My name is Joyce Cooper-Kahn. I’m a clinical psychologist and I work primarily with children and teens who have problems with executive functioning.
Executive functioning is such a fuzzy term for some people. It sometimes described as the conductor of the orchestra or the CEO of the brain. Basically executive functioning is the term that covers all of the neurological processes associated with goal directed behavior.
The metaphor that I like to use for executive functioning is it’s like the navigator on our car. I can plug in a destination and it will not only keep track of where I am but where I am in relation to my goal, exactly what steps I need to take to get there and it will give me a prediction based on the pace that I’m going based on the traffic, when am I likely to arrive.
It adjusts if I make a wrong turn if there’s more traffic than we expect. So it’s this process of supervising my intention of getting to a destination and it keeps adjusting my efforts in order to reach that goal. So that’s essentially what our executive functions do for us and the goal might be I want to finish my chores by four o’clock because then I can go to the playground or it might be I need to finish this project by April 3rd so that I can get a good grade on it.
Or it might be I want to get all my homework done so my mom doesn’t yell at me today. Any and all of those goals are supervised by our executive functioning system and so that’s the system that pays attention to what we intend to achieve, how we’re going to get there.
So we can break down that larger task of executive functioning in a variety of different ways. There appears to be one neurological circuit that primarily handles behavioral and emotional functioning and another circuit that’s primarily responsible for cognitive functioning.
They overlap of course, but the beauty is that the more research we accumulate, the more it seems to mirror what we’ve known all along that those things can happen in an individual, be delayed or be a strength, and sometimes both things are in sync, sometimes they are separate pieces.
