Producer: Welcome back to Full PreFrontal where we are exposing the mysteries of executive functions. I am here with our host, Sucheta Kamath.
Good morning, Sucheta. As always, good to be with you. Looking forward to your next conversation with Phil Zelazo, but you got to lead us off today by telling us about Jim Everett, the former quarterback for the New Orleans Saints and retired tennis star and ESPN Chris Evert. So Sucheta, what do the two of them have anything to do with executive function?
Sucheta Kamath: Well, let me explain. During the peak of his career, the New Orleans Saints quarterback Jim Everett was rocking it but to the ESPN talk show host Jim Rome, did not matter. For a few years, he continuously teased and referred to Jim Everett as Chrissy or Chris, a tongue in cheek reference to the women’s tennis star Chris Evert, and of course, mostly meant in a derogatory way. So during the season, Rome had Everett on his talk show and proceeded to tease in an unprofessional way by calling Everett ‘Chris’ to his face, not once, but twice. Now, you can imagine what happened next. The quarterback Everett politely asked the host to not do that but Jim Rome continued to egg him on in the spirit of fun and games. What happened next made TV worth watching. Everett lost it. Everett lost his cool and pummeled Rome to the ground on live TV.
So what I’m trying to say here is our imagination of the future and the capacity to plan in that direction is fueled via our unique ability for conscious self-awareness and the capacity for self-reflection. Both men in the story were quite self-aware as to what they were doing. Self-awareness is the key ingredient that ignites enlightened self-interest in planning and self-correction in order to become socially appropriate members who act in a culturally engaged way. Here, two men, both named Jim were facing an opportunity for self-reflection in order to self-refrain. Since one let go, the other one felt compelled to do the same and that led to a social disaster.
Improving executive function skills is not only essential for the growth of an individual but for the society in general. Better regulated members of the society create better regulated persons and more modulated responses, a true foundation for peace and happiness.
So today, my guest, Phil Zelazo is going to share how these skills can be taught at a very young age and must be modeled, shaped, and cultivated to practice. Professor Phil Zelazo is currently the Nancy M. and John E. Lindahl professor at the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota. His 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.
This work has led to the design of widely used standardized measures of executive function skills and to the creation of effective interventions for promoting the healthy development of executive functioning early childhood. Professor Zelazo’s research has been honored by numerous awards, including a Boyd Mccandless Young Scientist Award from the American Psychological Association and Canada’s Top 40 Under 40 Award.
He is a fellow of APA, the Association of Psychological Sciences, APS senior fellow of the Mind and Life Institute, and Scientific Advisor for Vroom and understood.org. He serves on numerous editorial boards, was lead editor of the Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness in 2007. I’m really excited to see how he is going to explain to us what best ways to manage executive functions.
Producer: Yes, and looking forward to it as well, Sucheta. I so enjoyed last week’s conversation with Dr. Zelazo so let’s get to it, here is Sucheta’s second conversation with Dr. Phil Zelazo.
Sucheta: Welcome to the show, Phil. It’s an honor to have you the second time and I highly encourage the listeners to listen to our previous banter.
Today, I want to talk about intervention, how we handle executive function and manage them and treat them.
I want to start with life’s big question: how do we better prepare our next generation? It is not well understood and that the three core aspects of executive function that include impulse control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility, and more gradually and slowly, and become differentiated over the entire course of childhood during which formal years of learning occur, and we are beginning to understand the educational intervention or the way we educate our children is not differentiated to support that kind of development. So I really find that the teachers and educators, and parents are stuck in this place where they not intentionally but are operating with a deficit model. That means a skill is absent, hence it must be a deficit instead of a naturally emerging but delayed emergence of skill.
So I just wanted your thoughts about what is the big picture when we look at development of executive function and even we start to thinking about promoting them?
