Dr. Mark D'Esposito

So if you teach them a task, they can do amazing things like match a finger to a color to a shape and put together all sorts of rules.

And they're really good at that task very quickly, and then nothing's really changed in their real life.

But I think we've learned on how to try and make it translate to real life.

And so, for example, there's a therapy called goal management training, which has developed...

by Brian Levine and colleagues at the Rotman Research Institute of Toronto, where they've been very successful in teaching patients how to improve your executive function and how to make that translate into your real world.

But it's very hard work.

It's very therapist driven.

It requires a series of trainings.

For example, people learn, they develop individual projects like planning a meal or planning a family vacation.

planning a podcast, and then they work through what's involved in that sort of very specific project, how you stay focused, how you don't just get distracted, how you keep your eye on the ball, how you break it down to sub-goals, how you monitor what you're doing, how you don't let anxiety and procrastination get involved.

But it's a very active sort of process.

But when you add all that to it,

in a very disciplined way over the course of many hours many weeks it does translate patients and individuals just say yeah i'm just better at doing things i mean the whole goal is to do things right and and i'm just better at it i don't know what it is but i'm i'm not just better at what you taught me i'm just better at other things so i do have a lot of hope that these kind of therapies will generalize to the you know to people's real life i throughout the

Yes, I mean the prefrontal cortex what's so fascinating about is that I would say it connects to every part of the brain, cortex and the subcortex and almost every part of the brain connects to it.

So that right there tells you it's a pretty important area and it has to if it's going to be in this CEO, conductor type experience role.

And so it's in this privileged position just anatomically.

So that gives us great insight to how important it is.

And so it is connecting.

And then, of course, we could talk about it, how it's connected to the body as well, how it controls heart rate and respirations as well.

So it's not just the brain.