let’s not underestimate the necessity and impact of play on the developing mind and overall human flourishing. Even though play is natural to babies, exciting to children, and helpful to even adults, not everyone gets equal opportunity to play and...

Send us Fan Mail Americans were never that concerned about the issues of educating children until it dawned on everybody that children are in fact “economically useless, but emotionally priceless” as described by Viviana A. Zelizer. Since then, being over-consumed by current competition and future career success, well-educated upper-middle class affluent families, schools and communities are caugh...

Send us Fan Mail No one is spared from the drama and trauma of growing up, not even affluent kids. However, as hard as it is to imagine, the children of highly-educated parents with abundant material comforts and lifestyles of privilege have their own set of challenges, which surface in their own unique ways. They are growing up in highly-competitive environments with an immense pressure to excel,...

Send us Fan Mail Seeing an under-producing, under-performing, or generally disengaged kid is quite painful. They often struggle to connect with purpose and persevere when school activities get challenging. Sometimes educators attempt to engage children with fear or praise or even by trying to entertain them, which too doesn’t always yield self-driven motivation. The world comes at these kids with...

Send us Fan Mail What’s common between a soccer mom who has a flat tire on the way to her son’s game, a Wall Street dad who just got told to stay in the office for the markets in the East to open, and a middle school girl who just got her new smart phone? They are all struggling to cope with feeling either anxious, lonely, stressed out, or tired. A dysregulated frontal lobe system often causes our...

Send us Fan Mail Psychologist and author Alexandra Horowitz says “Attention is an intentional, unapologetic discriminator. It asks what is relevant right now, and gears us up to notice only that.” It’s a gift to have such attentional acumen, but not everyone is lucky to have such a natural capacity for discrimination. In fact, in a neurogenetic and neuropsychiatric disorder like Attention Deficit...