Phil: I think what is becoming clear from the research literature is that executive function skills provide a kind of foundation for learning and adaptation across a wide range of situations, including being able to learn effectively in a classroom environment, and so we can think of these as a key part of school readiness, of having the attentional skills that make it possible, for example, to sit still in class, to pay attention to what the teacher is saying, to keep the teacher’s question in mind as you formulate an answer to it, to think flexibly about things, to let go of your old way of thinking about something as you are being taught a new way of thinking about that same thing.
So these are really fundamental foundational attentional skills that really need to be in place before children start learning how to read and write, and do arithmetic, and I think that early childhood education would be very well served to keep that in mind, not to take a kind of deficit model, as you mentioned, but instead, to recognize the logical priority of these attention regulation skills relative to the learning of other academic content, and also recognizing that these attention regulation skills can indeed be taught, not in the usual way, not in the way that you teach somebody how to do math, but like other skills, like riding a bicycle or whatever else. You learn it by doing it and you learn it by doing it first in a relatively easy form, for example, you learn to balance on a tricycle and then you have training wheels, and the training wheels get raised and eventually, you can ride on two wheels, and so forth. The development of executive function skills is very much like that. Schools have historically assumed that parents would take care of cultivating the development of these skills in their own children before sending them off to school. In other words, schools have assumed that children arrive at school with school readiness skills including executive function skills, but as our society changes and for various other reasons, it’s clear that too many kids these days are showing up at school without well-developed executive function skills, and this can lead to any number of different problems. These children might be misunderstood as having behavior problems because they are not paying attention and they are distracted, and they are talking to their friends when they should be listening to the teacher. They may be misdiagnosed, even, as having attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or some related thing as having a learning disability, and so I think it’s very important that people who work with children, early childhood educators and others recognize what executive function skills are, how they typically develop, when a child might be lagging behind his or her peers in the development of these skills, so that children who, for one reason or another, have not had ample opportunities to practice executive function skills and acquire them sufficiently aren’t misinterpreted as lacking intelligence or having some sort of psychological problem beyond simply not having had these opportunities to develop these basic skills.
Sucheta: Yes, and I love the way, I think, you are calling all the educators to shift their perspective as an institution or as an organization that takes decisions or provides support that when a student, particularly from underprivileged backgrounds comes to school and is not prepared, it is not a character flaw, and I see a lot of interventions or methods of handling absolutely counterintuitive to promoting the development of self-regulation or executive thinking, and in fact, it can harm a student’s sense of himself as a learner and his own sense of optimism for his own education can create a great amount of disengagement. So I really appreciate the big picture thought that you just laid out there.
Now, before we get into the actual intervention, I just wanted to see if you can comment or help our listeners understand what is the relationship between the teacher’s executive function as it relates to managing the underdeveloped or emerging executive functions in the classroom, and are we studying that? Do we have an understanding that sometimes, I feel certain teachers are much quicker to judge and kind of cast a student in a certain category, but that could be her own inflexible thought process or cognitive rigidity?
Phil: Absolutely. Yes, I think those are closely related, and similarly, a parent’s executive function skills are important for helping their own children develop their executive function skills. For example, cultivating the development of these skills require some patience, and so a teacher in a classroom might ask a child a question and the child may be slow in responding. How long does the teacher wait for the child to organize his or her thoughts, formulate an answer and actually speak up? So you could see, as you suggested, how a teacher who herself or himself was impatient or not displaying a whole lot of inhibitory control might just pose a question and then get frustrated at a non-response and answer the question himself or herself, and this is as opposed to recognizing that as these skills are developed, they may be inefficient. It may take a child longer to organize his or her thoughts and to provide an answer. So I think that you’ve captured something in your observation that’s important to call out, that teachers and parents need to display executive function. They need to be reflective themselves in order to best support the development of reflection and executive function skills in children. In general, what we have been encouraging teachers to do in our research is to create conditions that challenge children’s executive function skills just enough – not too much – so a kind of optimal level of challenge where it’s engaging, sufficiently challenging to be engaging but not so challenging that it is discouraging, and as children’s skills develop and they develop very rapidly in the preschool period, to change the challenges that are presented to children so that they are continually pushing themselves a little bit further in the development of these skills.
