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welcome everyone welcome to aspen brain institute's expert series 2.0 welcome to our growing community of global seekers seeking to be educated and delighted at the cutting edge hello to people all over the u.s and 103 countries all of whom have registered for this series 2.0 thank you all for tuning in we're offering this new free series in order to build an online brain health community all focused on brain health we'd like to thank lugano diamonds for their generous support as our national underwriters we thank lucano diamonds for choosing aspen brain institute as a non-profit worthy of their support and their values and for making our zoom expert series free to the public and able to be viewed worldwide we also thank alpine bank for their generous support as as our best community bank in aspen and we thank our partners at brain futures who have collaborated with us to produce our program today with our today's experts brain futures is doing important work in advancing the practical application of the latest scientific understanding of the brain and learning in k-8 schools at our expert series 2.0 you will hear global leaders deep thinkers technology experts cutting edge experts top-notch doctors and extraordinary creatives we hope the insights will transform how you care for your brain today that your 80 year old brain will thank you for tomorrow this expert series 2.0 underscores aspen brain institute's mission to share our the most basic research on brain health to increase brain health literacy and ultimately to create a brain healthy planet it is my honor and privilege to bring you these new episodes let's see what we can learn and explore together and now to our expert series i want to introduce holly mccormick the chief strategy officer at brain futures she is going to introduce our two expert speakers and moderated discussion between them holly take it away thank you glenda it's wonderful to be here today and thank you to the aspen brain institute for this opportunity it is uh as somebody who has had the opportunity to speak to both goldie hawn and dr bruce wexler about brain-based approaches to optimize student outcomes i am confident that the conversation today uh is going to be full of expertise full of wisdom full of passion and absolutely full of heart so i want to take just a quick moment to introduce our panel our first panelist of course needs absolutely no introduction and that is goldie han we all know her as an academy award winning actress but she is also the founder of the goldy han foundation and through her foundation she has had the foresight to bring together neuroscientists and positive psychologists and educators and researchers and found the mind up program for pre-k through eighth grade students so we're excited goldie to have you here thank you so much for joining us today thanks so good to see you and we are also joined by bruce wexler um bruce is a is professor emeritus of psychiatry and senior research scientist at yale school of medicine he's also an international leader in neuroscience re research with an emphasis in neuro neuroplasticity and uh bruce um if that wasn't enough he's also developed the activate program which is a k-8 cognitive cross training program which he'll speak to more in a moment bruce's work has also [Music] made him the recipient of the nih directors award for high innovation high impact research and he is also the author of the book brain and culture neurobiology ideology and social change so bruce welcome it's wonderful to have you today thank you holly so before we uh get into uh the flow of our conversation today i first wanted to start by kind of clarifying how all of our three of our work connects in my work with brain futures as glenda was saying that organization is a non-profit national non-profit that really focuses on accelerating the adoption of effective uh evidence-based neuroscientific applications to different segments of society that could benefit um from from these scientific breakthroughs and uh one of those areas that we focus on is youth and to that end last year we released an issue brief that um that was about uh executive function school-based programs and in the through the writing of that pro of that issue brief we vetted over 40 of these executive function programs against an evidence-based standard that was set by a national advisory committee of esteemed experts and of those 40 plus programs that we looked at only 10 met that evidence-based threshold and interestingly those 10 pretty much fall into two categories of programs and one of those uh categories is an executive function specific training which would be like computer-based training or executive function curriculums and the other category of program was mindfulness-based program and these programs also may have layered in either social and emotional learning components or physical movement components or brain literacy components to make the programs even more powerful and profound and we have the great pleasure of having two founders of um the of two programs that were featured in the issue brief and uh goldie with the mind up program and bruce with activate both of those programs were featured and we thought that it would be so important right now in light of all that is happening in our world with covid and um and the at-home learning and parents and families wrestling to figure out how to do that the best they can as well as with the mental health crisis that we're seeing um certainly that was in the country before covet but that is being uh you know accelerated as a result of covid so we thought it would be important to have a conversation with goldie and and and dr wexler to help us learn more about the essential aspects of these types of brain-based programs in promoting academic uh outcomes as well as as well as wellness outcomes for our for our for our youth so with that i'm going to pass it to dr wechsler who's going to spend a few minutes just giving us an overview about what we need to know about executive function skills and why they're important in relationship to an educational context and then after bruce speaks to to that and we all have a little bit more of a level set knowledge um then uh goldie will come on and speak a little bit about the mind up program bruce will speak a little bit about the activate program and then we'll all come together for a moderated conversation which we're really looking forward to so uh with that dr wexler thanks holly well there are two neuroscience concepts that provide the foundation for what goldie and i want to talk to you all about this afternoon