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, good to be with you as always. Looking forward to today’s conversation with today’s guest, but before we go there, you’re going to walk us through some ideas around one-click shopping, mindlessness, five ways to stop mindless shopping. What does that have to do with executive functions?

Sucheta Kamath: Great question, Todd. Do you agree that humans are weak when it comes to temptations?

Producer: Yes, and I say that because I’m talking about me.

Sucheta: Well, you and all of us, so there’s no difference between you and I, honestly. Well, we lost a tiny bit of power to resist in 1999 when Amazon was first granted a one-click patent. That allowed Amazon to store consumer’s payment and address details, information, so that the consumer did not need to really bother entering anything other than one click, and Amazon this way created an oasis of the least time-consuming and sectionless shopping experience, but of course, it weakened the brain’s executive function, if you ask me.

Fast forward 17 years, and in her article, Five Ways to Stop Your Mindless Spending, Emily Guy Birken writes: “This kind of spending without thought is remarkably easy these days,” nearly every device we touch gives us an opportunity to spend money even if we never set foot in a brick-and-mortar store, and she proceeds to give five tips, number one being, “Use gift cards for online purchases; second, she says, “Record all your purchases; third, she says pay attention to the context; fourth, she says, “Give every dollar a home,” and finally, she says, “Keep a running list of things you need.” Emily has noticed that by allowing her credit card information to be synced with one-click ordering, all her devices, she has food from intentionally thinking, planning, evaluating, and then ordering, to just mindless clicking, and that is what brings me to today’s topic and our guest.

We need -in fact, in 2017 – tools to circumvent mindlessness. When it comes to shopping, we even need articles like ‘five ways of preventing mindless shopping,’ but if you really think about what the underlying message is, that we need to create or put barriers, more additional layers of protection to circumvent the pleasures that we are seeking and really enter a pause button, and that’s what brings me to our guest today.

His name is Dr. Phil Zelazo who 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 shaped current scientific understanding of executive function and its development, including the key role of self-reflection, rule use, hierarchical complexity, mindlessness, and emotion.

This work has led to design widely used standardized measures of executive function, and then to the creation of effective interventions for promoting the healthy development of executive function in early childhood. Professor Zelazo’s research has been honored by numerous awards including 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, senior fellow of the Mind and Life Institute, and Scientific Advisor for Vroom and understood.org. He serves numerous editorial boards and he is one of my favorite speakers, and it’s my great pleasure to bring Dr. Zelazo to the podcast today.

Producer: Yes, Sucheta, I’m looking forward to the conversation.

I’m thinking about this one-click to buy on Amazon. It was very tempting. It was very easy; there was no friction to mindlessly buy things, so I actually had to disable that in my account and it’s actually made quite a difference. Very, very interesting.

Well, I’m looking forward to this conversation. Let’s get right to it. Here is Sucheta’s conversation with Dr. Phil Zelazo.

Sucheta: Welcome to the show, Phil. It’s such an honor to have you.

So let me jump right into it. When defining executive function, scientists, researchers, or experts often say that executive function is one of a number of overlapping constructs and it is involved in the top down deliberate goal-directed modulations, and many parts of this definition is lost on people. Do you mind walking us through each element of that? What does ‘top down’ mean? ‘Deliberate mean?’ ‘Overlapping constructs’ mean?