So if you think about developing memory skills, the first challenge is to remember just one thing for a very brief period of time, and with practice, you can increase the ratio and the amount of time that you expect a child to remember that thing, or you can increase the number of things that they are expected to remember for increasingly long periods of time. That way, calibrating the challenge to the child’s developing skill. A key part of that whole process, not only the parent or teacher’s sensitivity to the child’s developing skill level, but also modeling for the child the kinds of skills that the child needs, so teachers can, for example, talk loud as they try to solve a problem to show children the sorts of steps that the children themselves might go through. I mentioned earlier that we engage our executive function skills when we go off autopilot and adopt a more intentional approach to a situation. Well, parents, or teachers for that matter, can say, “Oh, wait a minute, we have a problem here. I don’t know what it is, let’s figure out how to solve this problem,” engage the child and show that child how you can say, “Well, what are we trying to accomplish? What do we know that might be useful here? Have we ever tried to do this in the past and it worked out?” All these kinds of reflective reviewing of the current situation, of the current context of what it is that one is trying to accomplish and showing children by example how they can use language, self-directed speech to ask themselves these same sorts of questions prior to responding. The key thing is that as children practice using language in this way to regulate their behaviors – they practice pausing, reflecting, stepping back, considering what they know, what they don’t know, all these things, they get much easier to do. So they happen far more quickly and it gets to the point where as an adult, half of the time, we don’t even realize when we are being reflective. It really does become a kind of habit of mind to switch out of autopilot and take a more intentional approach to solving a problem.
So I think part of what teachers and parents need is some awareness of what executive function is, how it typically develops, how much variation there is among children. For some kids, it seems to develop very rapidly. Other kids lag behind but they’re still perfectly healthy kids who are well within the normal range of variation. So part of what teachers and parents need is some content knowledge. They need to know what they’re looking for and what they can do, but certainly, another part of it is they themselves need those skills in order to orchestrate the complex cultivation of these skills in children.
Sucheta: I wanted to quickly share a wonderful statement my 18 year-old old made. He said, “Mom, smart learners are not great teachers.” So people who are smart, because we were talking about parents of his friends, and I said, “Have your friend’s parents taught your friends these things?” And he said, “They are smart people, mom, but they are just not good teachers,” and that’s such a wonderful observation that to teach, you just went through these wonderful, wonderful principles of being an effective teacher, but they are actually promoting the development of these complex set of skills which go and feed into the self-regulation or self-observation. Simply pausing and extending response time, giving kids a chance to mull over things is a great strategy but everybody is feeling so hurried.
Now, I wanted to share a quick strategy that I use when I do a parent and teacher training. One is that I say the foundational rule is simplifying expectations, so the expectations need to be externally demonstrated and explicitly stated, then they need to be automatized. They need to be internalized and exhibited through behaviors. Then comes the third part which is then, you need to introduce random interruptions. That means whatever the rule is or the expectation is, that needs to be broken intentionally, strategically, and specifically. So for example, if you expect your children to put their shoes outside – bring them inside, then every time, you bring them inside, but one day, you just say, “Today, you’re not going to bring the shoes inside.” Now, they need to know why, or a lot of my parents – one story pops in my head is when Mom said to me that I have this rule that you should bring your shoes, and my son – it was pouring and he had just come from soccer practice and his shoes were muddy. He walked all the way to his bedroom with those muddy shoes and took the shoes off, just the way he does every time when they are not wet and muddy. So that kind of not having where the rule needs an exemption is part of that learning intentionality as we were talking about.
Phil: And it requires a reflection and adaptation to invoke those other notions.
Sucheta: Yes, and patience can be the most fundamental training tool for parents and teachers, and as you mentioned, I use a lot of videotaping and making parent-and-child interactions, making both of them take notes.
Phil: That’s right, that’s exactly effective.
