Executive functions
Based on Wikipedia: Executive functions
The Inner CEO You Never Knew You Had
Right now, as you read this sentence, something remarkable is happening inside your skull. You're ignoring the notification that just buzzed on your phone. You're suppressing the urge to check what's for dinner. You're holding these words in your mind while connecting them to everything you already know about brains and behavior. All of this happens so seamlessly that you probably didn't notice you were doing it.
This is your executive function at work—the mental command center that makes you more than just a creature of impulse and reflex.
Think of it this way: if your brain were a company, executive function would be the CEO. Not the worker bees processing information, not the mailroom handling incoming stimuli, but the corner office where the big decisions get made. Should we take that bite of chocolate cake, or stick to the diet? Should we snap back at that rude comment, or take a breath and respond thoughtfully? Should we keep scrolling social media, or finally start that project we've been putting off?
These aren't just decisions. They're acts of self-governance.
What Exactly Are We Talking About?
Executive functions aren't a single thing. They're a toolkit of related cognitive abilities that work together to help you pursue goals, especially when the path isn't obvious or when your impulses are pulling you in a different direction.
The toolkit includes several core tools:
- Attentional control—the ability to focus on what matters and ignore what doesn't
- Inhibitory control—the capacity to stop yourself from doing something, even when you want to do it
- Working memory—holding information in your mind while you manipulate it, like doing mental arithmetic
- Cognitive flexibility—switching between different tasks or ways of thinking when the situation demands it
These basic tools combine to enable more sophisticated capabilities: planning, reasoning, problem-solving, and that elusive quality psychologists call fluid intelligence—the ability to think your way through novel problems you've never encountered before.
The opposite of executive control is what researchers call stimulus control. This is when the environment essentially hijacks your behavior. A notification dings, and before you've consciously decided anything, you're already reaching for your phone. A piece of cake appears, and your hand moves toward it. In stimulus control, the world pushes your buttons and you react. In executive control, you push your own buttons.
When Your Autopilot Isn't Enough
Here's a crucial insight: you don't always need your executive functions. Most of the time, autopilot works just fine.
Two British psychologists, Don Norman and Tim Shallice, identified five specific situations where your automatic processes can't handle things on their own:
First, anything involving genuine planning or decision-making. Your autopilot can drive you home on a familiar route, but it can't figure out how to reorganize your schedule after a meeting gets cancelled.
Second, error correction and troubleshooting. When something goes wrong—your computer freezes, your recipe isn't working, your conversation has gone sideways—you need executive control to diagnose the problem and try something new.
Third, novel situations. The first time you do anything complex, you need your executive function engaged. By the hundredth time, it might run on autopilot.
Fourth, dangerous or technically difficult situations. This is why even experienced surgeons don't daydream during operations.
And fifth—perhaps most interesting—situations where you need to override a strong habitual response or resist temptation. This is where executive function earns its keep.
The Chocolate Cake Problem
Imagine a piece of chocolate cake appears in front of you. If you've ever enjoyed chocolate cake before, your brain immediately generates what psychologists call a prepotent response—a behavioral tendency that's been reinforced so many times it's essentially automatic. The cake appears, the desire to eat it arises, the hand reaches out.
But wait. You're on a diet. You made a decision, earlier, in the cold light of morning, that you wouldn't eat cake today.
Now you have a conflict. Your automatic system says "eat." Your goal-directed system says "don't." This is the moment when executive function either succeeds or fails.
What makes this hard isn't the decision itself—it's that you have to override something that feels natural and rewarding with something that feels effortful and unrewarding. In the moment, the cake is real and present, while the goal is abstract and distant. Your executive function has to somehow make the abstract goal more powerful than the concrete temptation.
This, by the way, is exactly what breaks down in addiction. The stimulus—whether it's alcohol, gambling, or social media—has become so strongly reinforced that it dominates behavior even when the person knows, intellectually, that they should stop. The CEO has been outvoted by the boardroom.
The Brain's Late Bloomer
Here's something that might surprise you: the brain region most associated with executive function is the last part of the brain to fully mature. The prefrontal cortex—that wrinkled strip of tissue right behind your forehead—doesn't finish developing until you're well into your twenties.
This has profound implications.