one of them is executive function executive cognitive function the other one is neuroplasticity executive cognitive functions are a set of cognitive operations that include attention self-control working memory and cognitive flexibility and these function actually predict academic success more powerfully than iq not only academic success it also predicts in terms of elementary school math and reading but they also predict whether you graduate from high school whether you're more likely to use substances and to succeed in life as an adult one study for example assessed attention in third graders twelve thousand third graders in toronto and then followed them to see if they ever graduated from high school children with attention problems in third grade were in an eight-fold increased risk for becoming high school dropouts now when i first read that i asked myself well how many kids what percentage of kids had such severe attention problems to put them at that risk was it just the one percent most extreme kids unfortunately no 17 nearly one in five children in toronto had attention problems severe enough in third grade to put them in an eightfold increase of becoming high school dropouts another remarkable study followed a thousand children for 30 years they assess their executive function when they're three to five years old and they found as did the other studies that executive function at that age predicted math and reading achievement in elementary school but if you have poor executive function when you're a child you're more likely to use drugs and participate in unsafe sex as a high school student and as a young adult you're more likely to be unemployed incarcerated substance abuser and have a variety of other health problems so that's how important executive function is for life success and well-being our other foundational concept is neuroplasticity this refers to the fact that the structure and function of our brains are shaped after birth by stimulation from the environment hubel and wisely got the nobel prize for the work they did in the 1950s showing in cat and chick brains kittens and chicks that stimulation after birth alter the structure and function of their brains but the human brain is influenced in its structure and function by input from the environment far longer and to a far greater extent than the brains of any other animals these effects are dramatic and i could give you many examples but just one what happens when you're born blind what do you think happens to the visual cortex the big area in the back of your brain the fact that processes visual information does it do nothing no it actually becomes another auditory processing area somehow the brain gets information from the ears now to that part of the brain and the brain that part of the brain reorganizes itself to process tonotopic instead of retinotopic information now one way that the environment has this impact on our brains is by influencing gene expression what parts of our dna actually get turned on and turned off you may have heard that our brains and chimpanzees brains over only different one percent in the dna structure but we differ dramatically in our function especially our brain function our brains have 10 times more difference in what genes are turned on and off compared to chimpanzees than they do in the actual structure of the genes now probably the most important thing about this is that humans are the only animals that shapes the environment that shapes its brain so think about that we call it cultural evolution very powerful process over the last ten thousand years our children today are raised almost exclusively in human-made environments and when those environments are correct and supportive they promote development executive function skills that are the foundation for lifelong learning and well-being but on the flip side if you happen to come from a disadvantaged background you don't get the stimulation that your brain needs in order to develop these cognitive functions and on even worse you get exposed to what we call adverse childhood experiences exposure to trauma high levels of stress these actually compromise the physical development of those parts of the brain essential for promoting executive function the major cause of the shameful gap in academic achievement in our country is compromise executive function now some of you may know that goldie and i and i recently published a op-ed piece a warning about the effects of covid on the rearing environment of children the disruptions and stress in families in schools and communities are obvious to see but we're so distracted in dealing with all of them that we haven't really spent the time we should thinking about how is this impacting the environment that's essential for increasing uh for promoting development of the healthy brain and executive cognitive functions we know from 30 years of research that poverty compromises the development of executive function and we know that the same processes that compromising poverty are the ones that are being exacerbated by the disruptions in homes and communities from covet so these things to together uh produce a huge risk not only to our children but our to our whole society because the copa impact is greatest on the kids who can most can least afford it who are already suffering in the horror communities and it's going to add to the disparities in our society that threaten the well-being of our whole of our whole society now holly referred to and described the wonderful report from brain futures it's a very thoroughly researched report very nicely written and presented and i recommend it to all of you who haven't yet read it but as she said it identifies 10 different executive function programs that are 10 different intervention programs for schools that can promote executive function development and goldie and i as holly said or each of us involved with one of those programs and we've been asked to describe them both briefly today and i want to point out to you that the programs are very different from each other yet they have very similar effects and they actually we did research studies entirely independently before goldie had any idea who i was and then we they use the exact same outcome studies and these two different types of interventions produce very similar outcomes so goldie uh maybe you could talk about mind up now oh thank you so much what a treat to to get to know you i mean this really is wonderful for me and i'm a research freak and i'm loving i'm not liking what i'm hearing necessarily but the research that you're doing is so vital because until we really know how concrete and true