30 Essential Ideas you should know about ADHD, 3A The Five Executive Functions

I would want parents to understand something that the vast majority of the lay population does not understand self control is not learned it is not the result of your upbringing and how good your parents were this is one of the most profound insights from our research on ADHD ADHD is we will see is largely a narrow genetic disorder but then let's pursue the implication if that is true and ADHD is a self regulation disorder than self control is largely narrow genetic in origin that has a philosophically perfect one conclusion the vast majority a variation in the people sitting in this room in their ability to manage their behavior is not from how they were raised it is a part of who they are it is a part love their new road genetic gifts and that is very stunning indeed that our capacity for regulating ourselves is a neurobiological trait not some socially learned phenomena that you just happen to pick up from your parents so I would want them to know that ADHD being a self regulation to solder is a rising out of neuro genetic causes and that this inability to direct behavior toward yourself comes from impairment in the following 5 executive abilities and these have to do with brain development not with training it does not mean the training cannot enhanced on it means that they don't originate at the beginning in training in the social environment the social environment requires that they be there already and then it will help to shape them to become more proficient think if your language ability you didn't learn language but it doesn't mean that you can't become more proficient in how you speak and how you write but speaking and writing are not accounted for on the basis merely love training by your parents you're going to develop a language no matter where you grow up editing neurobiological tree and it unfolds as the brain unfolds it is an instant and so is self control but so control can be reduced to these five things what are the five things you do to yourself these are the things your child struggles to do number one can you stop can you wat because as revelation said in the novel Gargantua worked most if you have never read I'm sure but it is where this phrase comes from everything comes to those who can wait the waiting is the tough part you must build in a pause between the event and what you plan to do about it and an ADHD there is no POS the event happens and your responses up out done is if there was no front part to the brain it is as if you were like any other species with the spinal cord event respond to vent response or as an A gary larson cartoon member the far side to amoebas a husband and wife talking to each other one amoeba the wife of course says to her husband stimulus-response stimulus-response don't you ever think characterizes ADHD right there don't you ever think once you stop you will engage in four subsequent actions the first is mental imagery you will recall the past and you will play a DVD of it in your head you other theater in your mind it a short usual imagery system the mind's eye so your child not only cannot stop they cannot visualize as well as other children and what they do not visualize before they act is the past the relevant trashed do you have experiences in this situation previously if so what would they have told you to do lay people call this hindsight and the word site is no coincidence you are usually imagining your history what does it have to say and you like hunt how this will lead to foresight you look back to anticipate what is ADHD lied to me no foresight you are not thinking ahead because you weren't looking back either plain sight in foresight are the opposite sides are the same coin visual imagery so you will not use your images have your past to tell you what to do you will just do and then by five years of age you will get the third executive deficit you can talk to yourself young children by five years of age are beginning to internalize their speech and use it on themselves just watch any first- and second-grade classroom and you will see this if you have a three to five year old you'll hear it they're talking to themselves out loud most the day whether anyone is in the room or not mission to bed time and you will hear what I mean but over the next ten years this external Voice gets directed to themselves and slowly made private and mental in its form and so originates the voice in your head and that voice in your head is there for one very important reason it's to help control yourself you start telling yourself what to do and it starts to work and now any family I would explain this to you would understand that not only can your child not stop and only do they not have the mind's eye they don't have the mines Voice and what is dare is very week it's not controlling them so now you know why they can't do what you tell them to do I can't follow instructions they can follow the rules they can internalize the rules the situation because everything I have just said requires a voice in your head and they don't have that the next comes from the first three and that is the mines heart the ability to manage your emotions so that they are more socially acceptable so that they are consistent with your goals not conflicting with your welfare and so we will see the ADHD child as we've already described him easily frustrated quick to anger impatient and just overall more excitable and more emotional than others but what gets lost in this explanation is something more fundamental our emotions are our motivations if you cannot manage your emotions you cannot manage your motivation either because the fourth executive ability is the source of self-motivation self motivation is the fuel tank for all future directed behavior there is no getting ready for tomorrow if there is no self motivation so what is the ADHD child lost here they cannot motivate themselves what does that mean it means that you will always be dependent on the environment around you and it immediate consequences for how hard and how long you can work and if there are no consequences in that context you cannot work you cannot persist you will not get it done the fourth executive ability now explains to these parents why this child can play video games for hours and can not do homework for more than a few minutes because the video game provides external continuous a hundred percent consequences for interacting with that and the homework does nothing when a problem is solved on a sheet of paper nothing happens consequences are delayed and therein lies the trouble so the corollary of this is if you wanna see an ADHD person fail you put him in an environment where there are no consequences and I guarantee you feel your the work will not get done because the person cannot self-motivated and this is not a choice and this is not willful and this is not a child who just could if they wished wake up tomorrow and smell the coffee and get busy and do the work they cannot this is an internal neuro genetic executive failure you can't self-motivated like other people so it doesn't matter what your goals are you won't get there because self-motivation is required for all goal-directed actions the final executive ability which will not emerge until a childhood in the person with ADHD is the mines playground this is the ability to plan and problems of how many different possible options can you generate right now to get around this problem this ability to simulate multiple possible future options is the highest executive function in humans it is the source of all cultural innovation but it originates in problem-solving how quickly in your mind can you think have multiple ways to overcome the problem you just encountered and people with ADHD will struggle with this one as much as with the others so if you want to understand ADHD as a parent you have got to understand these are the five things that are deadly in dis child the ability to stop to use visual imagery to use your mines Voice to use our minds heart in emotion and motivation and when called upon to do so to simulate multiple possibilities when faced with the problem or when planning out what you hope to do planning and problem solving those are the five executive abilities we know where they are in the frontal lobe we know that ADHD children have lost all five of them actually that a bit of an overstatement it's not that they don't have them it's that they are quite delayed and we will discuss the delay in a moment so ADHD lead you to act on impulse not resist distraction you are less able to think back about what you are doing about the action that lies ahead you cannot use your hindsight and therefore your foresight is gone you do not plan ahead you live in the moment this is going to rob you of your sense of time because the center time comes from looking back to look ahead looking across time and knowing where I'm going you will not have a subjective sent to time and that alone is going to be a devastating adult disability you have the consummate disorder of time management it's no wonder they're always late you will not be able to talk to yourself to reason with yourself to ask yourself questions and to remind yourself of the rules that are governing the immediate situation and therefore doesn't matter what people say to you over and over and over again you long do which no amount of nattering by your teacher or your mother overcome the internal mind Voice deficit you will not be able to use language as well as other people to regulate yourself and that is going to the also lead you to have a self motivation problem and a problem with regulating your emotions and was self soothing when you do become emotional and then as we've said you will have trouble with planning and problem-solving so if you wanna know the symptoms listed ADHD this is it the DSM is but a mere superficial reflection are the most obvious symptoms up these five executive deficits but to truly understand ADHD you need to know that these five are all there underneath to refer to ADHD is inattention is to refer to autism as hand flapping and speaking funny they are the most obvious symptoms up a failure to develop the ability to relate to others a special objects as humans and out is what autism really is under needs the rest a bit is just the most superficial set of symptoms so I would want my family to understand the profundity up these deficits because inattention hardly captures what is going wrong in development

Channel: Adhd Videos

Views: 463,604

Keywords: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (Disease Or Medical Condition), Attention Deficit Disorder (Disease Or Medical Condition), ADD, ADHD, Executive Functions, The Mind's Playground, The Mind's Eye, Can you Stop, The Mind's Voice, The Mind's Awareness of Itself, Barkley, Essential Ideas

Id: Illf_Hsy570

Length: 12min 54sec (774 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 22 2014