Understanding Executive Functions in Children with Dr. Adele Diamond

In this episode, Dr. Adele Diamond shares groundbreaking insights into how executive functions—core cognitive skills like focus, emotional regulation, and flexibility—shape children’s learning, behavior, and life outcomes. Learn practical strategies to nurture these skills from infancy through adulthood and improve long-term success.
Main Topics:
What are executive functions and why they are essential for children’s development
The three core executive functions: inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility
How executive functions influence school readiness, academic achievement, and lifelong health
The impact of stress on executive function and strategies for creating supportive environments
Practical approaches inspired by Montessori education to foster self-regulation
The developmental trajectory of executive functions from infancy to early adulthood
How improving executive functions can mitigate behavioral challenges and promote social-emotional well-being
The extraordinary power of music and positive environment in aging and neuroplasticity
The importance of patience, belief, and love in nurturing children’s potential
Timestamps:
00:00 - Introduction to the importance of skills beyond intelligence in children's success

01:08 - Dr. Adele Diamond's background and her research into executive functions

01:44 - Defining executive functions: top-down control in the brain

02:13 - The three core executive functions and their subcomponents

03:09 - How inhibition controls behavior and its role in self-control and perseverance

04:07 - The role of working memory in relation to past, present, and future

05:05 - Cognitive flexibility: shifting mindsets and problem solving

06:31 - Why executive functions are crucial for thriving in education and life

07:40 - The feedback loops shaping a child's academic and emotional outlook

09:06 - Early predictors of academic competence and life outcomes

09:53 - The broad importance of executive functions across all domains of life

11:18 - The significance of inhibition and self-control for children’s readiness

11:59 - Strategies for developing inhibitory control early in childhood

12:41 - The importance of scaffolding, environment, and belief in children’s success

14:06 - Using visual cues and scaffolding to reinforce positive behaviors

15:29 - How a child's environment, love, and expectations influence development

16:42 - Dr. Diamond discusses her unexpected path into studying executive functions

17:11 - Cross-cultural aspects of control and maturation in early childhood

19:24 - How research on early cognitive development led to understanding executive functions

20:09 - Development of object permanence and working memory in infants

23:50 - The role of reward and external cues in early problem solving

24:39 - Typical developmental milestones and signs of struggle with executive skills

26:34 - Creating emotionally safe environments to foster regulation and resilience

27:17 - How stress impacts the prefrontal cortex and executive functioning

28:45 - The brain’s fear response and the importance of reducing stress for learning

30:40 - Recognizing when stress impairs children's behavior and learning

32:20 - Shifting from command-based teaching to nurturing independence

33:47 - The importance of patience, space, and reducing pressure for skill development

34:46 - How hands-on, relevance-based learning enhances executive development

36:09 - How physical activities and practical life tasks support focus and skills

38:23 - Developmental stages and neuroplasticity in growing brains

40:07 - The influence of aging on executive functions and strategies for lifelong improvement

40:34 - Findings from research on music, aging, and brain resilience

44:34 - Dr. Diamond’s ongoing research focus on aging and neuroplasticity

47:32 - Building caring community environments to support children's emotional regulation

49:14 - Final thoughts: children are developing skills, not simply misbehaving

Resources & Links:
ResearchGate - Adele Diamond
Music and Dementia video "Alive Inside"Connect with Dr. Adele Diamond:
ResearchGate
Research website of Adele Diamond
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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I told you that a child's success in school and in life is not determined by intelligence alone, but by a set of skills that we don't explicitly teach. Skills such as focus, emotional regulation, flexibility, and the ability to pause before reacting. And when these skills are strong, children thrive. And when they're not yet developed, we often see frustration, overwhelm, and behaviors that are misunderstood by us adults. Today's conversation may shift a bit about how you see children. And welcome to Now What with Yogi Patel. Our goal is to support caregivers and answer questions and give us more support in understanding children so that we can create environments where these students thrive. I'm truly honored by having this amazing speaker with us. She's a researcher, Dr. Adele Diamond, whose research has helped us understand executive functions and child development. I had the pleasure of learning from Dr. Diamond during my Montessori training. And this is truly a pleasure, and I hope you find some of the research uh helpful in your work. Dr. Diamond, thank you so much for being here. For listeners who may not know about your work, how would you explain executive functions?