Dr. Phil Zelazo: Absolutely. So it’s one of a number of overlapping constructs, as you mentioned, including cognitive control, self-regulation, self-control, and all of these in place of intentionality, so they are different from merely being responsive to the environment, and instead, they indicate a kind of proactive,  engagement with the world, and ‘top down’ is a metaphor used in contrast to ‘bottom up’ where ‘bottom up’ is more automatic where, for example, you are responding to suggestions from the environment in a reactive way, then top down is, as I say, more proactive and intentional where you are acting as an agent and acting in light of your goals, in light of your conscious desires and beliefs. We refer to executive function as a set of skills. Really, it’s referring to a set of ways of using attention, because these attention skills or attention regulation skills are reasonably well understood in terms of the brain and the developing brain. We sometimes refer to them as neurocognitive skills, just meaning that there’s a cognitive development and we have some insight into the way in which those skills are embodied in the brain. As you mentioned, there are several aspects of executive function skills that people call out in particular, and they have to do, as I say, with ways of using attention – use our attention in a number of different ways. We can be flexible with our attention, we can sustain our attention on a single thing for a period of time, and we can attend selectively to one thing and ignore other things that might be going on at the same time, and so those three ways of using attention map onto the behaviors that people typically use to measure executive function skills and individuals including developing children. So we measure cognitive flexibility which, more broadly, it does capture the flexible use of attention, but more broadly, it can be understood as thinking flexibly about a single thing. So for example, looking at something from multiple points of view or taking somebody else’s perspective on a situation in the context of psychometric assessments, neuropsychological tests and the like, often, measures of task-switching are used. So you are responding in a particular way to a stimulus when it appears on a computer monitor, for example, but then given a cue, you might have to respond to that same stimulus in a different way. I’ll give some specific examples in just a moment. In addition to cognitive flexibility, when we sustain our attention on something over time, we are engaging what is referred to as ‘working memory,’ keeping information actively in mind so that you can use it in this kind of top down way as a reference to guide your behavior in light of your goals. We also mentioned using attention selectively. This maps onto what is sometimes called ‘inhibitory control’ or ‘impulse control,’ and first and foremost, it has to do with ignoring distracting information and continuing to pay attention to whatever it is you are trying to attend to. So in other words, attend selectively. Here, you might measure this by showing participants a variety of stimuli on a computer monitor and they are told to attend just selectively to some set of the stimuli, like only pay attention to the middle stimulus, for example, and ignore the distracting stimuli on the periphery. So in other words, we’ve got this set of three ways of using attention, three sets of attention regulation skills: cognitive flexibility, working memory, inhibitory control, and all of these are used in the service of intentional action, of doing things in light of our goals, and by controlling our attention, we end up controlling our speech and our overt motor behavior, and our emotional reactions, the things we can regulate our motivation to do something, or we can calm ourselves down and create, as mentioned earlier, psychological distance from whatever it is that we’re doing. In general, it’s useful, I think, to contract our active function skills with what we normally mean by intelligence, which has more to do with knowing what to do in a particular situation, whereas these attention regulation skills, these executive function skills are important for being able to act on the basis of what you know, to translate what you know when to behavior, for example. So executive function skills have less to do with knowing the right answer to a problem and more to do with being able to put that knowledge into practice or use that knowledge in order to accomplish whatever it is you are trying to accomplish.

Sucheta: I love the way you just explained. I think using this attention as a central feature which I think that simplifies a lot about what you just said, the top down and goal-directed thinking and behaviors, I also liked the way you said that attention then converts into intention, then you are not just being attention but you are continuously monitoring what you are paying attention to matters. With a lot of patients that I deal with, I always say to them that it’s not knowing what you know but it’s showing what you know and your ability to show through actions, through speech, and through inhibition, which is by not speaking or not doing the action also shows what you know. Correct?

Phil: Absolutely. So in our work on executive function, we really emphasized the important role that reflection plays and it plays a number of different roles: first, there’s noticing when it’s important to, as it were, shift out of autopilot and instead adopt the more intentional stance towards what it is what is doing. So much of what we do in life, we can do without paying full attention. We get by as it were on autopilot but occasionally, we encounter an obstacle or some source of uncertainty, and those are the situations where we say, “Oh, wait a minute, we’ve got a problem here,” and we have to stop moving along without reflecting and instead pause and consider the situation where we find ourselves, and so knowing when to be intentional and when to invoke one’s executive function skills is an important part of reflection, of passing of a reflection, but we also mentioned the ongoing monitoring of what it is that one is doing, and reflection plays a key role there too. By reflecting, what we mean is on the behavior level, stopping stepping back, putting things into perspective, considering, “wait a minute, where am I, what am I trying to do? What do I know that is relevant to accomplishing my goals?” these kinds of questions that allow for somebody to create a more complex nuance representation of the situation in which they find themselves so that they can respond in a more adaptive fashion to the challenges that they face.

Sucheta: You know, I love Susan Sontag’s poem, one line of poetry, she said, “The best gift you can give to others is your attention,” and that captures everything of what you are just saying. I wanted to tie this into self-regulation which is often, something in the context of education, self-regulated learning often comes up. So the idea behind is that self-regulation which is, “I know who I am as a learner, I know my strengths, I know my weaknesses – hope I know my weaknesses and my strengths – and then how do I utilize my strengths to compensate for my weaknesses, and when I do that, then I’m regulating myself?” is that a right way to think about self-regulation and how do we relate that to executive function?