this is we're not going to pay enough attention um about almost 20 years ago i created a program the reason i did it was because i was very simple reason and that was i was seeing unhappiness in children and i was also looking at the amount of drugs that were given to children to mitigate some of their anxieties and uh it was uh it was alarming i also was looking at little children who were 10 12 14 years old who were killing themselves so suicide was going up depression anxiety and that was then that was right after 9 11. so i created this program only because of what i was interested in through my life and that was brain science meditation understanding the effects of meditation on the brain and understanding that there is neuroplasticity which you brought up realizing that this idea of that's the way i am isn't really true the brain actually can grow it can change in a way that our neurons fire um and so forth so in order to really help at that time i created this program the program was really driven for me because i don't really still understand why brain science is not absolutely a man a mandate in in our schools we ask them to use their brain we ask them to pay attention we ask them to be good we ask them to settle down we ask them to be you know not not disruptive whatever it may be and we ask them to learn but they don't know how their brain works so i thought just a nasty easy understanding of how to to have them help self-regulate because there's so much anxiety on the rise and our children really need to understand how that works so they learn the parts of their brain that actually they can understand and that's from kindergarten through eighth grade actually preschool now and that is to understand that unless you can quiet down your amygdala unless you understand that the percep percent pre you know section of the emotional part of the brain actually is quiet and not anxious and not fearful and not angry and so forth that we learn to do that through a brain break and a brain break is where they listen to a sound and then they focus their attention on their breath for three minutes three times a day what they learn is how that breathing how that effect actually changes the biology of the brain and how now we talk about the executive function now we call it the pfc and that's what the little ones call it the prefrontal cortex they now know how to calm that down they also know what it does it helps regulate it helps them understand their stress factor they know how to manage their own stress and actually their anxiety starts to to mitigate because they are now knowing that they can learn better so what does mind up do it actually supports the the the prefrontal cortex or the executive function to be able to think better remember better create better listen better and any brain that can attend for periods of time is a healthier brain and this is ultimately what creates a healthier life so we call it mind up for life because this is a life skill and we also do pro-social behavior we do areas in which we do acts of kindness we do and all of these different things which is gratitude it creates dopamine emission we want to be able to have children understand how to elevate their sense of being how to really engage with others and how to feel not great about themselves but good about themselves so they're not inflated and they're actually in they're interrelated and they actually what they can do matter so the the the prefrontal cortex and the executive function was measured and the measurement came out fantastic by dr del diamond our kids in our little group of mined up were actually better and able to manage and regulate have and their emotional quotient was much greater and their pfc was more active the children who had no no intervention actually went below the baseline which means that our children that are not watched our children that are not given in programs will actually dip down below the base level this is not good so we have to pay attention to not only executive function but programs that actually will help our children in the classroom so they can thrive and actually make much better decisions for their life thank you so much that was a beautiful summary of the mind up program and the um power that is it's having and we'll speak more about your experience with it in just a bit uh bruce i'm just um if you could also talk to us a little bit about the activate program sure i'd be happy to but first i want to say there's this wonderful school district in indiana evansville indiana that they actually have a director of neuroeducation talking to her susan phelps and she told me that they've been using they've been using our program for three years but they've been using the goldie's mind up program for the last six or seven years and she said it would have been impossible to bring the kids back as they are doing now in the context of the pandemic without the training they've been doing for several years with your program goalie because that has enabled that those children to to just as you said to manage their emotions and feel like they have some control over their lives in this situation so the program i'm going to tell you about is called activate it consists of computer presented executive function training exercises that are disguised to look like computer games and then it's integrated with a specially designed set of physical exercises to be done in the classroom or in the gym but most commonly exercise breaks in the classroom and these physical exercises are designed to have cognitive components so they actually engage the same brain systems as do the computer exercises but now in the context of whole body activity and social interaction that debate was developed in my lab at yale and then there's a yale startup company called c8 sciences that is the entity that further develops and promotes and actually sells the program so i want to disclose to you all that i have a financial interest in that company the programs themselves are done the training the computer program three or four times a week in 20-minute sessions each of the computer exercises has many difficulty levels 60 to 160 and the program has patented algorithms that knows the optimal time to shift a child from one task configuration one difficulty level to another so the program actually shapes itself to each individual child so what we have is neuroscience powered by technology and delivered at low cost to the internet to help children we have multiple published papers that's why we were one of the 10 evidence-based programs based recommended by the brain futures report we have multiple peer-reviewed papers with