SPEAKER_01 3:20

To inhibit all the temptations not to finish what you started. You know, maybe you're bored with it, maybe you're frustrated with it, maybe there are all kinds of other fun things you can do, and you're gonna use the self-control to finish what you started. The second core executive function is working memory, holding information in mind and working with it. Um so you want that you need that to relate the past to the present, to use the past to predict what might happen in the future, to um reorder your mental to-do list, to do mental math, to do any kind of mental manipulation, relating ideas and facts to one another. Um also important in working memory is being able to clear out from your limited working memory space the stuff you don't need. So, for example, uh John Duncan, a researcher at the University of Cambridge, did a study years ago where he taught people two different tasks. And then he said, We're not going to do the second task. You just need to pay attention to the first task. And the people with good working memory got rid of that second task that they didn't need to pay attention to and performed much better on the one task they were supposed to do than people with less good working memory who had cluttered up their working memory space were still holding on to that second test that's now no longer relevant. So it's important to be able to clear that out because you don't have infinite ability to hold information in mind. And then the third core executive function is cognitive flexibility, being able to switch mindsets, to switch between tasks. Um, an example I often give is that at home, maybe you're trying to work and your son or daughter wants to ask you questions. So you have to keep switching between talking to your child and doing your work, talking to your child and doing your work. Um being able to see things from different perspectives, come up with a whole new way of thinking about something, thinking outside the box, creative problem solving, seamlessly adjusting to change. Maybe a sudden problem has come up and you need to figure out a way to change to change to adjust to it, or new opportunities come up. And are you going to stick with your old plans or take advantage of? Um, if there's a problem we haven't been able to solve, can we think outside the box to frame it in a new way, think about it in a new way, be able to solve it? Um Alexander Graham Bell said, this is pouring a cognitive flexibility. When one door closes, another door opens. But we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the ones which open for us. So those are the those are the core executive functions. And from that, you're able to problem solve, reason, plan, strategize, things like that, which are also executive functions.

SPEAKER_00 6:27

Why are executive functions so important for a child's learning and the overall outcomes, including ability to thrive in classrooms?

SPEAKER_01 6:38

Well, without inhibitory control, you're at the mercy of impulse or old habits or stimuli in the environment that pull you this way or that way. Um uh inhibitory controls allows you to exercise some control, some choice over what you do. Um, so for example, um if you're in class and you have poor uh selective attention, you can't focus on your your work, you can't focus on what somebody's telling you, you're constantly being distracted by things. Um uh if you're inflexible, you you can't solve things when anything changes, when anything's new, when you run into a problem. Um, inhibitory control has been shown to be more important for school readiness than IQ or entry-level reading or math. And executive functions early in life have uh impact throughout life. And I think that's because they set in motion feedback loops, which keep reinforcing one another. Excuse me. Imagine a child who starts school with poor executive functions. So that he's blurting out the answer, he's jumping out of his seat, he's having difficulty paying attention or completing his assignments. He's always getting scolded, he's getting lousy grades. School is no fun, it feels like he's a failure, he wants out of there. His teachers expect poor performance from him and behavior problems. He expects he's gonna be a problem and he's a poor student. And then imagine you have a child who starts school with good executives. She raises her hand, she sits in her seat, she pays attention, she completes her assignments, and the teacher says, I wish I had a whole class of children like you. She likes school. It's a place of success for her and praise. She wants in and she expects herself to do well, and the adults expect her to do well. So you have one child who wants out and expects to fail, and another child who wants in and expects to succeed. So no wonder their performance differs more and more every year because you have two self-reinforcing feedback loops going in opposite directions. So it's so important to work on executive functions early in life and nip that negative reinforcement loop in the butt so it doesn't get going. Um it's also been shown that working memory and inhibitory control predict math and reading competence from the earliest grades through university. So if they're predictive early, they're predictive late, they're predictive every way through. And working memory is critical for so much that you have to do in school: reasoning, problem solving, creative thinking, um, recombining elements in new ways, seeing connections between seemingly unconnected things. And cognitive flexibility allows you to meet new challenges, find solutions, um, flexibly adjust to new uh uh information. Um uh, you know, be the creative scientist, the creative writer, the creative anything. Um, and they're not only important for doing well in school, they're important for everything in life. They're important for making and keeping friends, they're important for physical and mental health. Kids with poor inhibitory control tend to have higher cholesterol, have higher blood pressure, they forget to take their meds, they have trouble following the doctor's orders over time. Um and um um Terry Moffat and colleagues did a study that suggests that maybe inhibitory control is the executive function that's most predictive of long-term outcomes. They tested kids when they were three to eight years of age, and they found that those who in that early time period were more persistent, less impulsive, and had better attention regulations. Then, as teenagers were less likely to smoke, have unplanned pregnancies, or drop out of school. And 30 years later, as adults, they had better health, higher incomes, and better jobs, and had a happier life. They reported that they were happier in life. Then kids who between three and eight years of age had worse inhibitory control. And that's true, controlling for almost every variable under the sun. So it executive functions relate to not only doing well in school, but to most anything in life.