Phil: I think that is a very useful way to think about self-regulation. It refers specifically to a kind of intentional self-regulation where we regulate ourselves in a variety of different ways – homeostatic, biological processes that occur within us that we have little awareness of. If we are sleep-deprived, we tend to get tired and we are more likely to fall asleep early and that kind of thing. Those are forms of self-regulation but they can be contrasted with the kind of intentional, like deliberate self-regulation that you were describing where you are quite actively consciously on purpose paying attention to what you know and what you are learning and how you are learning, and so on, and executive function comes to play in intentional self-regulation, so I tend to think of self-regulation as the broader concept, and within it, you have more or less intentional forms of self-regulation, and executive function skills come into play when it is intentionally regulating one’s self, one’s behavior. So we could think of these as a particularly relatively well-defined set of neurocognitive skills that support intentional self-regulation.

Sucheta: I see. So one observation I have about people that I work with, that those who have executive function difficulties or deficits also struggle with self-observation skills, so their insight into self, their ability to observe the right aspect of their behavior that cause uponchange, or their ability to use what is the true nature of their strengths that they can utilize for weaknesses is not aligned properly, and so they are not the best self-advocates. They are not able to summarize their problems clearly. They get into this fixed mindset because they tend to view their own difficulties from one rigid way of thinking. Do you see any connection in your work, how self-regulation, limitations, and executive limitations go hand-in-hand?

Phil: Yes, absolutely. I think that’s a very astute observation and perhaps not an uncommon one to note that individuals who have difficulty with executive function skills also tend to have difficulty with self-reflection and self-awareness, and I think the reason is because some degree of self-awareness, some degree of self-reflection is a prerequisite for, for example, noticing the need to be intentional as opposed to more reactive and automatic, and knowing in particular when to invoke executive function skills. So knowing why it’s going to be important to rehearse information, to keep it in mind so that you don’t forget what you are trying to accomplish, so that you can use your plan to guide your behavior in an ongoing fashion.

So our work has really focused on the co-development of self-reflection and executive function skills: the metacognition that’s required to know that you have these skills and how to use them and how you use them effectively.

Sucheta: And I think that’s really the unique part of your work that I find not very common because people either tend to focus on one aspect or the other. I really appreciate that. That has tremendous – at least, has influenced my work or has given me great framework to work with.

I wanted to bring the conversation about social skills now that we’re talking about executive function and self-regulation. Strong executive function skills are essential for taking perspective, either taking a perspective on yourself or taking a perspective on other people, and really, that empathic stand in pro-social behaviors, how do I know what you are going through or how do I change my response based on your response of my response? And so that Theory of Mind that skills, can you help our listeners understand the complex relationship between why poor executive function skills often lead to having poor social skills?

Phil: So the development of those kinds of social understanding skills are called Theory of Mind that skills and the development of executive function skills are indeed closely linked. There’s plenty of literature, research literature, showing how closely tied those two aspects of human development are, and from our perspective, they both involve some of the same underlying cognitive processes, most especially reflection. So in order to appreciate somebody else’s point of view, for example, one needs to step away from one’s own perspective on a situation and recognize that it’s just one among other possible ways of looking at that something, and so in order imaginatively to appreciate what somebody else might be seeing in a particular situation or feeling in a situation, we need to engage in some degree of reflection where we distance ourselves from our own point of view and consider that point of view in relation to somebody else’s perspective. It’s a reflections involved, but of course, executive functioning skills are also involved. It requires some effort and use of inhibitory control to ignore one’s own way of thinking about something and even consider somebody else’s way of thinking about something. Engaging in this kind of empathic imagination where you are taking somebody else’s perspective also requires that you sustain your behavior over time, that you stay focused on your goal, that you don’t get distracted, and that you’d be flexible considering not only how, for example, the world looks to you but how it might look to somebody else who makes different assumptions or comes at the same scene from a different perspective.

Two skills: our executive function skills are involved on taking other people’s point of view and understanding other people’s feelings, and reflection is involved in both empathy and the executive function.

Sucheta: Yes, and I love the way you are saying that often, in order to activate thoughts of other people’s thoughts about you or others’ thoughts about themselves requires you to suspend or inhibit your own thoughts about you, and that requires a great amount of working memory and that does require you to activate many frames of references.

