Dr. Stuart Ablon
speaker
223 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Dr. Stuart Ablon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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They're like, I got to force myself to pay attention to this. Right. So, you know- And that's a skill. It's a skill. Absolutely. Gotcha. And what's the third one? And well, so hold on. Oh, we're not even done?
Okay. Well, I snuck in attention and working memory because it's related to attention.
Well, you know, most of us humans can only remember three to five things at one time, and there are five of these.
Okay, so keep going. Working memory just means keeping a bunch of stuff, ironically, in your head at one time and balancing it together. Okay. But the reason that's relevant is all problem solving requires working memory. Yeah. You don't realize, but when you're solving a problem, you have all these files open in your head and you're toggling back and forth between them all at one time.
What's the problem? Have I seen this before? What did I do about it? How did it work out? Have I seen anybody else handle a problem like this? How might I do it now? And you're juggling all those things. And if you're sort of hard drive crashes trying to juggle all those things, it gets in the way.
So that's attention to working memory skills. Okay. Let's go to number three. Yes. Use jargon for one second. I'll translate it. Okay. Number three is emotion and self-regulation skills. Okay. regulate is a word that's thrown around a lot these days. What does that mean? Well, here's the thing, just translate it into plain old English. It means to manage or to control.
So when people are talking about emotion regulation, they're talking about your ability to manage or control your emotions.
Okay. And self, self-control. What are they talking about there? They're talking about things like perhaps the most important human skill we have, which is impulse control. OK, all day, all of us basically keep our impulses in check. And we say to ourselves, like, don't say that. That's a bad idea. Don't do that. You know, we sort of check ourselves.
I always tell people, if you want to know how important impulse control is, spend a day. We should not do this today on the podcast, but spend a day where you imagine what it would be like if you did or said the first thing that came to your mind all throughout the course of the day. And I'll see you in jail.
You'll have, I was going to say, you'll have a blast. Yeah. But yes, it would be ugly. Yes. Because most of the time we're checking our impulses. Now, again, who's not very good at checking impulses? Two-year-olds, four-year-olds. But guess what? Teenagers. Some teenagers, but also adults. True. Okay. And, you know, if I could just point out really quickly, again, a sad irony here.
People who are very impulsive do stuff without thinking about the consequences of their actions. That's the definition of impulse control. Think about the likely consequences of what you do before you do it. So if you have poor impulse control, you do stuff without thinking first. Then you get hit with consequences, typically.
The reason this is sadly ironic is guess what consequences require to be effective in the first place? Impulse control. You got it. Because you've got to be able to stop in the moment and say, okay, if I do this, what will happen? Oh, gosh, if I do that, there's probably going to be this consequence or this bad outcome. I probably shouldn't do that. Let me reel it back in.
So in other words, consequences only work if somebody has good impulse control.
You got it. So consequences in essence don't work for the people to whom they are most applied is basically what we're saying.
Absolutely. And we should be clear, Mel. None of these skills that I'm talking about are correlated with intelligence, okay? So this is not like if you're struggling with any of these skills, just like dyslexia. If you can't decode words, that doesn't make you not smart. In fact, some of the most brilliant, innovative, interesting people had a hard time decoding words.
Their brains worked a little differently. Same is true with these skills. You can have poor language and communication skills, but be brilliant. You can have poor attention and working memory, emotion and self-regulation skills. And we still got two categories to go through. You can struggle with those skills and be brilliant.
I remember when I first presented these ideas at one of the prisons we were working with, one of the senior guards there that everybody sort of respected the most. He said after, he said, this is really interesting. He said, you know, I I think this might apply to like, say, 10%, maybe 5% of the young people we have here. But the rest of them, they're actually criminals.
And what they lack is the motivation to not behave this way. And a couple of years into our work together, it was amazing when he was like, you know, Doc, got to tell you, I still think there might be a couple of like sociopaths here, but like 95 or more percent of these people here are struggling with the exact skills you're talking about.
Cognitive flexibility. Cognitive, fancy word for thinking. So we're talking about flexible thinking.
You know, there's a lot of people out there who struggle with flexible thinking. What I mean by that is that they tend to be more sort of rigid or concrete or literal or we call black and white in their thinking. It's sort of like all or none. Yeah. Yeah. And sort of the grays of the world are harder.
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