SPEAKER_00 11:13

So inhibitory uh inhibition of control seems to be a key component, right? This really connects with both at home and in the classroom children who are really capable, but may have not yet the skills to show it. How do we create um or develop this inhibitory of control? How can we set things up for them in early childhood? You shared an example of two children, one that sits and waits and the other blurts out answers. Um, I think we become frustrated, but there is a way to develop these skills, and maybe you can help us figure out what are few things we can do.

SPEAKER_01 11:54

So, one thing that's really critical is to have the rock solid faith and conviction that every child is gonna succeed. We're gonna figure out a way so that you can be more regulated, you can show more self-control, and you can uh succeed at your lessons. So it's not happening right now. That's a problem for both of us. It's not just your problem that I need to tell you to fix, it's our problem, and we together need to figure out a way to fix that. Um maybe I need to allow you to have more time to move around. Maybe it's not so important that you stay in your seat all the time. Maybe you think well when you're walking around, and that's fine. Maybe you need to keep taking breaks from your work to get up and walk around. Maybe before you start working, we need to have you exercise and get out some of your excess energy. Um, maybe we need to help everybody in the class be able to focus better by scaffolding it. So have less distraction in the classroom, have less things on the wall. Like in Montessori classrooms, you tend to not have all the beautiful pictures and posters that you normally see in kindergarten and first-grade classrooms. The posters and the pictures are beautiful, but research shows they distract children. Children can't focus as well, concentrate as well if you have all that distraction. Um, Montessori materials also get rid of the distraction within the material. So, like if you're doing a pegboard where you want the child to implicitly understand the concepts of maybe um height or volume or diameter. You don't have them painted beautiful colors because color isn't part of the concept you'd want them to learn right now. And although it would make the pegboard look prettier, it's distracting. And so you get rid of some of the distraction to help them focus. And that helps everybody, whether it's a less regulated child or a more regulated one. Having visual reminders of what you're supposed to do. So have visual pictures of what you're supposed to do. So do you keep reminding the child of what's right. Um, in Tools of the Mind, which is a preschool kindergarten program, uh, they tell the children to all get a picture book, get in a pair with another child, and take turns telling the story that goes with the pictures in your book. Well, everybody's all excited to tell their story. They want to do this, and nobody wants to be the listener. And these are four and five-year-olds. So what they do is they give one child at each pair a picture of an ear. And the teacher says, ears don't talk, ears listen. And with that concrete reminder, the child is able to listen. Without it, she wouldn't be able to. And after a few months, they don't need it anymore because they've internalized it. So you scaffold it and then you gradually remove the scaffoldings, just like with Montessori materials, where after you have the materials that don't have color, you start introducing color because now they can take a little bit of distraction and still be able to do it. Um, so you find ways to um scaffold and and make it possible for you to practice things that you can't yet do without scaffolding. You um make sure that you make it absolutely clear that you have faith in the child, that you that you believe in the child, you like the child, you respect the child, you know you're going to be able to do this. There's nothing more that's so important because your expectations have such a huge effect on the expectations the child has for themselves. And if they feel like you believe in them and that you like them, it makes so much difference.

SPEAKER_00 15:53

Beautifully said. I think that sense of someone there believes in me and I am going to be okay goes a long way. And educators, we're um in a classroom because we love children. And Maria Montessori has uh this quote always stayed with me that you don't have to like what the children are doing, but you just have to love them, and that love is to see the potential that they have not yet met, so seeing them as the future opportunities, and and that really resonates with me. So, Dr. Diamond, what drew you to study executive function, especially in children?