Phil: And shift flexibly as well, so all three of those aspects.

Sucheta: And shift flexibly back and forth, yes, and in one of the training components, what I do is a lot of schema analysis – just helping people develop framework of thought process so they can actually recognize components that make the big picture and look at the big picture, and anticipate the components, and once you begin that process, I find that they are able to shift much more readily from one frame of reference to another frame of reference.

I wanted to now kind of see if you can talk about cognitive blind spots, like cognitive dissonance or discounting, or self justification. I find that it’s not just a cognitive limitation with people with executive function; they tend to be much more rigid and inflexible, and hence, their desire or how all of us are wired to resolve the dissonance, they tend to have much more rigid perspective. I don’t have any research to prove that but that’s my clinical experience – discounting teachers or discounting feedback. They are quick to conclude that these kinds of people tend to do these kinds of things. They tend to not give up on their opinions once they form it. Do you have any thoughts about that?

Phil: Well, I do think that reflection is a skill. It’s a kind of habit of mind, you might say, that involves not just responding rapidly based on the first sense of understanding that one has but keeping an open mind over time and revisiting one’s construal or interpretation of the way things are, and so it makes sense to me that there would be a close relation between a tendency not to engage in reflection and a tendency to be rigid and to discount, disconfirming information, and the like as you described. So I think it has to do with the criteria that one sets for being prepared to respond and commit oneself in action to an interpretation, and so as I suggested earlier, if we are going to rise as it were on autopilot, I’m walking along a familiar route or something like this, I hardly have to pay attention to where I’m going because I follow the same route every day, that sort of thing. I might not be paying attention to the route that I’m taking but instead be thinking about something else, whereas if I encounter an obstacle, if there’s a roadblock or something and I have to think about, “Oh, okay, I can’t proceed in the usual fashion,” so I need to pause and reflect, and consider what my goal is. I need to get home but the road is blocked, and so then I consider, what do I know that might be relevant here? Have I ever taken an alternative route home? Do I know if there is a way to go, a shortcut or something like that? And that is all an example of essentially thinking before acting.

In many cases, of course, where things are going just fine, we don’t need to think much before acting. We just respond to the environment, to the suggestions that we perceive in the environment. I think that is what you’re getting at with rigidity and the possibility that, for example, people with difficulties with executive function might end up being more likely to discount, disconfirming information. If you’ve seen that in your practice, for example, the way I would interpret it is that almost by definition, individuals with difficulties with executive function skills are not in the habit of reflecting prior to responding, and so they are more likely to, as it were, be operating on autopilot where they might be called upon to make a decision.

Sucheta: Yes, certainly, that resonates with me, and also, I think what you said so elegantly is that habit of mind. I think reflection can be sense of self and that requires a lot of investment of self into benefiting from the observations you make, and many of them – or at least some of them – are painful, painful truths about self.

I wanted to, in closing, ask you a question about developmental stages of capacity for reflection. Is there a gradual gradation with which this can develop and is it measurable, or do we have an understanding, or is it like a light switch that can be turned on or turned off?

Phil: Good question. It is not like a light switch but rather a more gradual developmental process. Executive function skills can be measured even in infancy. A classic example is an infant searching for a hidden object, so an examiner takes an object, a toy, for example that the infant is playing with, and puts it under one of two different claws and the infant has to keep the location of the toy in mind and guide their search to the correct claw in order to retrieve the object. The test gets more difficult when you first hide it in one location and then after that, maybe find that you then take it and you hide it at the other location, and so now, the object is hidden and they have to remember where it is, but they also have to resist any tendency that they may have to return to the original location where they found it the first time. A lot of babies, in fact, do return to that first location. They show a form of rigidity. They found it at the first location once, and so now, you hide it at a new location and…

Sucheta: Keep going back.

