After retiring from the NFL, football player Max began gambling compulsively, drinking heavily, and getting into brawls at bars that landed him in a jail cell. Like so many other NFL players, Max had sustained dozens of blows to the head, been knocked unconscious numerous times and had cracked his skull open at least once. When neuroscientists slid him into an MRI machine to get a closer look at his brain and ran him through a battery of tests, they found a lot that looked perfectly normal. But what was wrong was very wrong: a total communication breakdown between his frontal lobes and the rest of his brain.
Max was just one of around a dozen NFL players studied by the team of neuroscientists. They used a technique called diffusion tensor imaging to study the white matter pathways between different parts of the brain. In Max’s case, it was almost like his frontal lobes had become isolated from the rest of the brain, said British-Canadian neuroscientist Adrian Owen, who led the study and has spent decades researching executive function. Max couldn’t control many of his thoughts. A major part of his executive function was broken.
Read more: “Who Controls Your Thoughts?”
The story of Max is featured in Owen’s new book, Think Before You Think: Understanding and Mastering Executive Function. I spoke with Owen, who runs a lab at the University of Western Ontario, about how executive function relates to intelligence, theory of mind and free will, and what we can do to make the most of it.
The title of your book is Think Before You Think. Can you tell me a little bit about what that phrase means?
I always wanted to write a book about executive function, and I’ve done a lot of work on executive function over the years. But what to call the book really didn’t become obvious to me until I’d finished it. I realized that where the book was leading was that we need to encourage ourselves to get off autopilot and think about the decisions we make, think about the plans we make, think about what we attend to. In a sense, it’s thinking about thinking. “Think before you think” seemed like a way of summing that up.
You write in the book that there’s no single definition of executive function out there now. Why have we struggled to pin down what it is?
I think it’s because it includes brain functions that are in many ways very broad and sort of overlapping. Any memory task that I give you is also going to involve attention because you’re gonna have to attend to the thing you’re remembering, right? Many memory tasks also involve planning. If I tell you, I want you to remember the word, “convenience,” you need to lay out a plan now to hold onto it. These are very high-level functions that cut across many different aspects of our behavior, so the disagreement has been around where you draw the lines.
Having worked in this area for many years, I first set about looking at a few of the researchers I really respected and how they define it. I realized that even they don’t agree on this, so I basically came up with some objective criteria for what I would call an executive function. And nobody has complained yet about this. My operational definition is a function of the brain where you are controlling one or more subordinate processes. That’s where you get these two levels of thought. Let’s say somebody punches you in the face: You have an emotional response. You’re not controlling that, it just happens to you, right? But what you choose to do with that information is within your control. You can turn and walk away, or you can fight back. For me that is a secondary control function.
When you read psychology textbooks, it says things like, “an executive function is problem solving.” But we don’t have a problem-solving unit anywhere in our brain. We solve problems by combining a little bit of planning, a little bit of working memory, a little bit of attention. I narrowed it down to what we know actually exists in the brain as opposed to what I would describe as folk psychological descriptions of things.
I was surprised to read that you include theory of mind, or the ability to infer states of mind in others, in executive function. I thought that ability was more tied to personality.
Theory of mind and emotional regulation were the two processes that I decided to define as executive functions that I imagine some people might have a problem with. There’s a whole theory-of-mind lobby that doesn’t talk about executive function at all, but for me, it has all of the same properties.
In order to understand and appreciate what somebody else is thinking, you have to engage a bunch of subordinate brain processes. This is not something that happens automatically like an emotional response. I have to decide what you’re thinking about. I have to consciously put in a bit of effort to think, “Well, you know, she’s interviewing me. She might be thinking this or that or looking at what’s behind me.” It’s consciously controlled.
Is theory of mind associated with a specific part of the brain?
It is. And people that have damage to their frontal lobes often have problems with theory of mind tasks.
One thing you write about in the early part of the book is that executive function is a better measure of our mental capacities than IQ. Of course, there have been many takedowns of IQ tests over the years, but what makes executive function the better measure?
It is just a fact that you cannot reduce somebody’s cognitive abilities to a single number. It doesn’t make any sense any more than it does to reduce somebody’s physical fitness to a single number. If I were to say, “Your physical fitness is a 32 and mine’s a 41,” neither of us would have any idea what the other was talking about. Does it mean that you’re a fast runner? Does it mean that you can run marathons? Does it mean you can lift weights? Does it mean you can throw a discus? It’s meaningless to try and reduce physical fitness to a single number. And we don’t try to do it. We don’t say, “Usain Bolt is better than Mo Farah, the marathon runner.” We just think they’re both fit athletes in different ways. For some reason, the IQ lobby doesn’t really think the brain works in the same way.