SPEAKER_01 16:37

That's a long story. It's kind of uh uh uh circuitous route. I never planned to study executive functions, I never planned to go into neuroscience, I never planned to do any of this. I was interested in the person in their social and cultural context. So I was um studying psychology, social psychology, developmental psychology, um, anthropology, and sociology and integrating them. And I'm at Harvard and I got funded for three years for an anthropological, cross-cultural psychological way. So one year to prepare to go into the field, one year to go anywhere in the world I wanted to go. So I was going to go to the South Pacific because it seemed the most idyllic, and one year to write it up. And my idea was that everything I was reading in psychology, sociology, philosophy was saying that we needed to feel like we were in control, that we were masters of our faith. But it seemed to me that while everybody was assuming this was intrinsically human, I thought maybe it was cultural. And maybe people in another culture wouldn't feel such a need to feel like they were in control and masters of their faith. So I had all these hypotheses about why that might be true, but the more I started thinking about how I'm gonna study this, the more slippery it seemed. Because in another culture they might not want to have control over what we want to have control over here. And they might exercise control in different ways and subtle ways, not so overtly. Um and the more I started going into it, the more I thought that I wasn't coming up with a good research design. And I had very famous people at Harvard advising me, and I didn't think they were coming up with a good research design. Now this didn't move them. They said you'll go and you'll do great research and it'll be wonderful. And I'm thinking you guys are crazy. I'm not gonna go and do terrible work and not have a dissertation out of this. So I gave them money back. So, okay, now I have no thesis topic. I need a thesis topic to graduate. So my first year in graduate school, Jerry Kagan, who was my advisor, was literally jumping out of his seat about all the cognitive changes you see in babies in the first year of life, um, all over the world. And between about eight months and twelve months, babies all over the world show some of the same cognitive changes. And he said it can't all be learning and experience because their experiences are too different. It can't just be environment. There's gotta be a maturational component. And he's jumping out of his seat, he's so excited. Well, at the time I couldn't pursue that because I had this other thesis topic, but when I gave that up, I came back to that question. And clearly, if it was going to be maturation, it had to be maturation in the brain because you're talking about cognitive changes. And it turns out that the cognitive changes Jerry was noticing were actually aspects of executive function. So it was in investigating what the maturational components might be of the changes we see in baby's cognition in the first year of life that got me into studying executive functions. A very long answer to a very short question.

SPEAKER_00 20:04

A lovely story or just history of staying true to what you really believed in. And thank you for sharing that. So tell us a little bit about, because now I'm curious, what happens in babies during that time in terms of executive functions between six months, I believe, and eight months you mentioned?

SPEAKER_01 20:25

Yeah, six months to 12 months. So at about seven and a half or eight months of age, if you cover an object, the baby can uncover it and find the hidden object. They can uh it's called it used to be called object permanence. They can find the hidden object, and the parents are thrilled. And if you have two hiding places and you cover them both simultaneously, the baby has no trouble finding it at the first place. Then you do the same thing, but you hide it at the second place. And you made the baby wait like two seconds, not very long. And what happens is even though they were right at the first place, now they're wrong at the second. They go back to that first place. The parent is mortified. I had a genius a moment ago. They uncovered the hypnotic, they were so pleased. Why did they go back to this first place? And what's happened is they have fragile working memory and they have weak inhibitory control, and they just got rewarded for going to this first place. So they've built up a little bit of a conditioned tendency to repeat what got rewarded. But by nine months, they can succeed at that at two seconds or three seconds. And by 12 months, they can succeed at that even if you make them wait for 10 seconds. So you're seeing the development of being able to hold information in mind when you're also having to fight the pull to do something that was already rewarded. And um then I also use a transparent barrier task. Where the box is clear but one side is missing. And you put something in the baby wants. Well at seven months they only reach at the side they're looking through. You can come perfectly predict what they're gonna do, all you have to know is where they're looking. But as they get a little bit older, they start to exercise planning and they start to be creative in where they're gonna look. So they'll move around to see through a different side or they'll push the box up so they can see through the front. And you see a whole progression in the ability to resist that strong pull to reach straight for what you want and the development of the flexibility and the planning to try alternative things. And you also see the wall role of working memory because th what you first see is that they need to look through the opening. Then they can let the box down, or if they've looked in the side, they can sit up and the memory of having looked through the opening is enough and they can reach it and get it, whether the box is down or they're not looking through the side. So you see the role of memory, inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility and planning. So the babies nine months of age are already showing planning, are already showing creativity. For example, at nine months, they can't get it in the side opening unless they continue to look in the side opening. So the box is over here, the side is open. How am I gonna get the toy and look in the opening? So what they do is they come up with the strategy of leaning all the way over and reaching with the contralateral hand. It looks incredibly awkward. We call it the awkward reach, but it's brilliant. It's a brilliant solution to the problem of I need to continue to look in the opening in order to succeed. Problem solving, nine, ten months of age.