sample sizes ranging from 500 to 6000 children demonstrating that our program improves executive function and that that improvement transfers to improve math and reading and that's what you would expect as i said it's uh from a neuroscientist's point of view it's a pretty straight shot to how to mitigate the effects of poverty and covet on brain and executive function development because we know that these are key functions to predict life success we know they're compromised by poverty so we want to intervene to produce with programs that produce repeated activation of these neural circuits to harness the brain's neuroplastic potential and produce activity dependent growth i call a school lunch program for the brain for those reasons now we got a gift from the roddenberry foundation to do one large study in a actually affluent community and that showed that the kids who did our program compared to uh control control groups had greater gains in school administered math and reading tests and this was published in one of the leading science journals in the world one of the nature journals called nature scientific reports but our impact is actually greater on children from poverty for the reasons i've outlined from the neuroscience because they're the ones whose brains there's nothing wrong with them they haven't had the stimulation to realize that growth potential so again that's why i call the school lunch program for the brain we actually just like to get kids more to eat at school and they grow faster and catch up to their growth potential if they haven't had enough food we give the brain the skills the stimulation goldie's program gives them both the quieting which is a type of stimulation i mean this is an interaction and active process by which you learn to control yourself and these are things skills they have not yet developed previous to that so one example we had a school where 91 of the kids qualified for free and reduced lunch the principal said we're going to give your program to one fifth grade class and use the two other fifth grade classes as our control comparisons in that school sadly like many others in the control classes 10 of the kids met proficiency in the official state exam and math and only 20 in english kids who did 10 hours of our cognitive training program over the course of the school year 60 versus 10 percent that proficiency in math and 80 in english so i hope by now with our introductory comments that you have a sense of the neuroscience foundation of what we think is possible let me just add quickly that not only is there one director of neuroscience education that i found and i've met in the us when i gave lectures in china the minister of education said we need a neuroscience-based pedagogy for the country china on top of that they have key national laboratories could study neuroscience the second leading laboratory in the whole of china for studying neuroscience with brain imaging and stimulation is in their school of education goldie oh it makes sense what we're what we're talking about we have so i'll turn it back to the hosts to see uh for q a and discussion thank you bruce uh and and goldie for giving us sort of a sense of these types of programs and and again when we talk about executive function skill building uh as as bruce you were mentioning earlier that these are really the um these are the these are fundamental um to learning they undergird their neural systems that undergird all learning so if there is a deficit in these neural systems then the fact that students aren't learning shouldn't be a mystery to us you know how i talk about that my my comparison in the slide if we had slides is you can't pour water into a jar when the lid is closed what are our school systems trying to do well the kids aren't making progress in math let's pour more method let's put more reading in hello it's not going in you got to take the lid off that's right and i think that it's kind of the same thing as when a child is frenzied or their brain is apprehensive yeah you know that the executive function is not functioning uh so you know that you can't get in there you know how do you help a child learn you first have to help them know how to calm their mind down and be more present and and be more focused and then all of a sudden they're going i can access my pfc you know yeah yeah well goldy to that point i'm wondering if you can uh so you know obviously you talked about a mindfulness-based program that also has social emotional learning and brain literacy as part of it bruce talked about a more computer-based cognitive training program that has physical um component to it i'm wondering to the point you were just making what do you see as the mindfulness the power of the mindfulness component right now to students learning particularly in this moment like what you've seen in your own experience of how incorporating that component actually does address that frenzied kind of state of mind and really does prepare the the you know the child for getting more out of their their school day well you know oddly enough mindfulness back in the day uh everyone thought it was a religion um which it wasn't i mean it's just it's a brain exercise basically and what it does is when you spend a little bit more time maybe it's around a brain break but a little bit more time it actually balances and calibrates out left right brain and in doing so it calms everything down which means breath which is a has a lot of neurological correlates as well as focused attention and when you focus to tend to one thing what happens to the brain is actually quite beautiful it gets quiet and with that the but the dog starts stops barking as we do to our young children we talk about it and the wise owl wakes up and when the wise owl which is executive function or pfc this suddenly is when they know they can access learning what i wanted to make sure of was that we weren't just having a brain break for nothing it wasn't about mindfulness for nothing it was really the understanding of a cognition that they know that when they do that something is going to happen in their brain they will be able to access their ability to think better to feel better to not not not not necessarily be reactive because reactivity actually can negate and actually mitigate learning they learn all this by by activity they don't learn it necessarily by just pedagogy they learn it by their action they understand what's happening in their own brain so it was important to put mindfulness together with some actuality and some real concrete facts and cognition about what's really going on scientifically in your own brain and how because of