Sucheta: Yes, and I think it externalizes your full notion of perfection within you, right? I also ask parents to record routines of their children when they are getting ready for bed or when you start getting your homework out. I ask them to record these, not more than one minute, and then we make it a habit as a therapeutic process to watch the videos as a tool to kind of evaluate and give yourself feedback, and I find that very helpful as well.
Now, I wanted to move towards, at the heart of executive function management, whether it’s in younger children or more high school and college-bound students, when the demands and complexity of executive function management is exponentially increases, what are a few principles that you would like everybody to know? And design their treatment, coaching, training, whatever you may call it around those principles. What would they be?
Phil: Well, the first principle is that of plasticity, that these are skills that can change, that do change inevitably with experience, and that’s true at the level of behavior, it’s true at the level of brain as well. So first recognizing these are skills that can change, that need to be practiced, etc. The other is that the brain is continually adapting – this is a related point – it’s continually adapting to structure in the environment, and so parents, sometimes serve as a kind of temporary executive function for children as those skills are developing in childhood, and that speaks to the notion of scaffolding or supporting children in the developing of these skills and the process of developing these skills. So in other words, you can take a complex executive function challenge, as you mentioned, the challenges placed on children grow pretty dramatically. There’s a big jump, for example, at kindergarten with their big jumps at various points in a typical child’s life, and what parents can do to help children manage these increases in the demands that are placed based on their executive function skills, they can break the challenge down a little bit and support children as they attempt to meet those challenges.
In the work that we do with young kids, we typically take an executive function challenge, like the game Simon Says, for example, right? Simon says. There’s a game where you say, “Simon Says, touch your head,” and you touch your head, “Touch your nose,” and you are not supposed to touch your nose because it wasn’t preceded by “Simon Says,” and that’s hard to do, right? People listen to touch –
Sucheta: It’s really hard.
Phil: But you can take that task and you can break it down into several different levels of intermediate challenge, so for example, one way to simplify it is you can have two puppets, a dragon and a bear, for example, and the dragon tells you to do things and you always do it and whenever the bear tells you to do something, you never do it, and it’s easier to keep track in that case of when you are supposed to respond, when you are not supposed to respond. You can make it even easier if before the bear speaks and tells you to do something, that you are supposed to ignore. You ask children to sit on their hands so that they are reminded not to respond to that character, and in this way, you can create levels of difficulty of this game. At the highest level where you have straight Simon Says, you can make it even more difficult by, after playing Simon Says, saying, “Okay, now we’re going to switch it. Now, I only want you to respond when I don’t say ‘Simon says.’ If I say ‘Simon says’ then you’re not supposed to respond. So you can create these graded levels of executive function challenge and you can present children with the level of challenge that is best suited for them given their developmental level. I had something that is challenging and engaging –
Sue: They can handle.
Phil: Fun, but something they can handle. Yes, it’s probably a big part of the reason why those kinds of games, like Simon Says and Red Light, Green Light, Duck, Duck, Goose and all these things are engaging for children at that age, because they are challenging their executive function skills. That’s what makes it hard, that’s what make it a challenge and somewhat surprising how hard it is given how simple the instructions are for a game like Simon says. It’s surprising that any of us make these mistakes, and so that is a really good motivating, engaging context in which to help children practice the development of these skills and as an adult, you would have to be reflective and use your own executive function skills in order to provide just the right amount of support, and then to adjust that amount of support as learning proceeds.
Sucheta: Oh, that’s incredible. I think this combination of kind of really be open and willing to change your own skills, your patience, your judgement about children’s abilities or inabilities, and patiently allowing certain skills to develop while nudging certain skills around requires – almost enters the zone of art, teaching as an art and reading between the lines when it comes to certain behaviors as indicative of a skill has run against the wall or is actually in the process of emerging if we repeat it a few more times.
In closing, I had a question about the interventions that you touched upon throughout our talk, but using the science of reflection, could you talk a little bit about your particular intervention strategies that you have found great results with?