SPEAKER_00 23:56

And you added something that I had no idea about, the reward. We begin as the external uh input that the child believes, and they're automatically conditioned to that um praise, you know, good job, great job, yay. Uh, pretty powerful um tool that actually gets in the way. So, what are some of the early signs that child may be struggling with some of these skills? Because I'm assuming every child gets to some of these executive functioning skills at different stages. It's not like at three to six months. This should happen.

SPEAKER_01 24:35

Exactly. It's just like children talk, begin talking at different ages, they begin walking at different ages, and by their time they're three years of age, you can't tell who was the early walker or who was the early talker. Um, so it really doesn't matter when they start, but they do start at different ages. And um so so one thing is having trouble staying in their seat, um, having trouble not being distracted by anything around them. Um often you'll find that the child knows what he or she should do but doesn't do it in the heat of the moment. So, you know, I know I'm not supposed to hit, but I got really upset at her. She just took my toy and I hit her. Now, if you asked me immediately afterward, should you hit, I'd say no, I know you shouldn't hit. But in the heat of the moment, I didn't have the self-control to do that. Um, and that develops slowly, and we can help scaffold that. Um uh um having trouble settling down after recess. Um uh maybe um having trouble with with your peers because you're not being able to see things from their perspective or you're not being patient enough to wait till they're finished with something. Or um uh you interrupt to people who are talking because you wanna have something to say. So there are all kinds of things that are perfectly normal. Um and we d we just need to help children with it. And whether we're helping them with it when they're five years of age or they're three years of age, they still need help with it. And they can still get better at it at i at any of the at any age if we just help them and believe they can do it. Yes, and I think this one thing I wanted to mention that Maria Montessori really emphasized is the importance of not embarrassing a child. Not only do we need them to know that we believe in them, but they also need to know that we're not gonna um uh embarrass them, we're not gonna make them feel ashamed, we're not gonna um uh berate them if they make a mistake. Mistakes are normal. We're not gonna embarrass them if they make a mistake. That's so important.

SPEAKER_00 26:59

Indeed. Um, so your work highlights how stress affects children. And how does stress interfere with focus, emotional regulation, and then learning?

SPEAKER_01 27:12

Well, stress uh um executive function, so everything you mentioned, uh relies importantly on prefrontal cortex. It relies on a whole network in the brain, but prefrontal cortex is sort of the hub of that network. And prefrontal cortex is the most vulnerable area of the brain. It's the last area of the brain to develop over the course of evolution, the last area of the brain to mature in human development, and the most fragile. So if you're stressed, if you're sad, if you're lonely, it affects prefrontal cortex and therefore executive functions first and most. And the way it affects um prefrontal cortex, for example, is even very, very mild stress increases the level of the neurotransmitter dopamine in prefrontal. Now, and it doesn't do that anywhere else in the brain, just selectively to prefrontal. Now, prefrontal cortex needs dopamine, like your car engine needs gasoline, but it's no good for your car engine if you flood it with gasoline. It's no good for prefrontal if you flood it with dopamine. Too much or too little dopamine is no good, and stress is likely to give you too much, even if it's very mild. And also, stress disrupts the functional communication between prefrontal cortex and other areas of the brain. And remember, I said this works as a network, not just prefrontal. Um and that's especially important for stress because normally when you're stressed, the amygdala in the brain starts screaming, it's sending out alarm signals. Maybe there's danger, beware, maybe there's danger. Um and if there's really no danger, if it's really okay, prefrontal cortex sends a signal to the amygdala that you can calm down. I have a handle on this, you're really not in danger. But if the prefrontal cortex, if the functional communication between prefrontal and the amygdala is disrupted, the prefrontal cortex tries to send that message, but it doesn't get through to the amygdala. So you stay in that aroused, anxious state, and you can't calm down because prefrontal can't get the message through to the amygdala. And when you're anxious, when you're stressed, it impairs executive functions and even very mild stress. Some people are better able to tolerate stress, but n they're not helped by it unless it's extraordinarily mild. There's no level of stress that's beneficial for the executive functions of most people. And that's really important to hear because a lot of times you hear about good stress, new stress. I think that's not true. There's a difference between the excitement and exhilaration of being challenged and the anxiety of feeling stressed. The anxiety of feeling stressed is not helpful. The joy and the challenge of pushing yourself to do better things, that's fine. That's great. Arousal is not the same as stress. A little bit of arousal when you're challenged, when you feel, my gosh, I want to take this on, that's great. If you're feeling happy about it, it's good. If you're feeling anxious about it, it's not good.