Phil: Going back, yes, to initial hiding place. There are very good psychometric measures for – or I should say, psychometrically-found measures for measuring executive function skills starting at about age 2 and spanning across the lifespan. One of the measures that we created, Stephanie Carlson and I, it’s called the Minnesota Executive Function Scale and it’s an iPad – sorry, tablet-based app that is based on extensive norms and has a very good reliability and validity, and all that sort of stuff. Anyway, if you use a measure like that, what you see is that executive function develops very rapidly in early childhood between about 2 and 6 years of age, and it continues to develop through adolescence. There’s another period of relatively rapid development around the transition to adolescence or the beginning of adolescence around puberty, and performance on most of these kinds of measures of executive function is, direct behavioral assessments reaches a peak typically in young adulthood at about age 25 or so, and then in the general population, tends to decline as people age, so neurologists sometimes talk about executive function skills as ‘last in and first out;’ they’re slow to develop, but partly for that reason, because they are so complex and they depend on the integration of very many different parts of the brain, they’re also pretty vulnerable to disruption, and so with cognitive aging, with age-related diseases, things like alcoholism and other sorts of things, all can contribute to a decline in the efficiency and proficiency of one’s executive function skills.

There are some stage-like characteristics that can be protected, so there seem to be some fairly dramatic and qualitative changes – seemingly qualitative changes – that take place around at the end of the preschool period, but mostly, intensive investigation suggests the pattern of development that’s consistent with the use of dependent increase in the efficiency of the neural networks that underlie these executive function skills, which suggests that it’s more of a continuous gradual process, that these skills tend to develop very rapidly in early childhood – but probably because they are relatively new; there’s still a lot to learn – and parents and society places a lot of emphasis on helping children to develop these skills during that age range, helping to prepare them to the degree of autonomy, independence that they need in order to go to school for the first time and succeed in learning in a classroom environment.

So I’d be inclined to say that we can describe seemingly stage-like increments in the development of these skills, but probably, it’s like any other skill: it’s a question of learning how to behave in a particular way, and the more you behave in that way, the more efficient you get in behaving in that way, and there are these corresponding increases in the efficiency of the underlying neural networks. So extraneous neural connections are pruned away, leaving only the ones that really matter, and so the ones that remain end up functioning more efficiently. They are processes like myelination that take place that increase the speed of neurotransmission and so on.

So to answer your question simply, I think it’s something that develops gradually. It’s always developing. Our brain, as we know, are always changing. It’s a function of our behavior and our interactions with the environment, and I’m inclined to think that executive function skills are, at the end of the day, really just like any other skill. They are something that you learn by doing and you get better at them by using them.

Sucheta: Doing more. I know this was my last question but I have to ask then, the fact that the executive functions which are a conglomerate of many, many skills and they are put to use in novel context, so more novelty exposure, you have, even when your life becomes multi-faceted and becomes more dynamic, and when you start going out and facing the challenges of the world, those skills are better put to use, but just by being exposed to opportunities to exercise your executive function does not mean your reflection about your appropriateness may not improve. You have the capacity to reflect effectively but you may or may not be intuitive about your reflective process. Am I right about that?

Phil: Absolutely, and so –

Sucheta: That’s the disconnect I see, you know what I mean? Those who do not have the natural practice or the environment has not carefully nudged them to engage in practice along with these executive processes, they tend to lag and they have very warped sense of self.

Phil: Yes, absolutely, and so the kinds of intervention work that we do is focused on supporting and scaffolding the use of these skills in a very sensitive way, finding opportunities for children to practice their executive function skills that are challenging but not too challenging, not so challenging that they are impossible or discouraging, but challenging enough that they require some effort. So by supporting children in the development of these skills, by giving them a boost when they need it, but encouraging them to take on challenges, by modeling for them how to reflect, how to say, “Okay, this is serious. Wait a minute, let me think about it. Let us consider. What am I trying to accomplish? Where am I now? What do I know that is relevant to accomplishing what I want to accomplish? What is the specific context in which of this is taking place? Those kinds of reflective self inquiry are things that parents and teachers can model for children, showing them, for example, how to use language to talk their way to a problem and keep them on track.

Sucheta: Well, this has been a terrific conversation. I can continue to talk to you for hours, but unfortunately, we are at the end of our segment and Phil, once again, you are an incredible speaker and insightful research, and your wisdom is going to help a lot of my listeners, so I really appreciate it.

Phil: Thank you very much. Happy to speak with you.

Producer: Alright, so that was Dr. Phil Zelazo. Another great conversation, Sucheta, really enjoyed it, learned an awful lot. Give us your rundown of some of your key thoughts.