Phil: Sure. So our intervention approach started with some laboratory-based studies: bringing children into the laboratory, giving them some a measure of executive function, finding those kids who were struggling. So these would be, typically developing kids, but for example, 3 year-olds struggling with a classic task that 3 year-olds typically failed but 4 year-olds or 5 year-olds might succeed on, and retake those children and then who have shown to be at a particular point in the development of these skills and we deliver to them a kind of brief reflection training intervention where we do the kinds of things I was suggesting parents and teachers can do with children. That is to say, in the context of an executive function challenge, supporting children’s developing skill by providing support, hints, that kind of thing by modeling the appropriate way to respond by teaching children, by asking them open-ended questions, teaching them to ask themselves those open-ended questions – What am I doing here? What am I trying to accomplish? Those kinds of things, so for example –
Sucheta: How young can that be taught? Sorry.
Phil: Well, we’ve done it with children as young as two and a half.
Sucheta: Oh my goodness. That’s amazing.
Phil: We bring these kids into the lab, we give them a task like the dimensional page card sort where you have to sort pictures by shape and then switch and sort that color, and children show characteristically, rigidity at around that age – two and a half, three years of age, it gets stuck in sorting by a particular dimension, and in the context of a task like that, you can ask children questions like, “So you put the card over here. That means you were looking at the color, but what shape is it? Oh, that’s right, it’s a rabbit. And is there another rabbit here? Yes, there is a rabbit. See, that could be sorted with that one because they are both rabbits,” and talking through the task, helping children to reflect upon it and construct a kind of high order representation where they themselves can say something like, “I get it. If we are sorting by color, if we’re playing the color game, then I put the colors together that go together, but if we are playing the shape game, then I sort the same pictures differently – I sort them by shape,” and so children are moving towards being able to use language to reflect on the situation and say to themselves in effect, “First, I have to pay attention to the shape now, and then now that I’m paying attention to the shape, which shape is it? Is it a rabbit or is it a boat? And that’s how I determine where it goes,” or if they are playing Simon says, “We are playing Simon Says, and so I have to remember, whenever he doesn’t say ‘Simon says’ or she doesn’t say ‘Simon Says,’ then I don’t respond,” and so keeping that picture in mind as you proceed rather than just responding more directly to a cue in the usual habitual fashion, like somebody says, “Touch your nose,” but they didn’t say Simon Says, and so you just go ahead and touch your nose.
So we model for children and we give them practice interrogating themselves and reflecting, and what we found is that even a very brief kind of intervention like that in a laboratory, about 20 minutes or so was sufficient to cause about half of the children in our sample now to succeed at the measure of executive function that they were having difficulty with initially. We have also shown that whatever it is that children learn from this intervention also was displayed in their perspective-taking, so a very different kind of measure. There was some evidence of the transfer of whatever was trained to new tasks, and we also, our research have recorded brain activity using an electroencephalogram and looking at event-related potentials prior to intervention and after intervention, what we’ve found is that even a very brief intervention, 20 minutes or so brings about changes in children’s neural activity such that they now look like older children. Their brain responses are more mature as a consequence of this kind of training.
I think that this illustrates the way in which these skills are indeed typically acquired. There are neural networks in the brain that support the use of attention in various ways – flexible attention, sustained attention, selective attention, and exercising those neural networks, practicing the behavior changes the neural networks and increases the effectiveness and efficiency of the behavior, and so we have now taken that work out of the laboratory and embedded these principles of reflection: scaffolding, modeling, self interrogation, the use of self-directed speech into various curricula we sometimes call the mindfulness plus reflection training or other times that we’ve been able to test on a larger scale in authentic classroom setting, and increasingly, that research leads me to believe that this is the most effective way to cultivate the development of these skills, and not only that but to cultivate these skills in a way that supports their generalization to new situations because we’re not just teaching children, for example, how to inhibit attention to distractors in the context of, say a video game but we are teaching children to be able to reflect on their own executive function skills, to know that they can use them to identify situations when they are appropriate to use, and so on. So I think that the addition of reflection training to the practice of particular executive function skills supports the generalization of these skills to new situations because you’re also increasing children’s metacognitive understanding of their own executive function skills.