SPEAKER_00 30:35

That feels really important because sometimes what looks like a student might not be trying might be actually that they're under stress and they're just not able to give us what we need in that moment. And isn't it true in the classrooms? We have many children and we want them to comply in that moment, but there might be something going on.

SPEAKER_01 30:56

Right. So there are all kinds of sources of stress. So it could be stress from the assignment, maybe they don't understand how to do it. It could be stress from maybe one of their friends in class just hurt their feelings. But it could also be stress that has nothing to do with class and has to do with their life outside of class. You know, maybe their parents just had an argument, maybe their parents are worried about paying the bills, um, uh, maybe there's uh been some violence in the community. There are all kinds of things that can cause children to feel stressed. And we need to be sensitive to that. We need to find out what's happening with the child, listen to the child, and then adjust to that, help the child find a way to calm down and be able to do their work.

SPEAKER_00 31:46

So I think what you're sh cre talking about is creating that safe environments emotionally regulating when they have the caregivers that they can um go to when they have challenging so people who understand us, the children, and for them to know that mistakes are opportunities to learn and they're going to be okay in this situation. So, one of the things that I want to follow up with is often at home and in schools, we tell children what to do, how to do it all the time. And that really just gets the brain to constantly take this information in what is a better way for us to develop skills in executive functions if we want them to learn something or do something.

SPEAKER_01 32:41

Um uh have patience yourself. Um because when we see a child struggling, our first inclination is to want to get in there and help. We don't want to see them unhappy, we don't want to see them struggling. We we can see that they are on the you know, trying to do the right thing, we'll just help them do it. But that doesn't help. What helps is giving them the space and the time to figure it out themselves and get the enormous pride from having figured it out themselves. And we rob them of that if we go in there and heroically rescue them. We're the we're the champions and they're the needy ones. So we really need to give them space and time and um also realize that their information processing can be a lot slower than ours. So whereas the answer occurs to us right away, it might take them several seconds to generate that, and we need to be quiet and wait and be patient. And that's very hard. And it's especially hard if we're stressed. So it's critically important that we address the stresses in our lives and find ways to handle it and reduce our stress. Because when we're stressed, we can't be the parent or teacher we want to be. And when we're stressed, the children pick up on it and they become stressed, and that's no good. So, in order to be that caring, solid person, we need to address what's bothering us.

SPEAKER_00 34:16

Yes. Um, so many learning environments, they emphasize hands-on work and movement, and uh Montessori being one of them, and I know there are many other environments where hands-on work is encouraged. So, from your research perspective, how do hands-on work experiences support children's development? And you just also spoke about letting them figure things out.