Think about the decisions we ask teenagers to make. Should I go to college? What should I study? Should I get in the car with my friends who've been drinking? These questions require exactly the kind of long-term thinking, impulse control, and reasoned judgment that the prefrontal cortex provides.
And yet the prefrontal cortex of a sixteen-year-old is, quite literally, under construction.
Executive function doesn't develop in a smooth, linear progression. Instead, it appears in spurts. Attentional control shows up first, emerging in infancy and developing rapidly in early childhood. Between ages three and five, children show dramatic improvements in inhibition and working memory—suddenly they can wait for a reward, follow multi-step instructions, and resist the impulse to grab a toy from another child.
Cognitive flexibility, goal-setting, and information processing undergo rapid development between ages seven and nine. By twelve, these abilities are approaching maturity.
But true executive control—the ability to plan, strategize, and regulate behavior in complex situations—doesn't really come online until adolescence. And it keeps improving after that. Peak performance typically occurs between ages twenty and twenty-nine.
Then, unfortunately, it starts to decline.
The Geography of Control
Scientists used to think executive function lived entirely in the prefrontal cortex. The story was simple: frontal lobes equal executive control, damage them and you lose the ability to regulate yourself.
This turns out to be too simple.
Yes, the prefrontal cortex is essential. But it's not sufficient. Executive function requires a network of brain regions working in concert, like an orchestra rather than a soloist.
Different parts of the prefrontal cortex contribute different things. The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex—the area on the outer surface, toward the top—handles what researchers call "online" processing. This includes working memory, planning, reasoning, and the ability to maintain a goal while switching between different approaches to achieving it. Damage here tends to produce cognitive difficulties: problems with planning, trouble maintaining focus, difficulty solving novel problems.
The anterior cingulate cortex, which sits deeper in the brain along the midline, integrates emotional information with decision-making. It's involved in inhibiting inappropriate responses and maintaining motivated behavior. When this area is damaged, people often become apathetic and passive, losing drive not just for achievement but for basic needs like eating and social connection.
The orbitofrontal cortex, located just above your eye sockets, plays a crucial role in impulse control and social behavior. It helps you evaluate rewards and regulate your emotions in social contexts. Damage here can produce dramatic personality changes: people may become disinhibited, impulsive, or even antisocial, unable to restrain behaviors that would normally be held in check.
But even this map is incomplete. The caudate nucleus, tucked deep within the brain, contributes to inhibitory control. The subthalamic nucleus, part of the brain's movement-control circuitry, also plays a role. Even the cerebellum—traditionally thought of as purely a movement-coordination center—appears to be involved in some executive functions.
Executive function, it turns out, is less like a single command center and more like a distributed network. The prefrontal cortex is the hub, but the spokes extend throughout the brain.
The History of Self-Control Research
Our understanding of executive function has a surprisingly long history, though the term itself is relatively new.
In the 1940s, the British psychologist Donald Broadbent distinguished between "automatic" and "controlled" processes in the mind. Automatic processes are fast, effortless, and run in parallel—you can process the colors, shapes, and movements in your visual field simultaneously without trying. Controlled processes are slow, effortful, and serial—you can really only think about one complex thing at a time.
Broadbent also introduced the concept of selective attention: the ability to focus on one stream of information while ignoring others. This was the foundation on which executive function research would later build.
In 1975, the American psychologist Michael Posner used the term "cognitive control" to describe the brain's ability to regulate its own processing. By the 1980s, researchers like Posner, Joaquín Fuster, and Tim Shallice were developing theories of an "executive" or "supervisory" attention system that could override automatic responses and direct behavior according to internal goals and plans.
Meanwhile, the British psychologist Alan Baddeley was developing his influential model of working memory. He proposed that working memory wasn't just passive storage but included an active component he called the "central executive"—a system for manipulating information, not just holding it. When you do mental arithmetic, it's not enough to remember the numbers; you have to actively work with them. That's the central executive at work.
These various threads—attention, cognitive control, working memory, and frontal lobe function—gradually wove together into our modern understanding of executive function as a suite of related abilities underpinning self-regulation and goal-directed behavior.
When Executive Function Fails
One of the best ways to understand what something does is to observe what happens when it breaks down.
In attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, commonly known as ADHD, executive function is consistently impaired. People with ADHD struggle with inhibitory control (they act impulsively), working memory (they lose track of what they were doing), and cognitive flexibility (they have difficulty shifting between tasks). This isn't a moral failing or a lack of willpower—it's a difference in how the brain regulates itself.
Addiction represents another form of executive dysfunction. Here, a particular stimulus—a drug, a behavior, a substance—becomes so powerful that it overwhelms the normal capacity for inhibitory control. The person knows they should stop. They want to stop. But the wanting of the drug is stronger than the wanting to be free of the drug. The stimulus has wrested control from the executive.
Autism spectrum conditions often involve differences in cognitive flexibility—the ability to shift between perspectives, adapt to changing circumstances, and adjust expectations. This can manifest as a preference for routine and difficulty with unexpected changes.
Even in healthy brains, executive function has limits. It fatigues with use. It performs worse under stress, when we're tired, when we're hungry, when we're distracted. The chocolate cake gets harder to resist at the end of a long day than at the beginning.
The Good News: You Can Train This
Here's something encouraging: executive function isn't fixed. It can be improved at any age.
Exercise appears to be one of the most reliable ways to enhance executive function. Even light physical activity produces measurable improvements, with the strongest effects seen in children, adolescents, and people with ADHD. Low to moderate intensity exercise seems particularly effective—you don't need to run marathons to get the benefit.
Various forms of training can also help. Research has shown positive effects from biofeedback, where people learn to consciously regulate physiological processes like heart rate and breathing. Mindfulness practices, music therapy, and other interventions that teach self-regulation show promise.
For children especially, executive function skills respond to training. This matters because these skills predict academic success and social-emotional development. A child who can focus attention, inhibit impulses, and hold information in working memory is better equipped to succeed in school—not because they're smarter in some abstract sense, but because they can better deploy the cognitive resources they have.
The Paradox of Control
There's an interesting tension at the heart of executive function. On one hand, the ability to override impulses and automatic responses is clearly adaptive. It's what allows you to pursue long-term goals, delay gratification, and behave in ways that align with your values rather than your momentary urges.
On the other hand, not all impulses should be overridden.
Some researchers have noted that executive control can sometimes suppress things that probably shouldn't be suppressed: moral intuitions, creative impulses, authentic emotional responses. When cultural expectations conflict with a genuine sense of right and wrong, the "controlled" response—going along with the crowd—isn't necessarily the better one.
Similarly, creative thinking often requires loosening executive control, letting ideas flow without immediately judging or filtering them. The brainstorming injunction to "suspend judgment" is essentially a request to temporarily reduce inhibitory control.
The goal, perhaps, isn't maximum executive control, but appropriate executive control. Knowing when to restrain an impulse and when to let it flow. Knowing when to override automatic responses and when to trust them.
That kind of wisdom might be the most executive function of all.
Why This Matters for Parents
Understanding executive function reframes many common parenting challenges. When a three-year-old can't wait for a cookie, or a teenager can't seem to plan ahead, or a child with ADHD struggles to sit still, these aren't primarily problems of motivation or character. They're problems of neurological development.
The prefrontal cortex develops slowly. Its full myelination—the process by which neurons become insulated for faster, more efficient signaling—isn't complete until the mid-twenties. Before that point, executive functions are literally still under construction.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't have expectations for children and adolescents. But it does mean we should have realistic expectations. And it suggests that scaffolding—providing external structure and support—may be more useful than simply demanding self-control that the developing brain can't yet fully provide.
A toddler can't inhibit impulses reliably because the neural hardware for inhibition isn't fully installed yet. An adolescent can make good decisions in calm, reflective moments but may struggle when emotions run high or peers are present—because the integration of emotional and rational brain systems is still developing.
Knowing this doesn't solve parenting problems. But it might make them feel less personal. The child who can't wait, the teenager who didn't think ahead—they're not necessarily defiant or irresponsible. They might just be working with a prefrontal cortex that's still receiving its final updates.
And there's hope in this too: executive function continues developing well into adulthood. The capacities that aren't there yet may arrive with time. The skills that are weak can be strengthened through practice and support. The inner CEO is still learning the job.