Sucheta: Absolutely, Todd. The first takeaway to me is that the brain has two systems: a top-down and a bottom-up system. The bottom-up system is more rudimentary in nature and it runs on autopilot. It’s just a reactive and reflexes system that is brought into focus as a response to the environment. There is no planning or willfulness in it. Mostly, once a person masters the skill and gets habituated, we kind of employ or deploy the bottom-up system. The top-down system, on the other hand, is more involved and is more regulatory in nature and it’s the one that is in charge of impulse control, cognitive control, and even self-refrain. This is the system that’s activated by engaging in conscious awareness and deliberate intentionality. The top-down system, as we have come to understand, is a proactive system which is dynamic in nature and it’s adaptive. It adjusts, tweaks, and repurposes. In an unfamiliar or novel experience, it suspends the autopilot and zooms in on how to take actions and meet the goals for self in accordance with one’s beliefs, attitudes, and desires. That’s the point, I think, Dr. Zelazo was talking about, that the distinction between executive function, which go into governing the rest of the brain, and the brain on its own autopilot, is that we need to deploy this supervisory system. So in essence, executive function is the set of skills that allow us to be intentional, proactive, and adapt dynamically. So everyday routine is pre-learned and predictable. We don’t need to think about what next, it is only when we need to go over a bump in the road, we summon our executive process, and if we continue to stay on that autopilot, we fail, and that is the most important thing to take away from that.

Producer: Yes, no doubt about it. I heard Dr. Zelazo frame executive function through the lens of attention. Could you expand on that for us please?

Sucheta: I think this should be a really, really informative frame for all those – people, parents, educators, as well as therapists who are trying to work with people with executive dysfunction, that it is really learning to manage functions through the system called ‘attention regulatory process.’ So this is my second takeaway from our conversation here, that we keep attention at the center of it all. Dr. Zelazo explains that executive function can be thought as a way of directing, managing, and regulating attention. So one has to ensure that the executive brain that’s busy paying attention is truly directing focus or not focusing by answering these questions for ourselves: number one, what we are paying attention to, what we are choosing to ignore, are they good things? Second, can we sustain the mental effort by ignoring the unimportant? And lastly, are we flexible while doing this, doing this juggling act, so to speak? So the executive process boils down to actively pursuing relevant information, weeding out the unnecessary information and truly not falling prey to the onslaught of external and internal distractions.

So essentially, executive function is translating what you know into the action plan where you channel your attention in the direction of intention and stop yourself from veering away from stuff that doesn’t matter.

So executive function – you’ll like this analogy, Todd – is like having a most skilled bouncer at the door of a fancy nightclub who is busy to checking IDs and passes, and kicking the losers out. If the bouncer is puny, then everybody gets the entry into the club and it’s a disaster. It is no longer the most popular club in the world.

Producer: Yes, that makes sense to me. I appreciate the analogy. So thinking more about the conversation, I did not realize that being able to reflect is actually a scientific phenomenon. It’s fascinating. I thought it was something that our parents and teachers ask of us to avoid being punished, yes?

Sucheta: Yes, well, I think you and I probably have had to write, “I will not do this again,” or what I did was not really good kinds of things to reflect in writing, so to speak, but Dr. Zelazo has dedicated his career studying the science of reflection and its relationship to self-regulation. Everyone knows what reflection means. I don’t need to define it. It’s noticing a change in the environment that poses a roadblock, to auto respond, so to speak, pausing to evaluate it and considering options as to how to engage deliberately, and when we do this kind of reflection, we really are responding in accordance to our observations and goals for yourself.

There’s a sweet spot between the autopilot and intentionality. When we switch the gear to become more deliberate, that’s when we are in the zone of reflection. That’s the reflection window, so to speak. That’s when being reactive is turned off and being reflective is turned on. Some are flexible in making the switch and some are really not. Those who are unable to mobilize the top-down mode often experience personal, social, and interpersonal disadvantage. They come to be known as impulsive, reactionary, one with sort of short fuse, and emotionally volatile. Pursuing goals and collaborating with the world becomes a huge problem for them, really.

Producer: Much to think about. Again, great conversation with Dr. Zelazo, Sucheta, looking forward to your next conversation with him.

So that’s all of the time we have for today and on behalf of our host, Sucheta Kamath, and all of us at Cerebral Matters, thank you for tuning in. We look forward to seeing you next week on Full PreFrontal.