Why does the idea that IQ is a valid test of a person’s intelligence persist? Why do we have this urge to rank people by intelligence?
It’s convenient. We do it for lots of other things. Blood pressure is just a couple of numbers. Height is a single number. It’s a convenient way of comparing two people. When you look back at the history of IQ testing, obviously, it all came from Western notions of what intelligence was. It’s an extremely outdated idea.
We approached the questions of IQ mathematically in 2012. We took 44,000 people and measured everything about their cognitive function and tried to reduce it all to a single number that would explain the differences between people. And we could never get close to a single number. If your dorsolateral frontal cortex happens to be a little bit more engaged than mine, you’re going to be a better planner than I am. But if the lower part of my frontal lobe is more fit than yours, then my memory’s going to be better than your memory.
This is not rocket science. We’re not even talking about people with brain damage. We have these different processes, and you can be good at them and bad at them for exactly the same reason that you can be super fast or a super long endurance runner.
So you can’t say that one person has better overall executive function than another because there are too many different components, or could you?
Well, you could. It could be that you just happen to have all really good ones, but it’s equally likely that some of yours are gonna be better than mine and some are gonna be not as good as mine. We all meet people who just seem to be very insightful. Insightfulness is not an executive function, but a lot of executive functions play into what we mean when we say somebody is insightful.
Can a person who has poor executive function across the board still be considered intelligent in some way?
Yes, they could have a very good education. I would argue that they’re probably not going to do very well in life in general, because I think having really strong executive functions does give you a competitive advantage, in a way that simply performing well on traditional metrics of intelligence doesn’t. It makes you mentally much more nimble.
How much day-to-day control do we have over our executive function?
That’s really the question at the heart of the book, and this was actually quite a difficult tightrope to walk, because I didn’t want to insult everybody. But my feeling is many of us take the path of least resistance most of the time and live on autopilot. We attend to whatever jumps in front of us. When the phone notifies us, we attend to the phone, when a loud bang goes off behind us, we attend to that.
And that’s just one aspect of executive function, whatever’s grabbing our attention, but it doesn’t have to be that way. We can have a lot of control over our executive functions, but we more often than not choose not to because it’s effortful. We all can exist because we live in such a convenience culture now that stuff just happens and it’s mostly fine. But I don’t think life has to be like that.
One of the things that you mention that has been shown to improve theory of mind specifically is reading fiction. Is this something that applies to all narrative storytelling or is it really a function of literary fiction? Is it something ancient or something new?
I think it’s probably a stylistic thing. I read those papers, but I personally haven’t done any research on that. What we have done—which is very related, and I think the answer is probably the same—is to look at what happens when people are watching movies. One thing that’s really interesting about movies that I didn’t realize until we got into this area of research is just how variable movies can be in terms of the extent to which they require theory of mind.
This is why I end up focusing on Alfred Hitchcock at various points in the book, because many of our studies end up using Alfred Hitchcock movies. It turns out that he clearly was just very good at directing our attention in a way that other movies don’t, such The Fast and the Furious franchise. There’s a lot going on in a Fast and Furious movie. It’s easy to imagine that’s going to be very engaging, with all these cars flying around and half naked people, but the problem with those sorts of movies is they don’t actually require that you think very much, because they tell you everything. They give you all the information. You don’t have to decide what Vin Diesel might be thinking because it’s just there for you. He tells you, “I’m gonna see how fast this baby can go” or whatever. With most Hitchcock movies, you’ve gotta do a bit of work to understand the motives of the people involved. If you don’t have theory of mind, you can’t understand.
I think this is the same in fiction, which is that the more you have to dig into a character to understand their motivations and why they’re doing this and what they’re doing it for, the more likely you are to exercise things like theory of mind than if it’s just laid out there on the page like a Bugs Bunny cartoon.
Thinking about executive function naturally brings up questions of free will. Your argument seems to be that it’s not really essential to say whether we have absolute free will or not. We have just enough to live meaningful, morally responsible lives and to choose how we use our cognitive gifts.
The reason that the debate over free will rages on is that there are perfectly good arguments in favor of the idea that we do have it and that we don’t. You can deduce every decision we make, every direction we take, down to something physical in the brain, which implies that we don’t have a choice over it. But that’s a very reductionist view of the world.
The only point I was trying to make with the free will argument is that we have enough of it to be able to decide consciously whether to exercise our executive function at any particular point in time. I don’t think that’s contentious really. Somebody somewhere will say, “Well, it was always predestined that at that point he was going to turn on his frontal lobes and try to count the number of millions on the screen.” But ultimately, I believe we have the free will to make those sorts of decisions about how to orient our thinking.