SPEAKER_01 34:41

Yeah, there's so many ways that it does that. First of all, we never evolve to learn for learning's sake. We evolve to learn something when we need it for something we want to do. So if you're doing something hands-on, you you want to learn something because you want to be able to do that thing that you're working on. There's a reason to learn it. We learn something so much better when we have a reason for it, when it's relevant. My son years ago gave me a brilliant lecture on how to program the VCR. It was clear, it was elegant, it was, I I followed the whole thing. Two months later, when I wanted to program the VCR, could I do it? No. Because when I listened two months earlier, I was being polite, but I didn't think I was ever going to need to use the information. You don't process things as well when you don't need them. And when you're doing hands-on learning, you need it for what you're doing. Um, then it's also incredibly important to work on something that interests you. Like Montessori lets you follow your interests. If you're interested in it, you'll keep pursuing it and working hard to do it. Also, for young children, and this is a really wonderful insight from Montessori, it's in you can learn things nonverbally, you can learn things viscerally without having to attach a verbal label. And then later, maybe years later, when you get the verbal label, they have meaning for you. So again, I come back to that pegboard with volume and height and diameter. You have a pegboard where the pegs only differ by diameter. Now you don't tell the three-year-old they differ by diameter. You never mention the word diameter. But the three-year-old implicitly picks up on the concept of diameter in solving that pegboard. And then years later, when you introduce the word diameter, now they have something to hook that on to. Now they understand it because of the hands-on activity they had using that. Um, and then there's all the practical life activities in Montessori and at home. You know, doing kitchen chores is a great way to train focused attention and concentration. When you're pouring a liquid, when you're carrying a tray of filled glasses, when you're cutting something, all of these things you have to pay careful attention. You're you're learning focused attention, and you're having the pride of helping do do adult chores. You know, I'm doing what I see my mom doing. Um crafts, crocheting, sewing, beadwork, woodworking, all of these you need careful focused attention. And then movement activities like walking on a log or for little kids walking on a line on the ground are great ways to train focused attention. Um, Tiss Jennings in her Montessori classroom, when the children were able to walk on a line pretty well, she would have them hold a bell, and you were to walk with the bell without making a sound with the bell. That requires a lot of focused attention. So you can learn these things through through movement in a way that's fun, in a way that makes sense, and you can hold on to. So, I mean, even in university, the studies show that from preschool through university, you learn something better hands-on than by listening to somebody lecture at you. Well, our latest research is my first study with older adults, because almost all my work has been with children. But I saw a video online called Alive Inside, and I was blown away. This was with people with severe dementia. They couldn't have a conversation with you, they couldn't even recognize their daughter or their children, and then you put headphones on them with music that they loved when they were younger, and all of a sudden they don't seem to have dementia. They can have a conversation with you, they recognize their their their relatives, they're they seem perfectly cognitively fine. You take the headphones off.

SPEAKER_00 38:50

What a powerful study. It's interesting because when I am dysregulated, automatically humming a song for my childhood just automatically comes through, and it just makes us feel a lot better. Like we go into the state of being or meditation, right? When you were younger, that happy moment or place, it just allows us to regulate a lot more. So, um, what is your next research about? And are you going to be looking at this um research on aging a little bit more? Your work actually continues with many countries and communities in education. What is one thing that you'd like to see, or one part of your research that you want to share with Ministry of Education? Creating a community in your classroom, maybe in the beginning it might take time, maybe it seems not normal. However, it seems to be where we have the highest focus. I work with Positive Discipline and I work with schools internationally, and many upper level teachers believe they don't have time to connect with the students. They have to follow my directions, they don't come in on time, then they should go to the principal's office. And it's contradicting everything that we want, especially with executive function and development, is that the children need to feel they're welcomed in our classrooms. They are an important part of our community and mistakes are gonna happen. Sometimes you're gonna run late because that dysregulation, maybe how they're getting their stuff together to get to the classroom, might vary, right? It might differ from someone else, but maybe taking the time to understand what might be going on for this young person. Because when we spend more time early on, we're going to gain more time later. And if we're in teaching, it's more about our community, our students, more than how it might feel for us. And maybe we can self-reflect at that point. I have lots of opinions, friends. But this has been such a meaningful conversation. And what I'm taking away is children are not simply behaving or misbehaving, they're developing skills. And when we understand executive functions, we begin to shift from reacting to supporting. Dr. Diamond, thank you so much for your work and for sharing your wisdom today. And to everyone who's listening, thank you for being here. This conversation resonates with you. Share it with a parent, teacher, or caregiver. And Dr. Diamond, how can others find your research besides from ResearchGate? How could they learn more about your work? Thank you very, very much. What a pleasure talking with you today.