Sucheta: What I really find mind-blowing about your research, and I had a conversation with Stephanie as well, that you have been able to impact or measure the impact at the very young age, which most commonsensical or conventional wisdom may not have a buy-in because you just don’t expect that children will be able to reflect or mediate through language and use inner speech or externalized speech to regulate behaviors or problem solve.
I am so hopeful that your work with have groundbreaking effect, not just in the way people parent and also really, the way we educate when we are managing a class. It’s been a terrific honor to have you as well as an absolutely invigorating conversation. I cannot thank you, Phil, for your time.
Before I let you go, if people want to get ahold of you and find out more about your work, what is the best way to find out about your research?
Phil: Well, Google works pretty well. There are various things on the web, talks and websites and stuff that provide some of that information.
Sucheta: And we will link that on our website as well for people to have easy access to.
Phil: Absolutely, but also, feel free to email me and I can give you my email address as well. It’s zelazo@umn.edu.
Sucheta: Fantastic, and you will also link that on our website. So once again, thank you for your time and it’s been terrific to have a conversation with you. Thank you.
Producer: Alright. Wow, Sucheta, yet another dynamic conversation with Dr. Phil Zelazo. What’s your take on it?
Sucheta: Well, first of all, Dr. Zelazo’s important message is that executive function skills can be cultivated, nurtured, strengthened and put to test with carefully crafted activities by parents and educators. It is so important for everybody to remember that and focus on that, in fact. This can be done with very young kids, as young as preschoolers or even younger than that. Unlike intelligence, he kind of emphasized that where you solve problems and learn executive function skills are employed in an ongoing basis. As you do more work, you are applying your executive function skills to test and they are the skills that are related to demonstrating an ability, not having an ability and mastering an ability. It is demonstrating it, and so you keep on demonstrating that in various ways. Novel, unfamiliar, and unpredictable situations is when most executive function skills are put to test. We need to practice these skills and only then, we can cultivate and imbibe the skillset that we are referring to here.
So executive function skills cannot be simply talked about. You cannot have a discussion or a presentation, or a lecture. The child can simply be told to adapt or shift his mindset. Rather, he needs to know how to adapt and shift his mindset by adapting and shifting in difficult and different situations. So let me give you a quick example. Let’s say James is doing his work in his class and his pencil tip breaks. If James stops doing his work, it’s a problem, but if he gets up and looks for a pencil or sharpener, that’s a good thing, but if he just wanders through the classroom goofing off, that could be a problem. So James needs to get up with a very specific intention to get his pencil ready so he can continue to write. If he looks for a sharpener and can’t find it, he needs to shift gear and begin to look for another pencil without losing sight that ‘I need to get this pencil so I can come back to writing.’ He must not stop until he has a pencil in his hand to do the work that he stopped doing when the pencil tip broke. This is what the top-down or intentional executive function system looks like, and we need to create ways that the children do that by recognizing when they have stopped producing or demonstrating.
Just to summarize, if James fails at a single thing that I just described, he’s going to have a problem in becoming successful in the classroom. So in short, at home, moms and dads cannot simply tell James that he should use another pencil. In the classroom, teacher shouldn’t just simply hand another pencil to James, but what needs to happen is a collective effort for James to discover that he needs to have a pencil to continue to do his work.
Producer: Yes, the collective effort. I have to say, Sucheta, it just seems to me, it sounds like coaching children to reflect sounds like a lot of fun, actually.
Sucheta: Yes, you are an enthusiastic new learner, I can see, and same thing, the vibes I got from Dr. Zelazo as well. He has built his career around reflection signs and his work has shown how children can develop these abilities with coaching and training. He has designed an experiment which he didn’t get too much into it but I know from his work where he has created opportunities for young children to practice a game that requires switching flexibly between rules for sorting pictures by color, and then by shape, or form shape first and then by color. The experiment, for example, puts for two conditions. One condition was where the child has to reflect, and then the second condition was non-reflection condition. So in the non-reflection condition, the only feedback the child got, whether he was right or wrong, so he had to first identify shapes, and then second time, identify colors, but if he didn’t do it successfully, all he was told was, “You were wrong.” In the reflection condition, on the other hand, the children were given feedback and were encouraged to reflect on the rule, and they were helped to bring their attention into focus about the rule having changed. After the training, children who received reflection training showed better executive function skills.