Can brain training help us improve executive function?
We did this brain training study in 2010 where we had 11,000 people and we trained them on a commercial brain trainer, and we specifically looked at executive functions. We had them doing all sorts of working memory and planning and reasoning and problem-solving tasks for six weeks. It’s still the largest brain training study that’s ever been conducted, and there was absolutely no improvement at all.
They did get better at the things they were training on. One of the tasks was to count the number of suitcases coming out of an airport x-ray. If that was your task, after six weeks of doing that, you got quite good at doing that. But as soon as you changed things, even slightly—like asking people to count the number of oranges coming out of a basket, instead—they weren’t any better at it. It didn’t generalize at all. That study has stood the test of time. It sums up the literature pretty well: You can train at the level of a single task.
The point I try and make in the book is that a lot of things make a difference to executive function: good sleep, diet, socialization, even brain training will make some minor contributions, but it’s not gonna change your life. What does make a big difference is just actually thinking about your thinking, which we know from various experiments that we carried out. We did this big study where we looked at all these lifestyle choices that people make, video-game playing and drinking and smoking and whether you go to church or not—22 lifestyle choices. We didn’t worry about age or disease or anything you have no control over, just the choices that you can make in life, do they affect your executive function?
Over the course of a lifespan, it turns out that they all make really tiny contributions. There is no magic bullet at all. Whereas I think simply taking control of the decisions you make, what you attend to, the plans you lay out, can actually make a measurable difference to an individual.
Are there ways that you do this in your own life?
I’ve been working on executive function research for 30 years or more, and yes, I think I have changed over that period of time. I feel like I have a complicated life. I have a lab with 25 people in it. I write books that require that I talk to journalists. I play in a rock band with my friends. I have a 12-year-old son who is at home at the moment and needs my attention. I wouldn’t say my life’s any more complicated than many other people, but I feel like I manage quite successfully to juggle a lot of things all the time. The only way I do that is that I carefully manage my cognitive functions.
I don’t have any notifications on any machine I have. I have computers all over the place at work and here and everywhere on my phone, but I don’t have any notifications at all because I just can’t function if somebody can spontaneously get in touch whenever they like. I don’t ever have the ringer on my phone ever. People can’t phone me. They can leave me messages. And it’s been like that for years because I can’t function if I can be interrupted. I spend a lot of time writing academic papers, for example, that require tens of hours of careful thought. I’m only able to do that by really focusing my attention on that one thing.
I also plan a lot—and I stick to my plans. I’m not a person who didn’t know what I was going to do today, so I’m going to go to the beach. This doesn’t ever happen to me because I get up early so I’m either going to the beach or I’m not going to the beach. My day doesn’t get dragged off to the beach.
Should we worry about the executive function of young people whose brains are still developing and may have a harder time screening out the constant notifications and distraction provided by technology and social media?
That’s a multi-layered question. The way I operate my life is completely fine because social media only exists in my brain when I choose to put it into my brain. I think if you lead a different sort of life where you’ve got your Instagram or your TikTok or whatever and it’s bombarding you with information, that’s probably not good for you, but I’m speaking more as a father than as a scientist here. Social media isn’t my thing at all.
The reason I say it’s a multi-layered question is I think there are many aspects of technology in general that are really helpful, and I think we can use them cleverly to extend the biological limits of our brains. It’s the same as you and I wearing spectacles. All we’re doing is augmenting the biological limits of our eyes. I think that’s what your phone does, too, if that’s where you keep your phone numbers. You’re able to store many more numbers and get at them more quickly, and I think that’s a good thing. There are many ways in which technology can augment our executive functions. But it probably isn’t good for you to stare at a screen for more than two hours a day. We have to keep these arguments a little bit separate because there is a sense in which a lot of the technology that provides screen time and social media is basically just the modern version of the fax.
I spend a lot of time telling my son that he needs to use his frontal lobes, which he thinks is quite funny. They’re probably still just developing, but I’ve decided if I keep telling him this sort of thing it might actually help him. When my son says to me, “How do I do that?” I didn’t tell him how to do it. I say, “Well, think about it.” How do you think you could do that? And 100 percent of the time, he comes up with the answer. It’s not that he couldn’t work it out. It’s that it was easiest not to. It was easiest to say to me, “How long does it take to get to the soccer field?”
The important thing is that we need to encourage people who are still developing to not take the path of least resistance. We have a lot more time to get people to think about what they’re thinking. Starting young is probably the solution. 
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Lead Image: Jef / Adobe Stock
