Join Carla and (neuroscientist) Adele Diamond as they discuss Executive Functions, the implications of limited Executive Functions on learning and everyday life, and what we can do as parents and or teachers specifically to support their development.
Prof. Adele Diamond:
Adele Diamond, PhD, FRSC is the Canada Research Chair Tier I Professor of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience at University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver, BC, Canada. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, she has been named one of the “2000 Outstanding Women of the 20th Century,” has been listed as one the 15 most influential neuroscientists alive today, and her impact was recently ranked among the top 0.01% of all scientists across all fields. She received her BA from Swarthmore (Phi Beta Kappa), her PhD from Harvard, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale Medical School.
Prof. Diamond’s specialty is executive functions, which depend on the brain’s prefrontal cortex and interrelated neural regions. Executive functions enable us to resist temptations and automatic impulsive reactions, stay focused, mentally play with ideas, reason, problem-solve, flexibly adjust to changed demands or priorities, and see things from new and different perspectives. Prof. Diamond’s lab studies how executive functions are affected by biological factors (such as genes and neurochemistry) and by environmental ones (for example, impaired by stress or improved by interventions).
She has demonstrated that executive functions emerge and can be assessed as early as the first year of life, and shown that interventions can improve executive functions even in very young children. Her work has demonstrated ways to help children grasp concepts and succeed at tasks long thought beyond their ability and has changed how people think about cognitive development in emphasizing the importance of inhibiting reactions that get in the way of demonstrating knowledge that is already present.
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