What’s fascinating about this particular experiment that I just described, that the brain activity in these children also showed activation just as much as older children’s brain does. So this is kind of the sign of maturation, and so we are building or reconstructing new pathways in the brain by introducing this process of reflecting on the rules and reflecting on the shift in behavior needed to be in accordance with the shift in the rules.
Producer: You know what? No doubt in my mind that Dr. Zelazo’s work, it just has to be really helpful for parents and educators alike, yes?
Sucheta: Absolutely. That is what my third takeaway was, that the classroom and home environment where a child is provided with opportunities to practice their executive function skills is ideal. So this needs to be done in optimal conditions, just enough challenge and not too much. What it does is it creates some desire and motivate children to take on the challenge but they don’t feel defeated or they don’t feel paralyzed by the roadblocks. Ideally, what parents and teachers should do is sprinkle daily learning with roadblocks that are not impossible to overcome or have any discouraging effects on the child, but they require effort. In the reflection training condition as we talked earlier, children were given feedback and those were increased to reflect, showed greater understanding of their own behavior, and they found ways to circumvent the errors in the future, and that’s what a good classroom can do.
What the message to me is that teachers need to take time to engage in reflection as a separate activity and being completely mindful that that actually is building executive function, so after you finish math, you need to do reflection. After you do reading, you need to do reflection. But after you even line up and go for lunch and come back, you need to do reflection. And after you come from playground, you need to do reflection. Now, this reflection itself which is giving student encouragement and feedback about the changes in rules can have great impact on building skills.
Producer: Yes, no doubt about it. I understand now that this work on reflection can have lifelong ramifications, positive ramifications. It’s very exciting, but I imagine some teachers and some parents make this almost a punitive effort, so what I’ve learned from Dr. Zelazo is that this can be fun and engaging and exciting, and really, really beneficial. Good stuff.
Sucheta, any other final thoughts?
Sucheta: Yes, if you permit me, Todd, I’m going to take it up a notch and kind of talk about this process of reflection at a much higher level, elevating yourself, so to speak. I have read Mark Leary, a social psychologists, who talks about some self can be one’s own enemy and he talks about three inner barriers to personal advancement. First, he says that hyper focus on mundane materialistic concerns and when a person is engaged in that materialistic concern or is indulged and egocentric state, he is less able to elevate himself or overcome self, and as you can see, what is the problem with that self-indulgent egocentric state is you are not able to take perspective on self and in psychological sciences, it’s called self-dispensing.
The second barrier that Professor Leary talks about is, to evolve to a higher plane or to engage in the top-down system, one has to be centered – other centered, and hold back your personal agenda, so to stop thinking about self and think about other people’s needs, other people’s minds, other people’s agenda requires a lot of letting go of your personal greed, I’m saying, and I’m not talking about greed in terms of financial greed but greed to be more self important, and that’s something, I think the science of reflection can really help us with.
Lastly, the practices that put others first are hard and they demand unequivocal commitment which means foregoing the pursuit of immediate self-gratification, and that’s really hard, and particularly very difficult in this day and age, so I do think that by engaging in the tools that Dr. Zelazo was talking about or all the podcast interviews I have done and we have learned from the experts, the game is about learning to think from a perspective of the other and suspending the self-centered thoughts, and those can really help you elevate yourself to a higher plane.
Producer: Well, and I’m learning that when you achieve that skill, boy, it’s life-changing. Fascinating stuff.
All the time that we have for today. On behalf of our host, Sucheta Kamath, and all of us at Cerebral Matters, thank you for listening today. We look forward to seeing you again next week on Full PreFrontal.