neuroplasticity you guys get to change things the way you would like so it gives them power puts puts them back in the driver's seat today more than ever it's very very important as we know that our children actually get to activate which is one of my favorite words their brain and they know how to do it because we've given them the tool to do so so i think that mind up moving together with mindfulness which of course we call a brain break an understanding of brain science and also knowing that certain things can create dopamine which is giving back acts of kindness these things all help support an optimistic on environment in a way that children can actually feel better and and this is this is i think but interestingly enough no i didn't want mindfulness in there because we were a brain based program and it's important to say it because i believe that that's what's going to get through and i believe that in the future hopefully in my lifetime we begin to see the value that every single teacher should learn about the brain and be prepared and every teacher should understand that you're not just teaching math these are human beings and they need to also be taught ways to self-regulate to give back to actually put a little bit of human back in humanity and this is this and we talk about a vision i think that this this was has always been my vision because now mindfulness can be combined with neuroscience can be combined with positive psychology back in the day when i started this and holly you know is that that was unheard of i mean you could do a program how to be empathetic or they had programs on how to be one thing or you know watch out for you know abuse or make sure whatever but this idea of combining these things was just unheard of now i'm not saying i'm a genius but my sense was why not that's that's such a great uh segway into you know uh that idea of we want to make things sure things are scientifically based we want to make sure we're you know that that the educators and parents that can rest assured that this is not wasting time it's actually a gain it's a gain in the educational value of a student's school day bruce just on on the being able to track some of those gains the activate program and programs like that you know that are computer-based often have these sort of administrative dashboards where in real time teachers and administrators and district leaders can see um some of those scientific impacts that that goldie was talking about can you share a little bit more about about the power of that kind of aspect to one to an executive function or brain based program and um how that informs how maybe a teacher could teach or individualize learning plans things like things like that oh that's a great question there's so much to talk about here and it's exciting to hear what goalie has has said about her program and the problems that our schools face so many problems now and these interventions that various points can have positive impact throughout the system early on uh education association asked me to partner with them in a grant and one of the outcome measures was teacher retention i said teacher retention you know we got this program to help kids develop these executive functions she said yeah teachers are burned out that they're trying to manage all this stuff which they can't if they have two children they come in with a lesson plan they have two children who can't control themselves if within a few minutes the lesson plan they have a choice forget about those two kids and just let them you know fall further and further behind or forget about my lesson plan and try the teachers need tools that can help them deal with this and and that's why uh susan phelps that evan in evansville was so clear about the tools that was had been built and developed in the kids through mind up so that they could do that when you think about the tools that a teacher has now we'll get now i mean i will move from these interpersonal skills more into some of the technology-enabled ones because we want to use everything but when i was in classrooms with the teachers they and i would say the way they try and what is their tool set that they can use to get kids in the right frame of mind for learning they say if your eyes aren't on my eyes you're not paying attention now that's sort of cool and it's sort of fun but honestly it's pretty limited in terms of what you can do and um and so you can imagine they can't spend their whole class hour like that looking at each other so they have to be able to have the tools to carry on like like ollie was describing that these kids then can be partners you enable the kids to be partners in creating a learning environment for everybody in the classroom in school now one of the nice things about online things is that you can monitor stuff and you're interacting with the kids in a variety of ways so i first wanted to know whether our programs were working and honestly after spending 25 years of research on neuroscience and neuroplasticity and developing the programs and then i got the idea to bring them out into the school system i was worried about how they're going to be evaluated because i'd heard that a lot of the tests that are used are necessarily the most reliable and sensitive so we built in measures of formal cognitive function so we would know whether our programs were working and then i saw and then i minister them we administer them automatically in the program the kids it just happens during the course of when they're playing the game sometimes they get a an assessment that is also somewhat fun but it's a formal research assessment done online and now we have a hundred thousand of those sort of of those test assessments and kids across the country so i built those in so we could see whether or not the program worked it turned out those are very valuable for the schools as you said to individualize universal design learning principles said you want to know each child's areas of cognitive strengths and weaknesses so you can customize things but what do they do now they they cost four or five thousand dollars to get a neuropsych assessment so they don't get them on many kids and if they do they get one and then who did the assessment was it a good day or a bad day for the child and that one day has been used to impact and plan so much of their education so we did build in assessment solid first so we could see whether the program worked and so we could continuously improve it i know if the programs aren't better five years from now than they are now we fail because we can collect all this information constantly every keystroke from every child so we have 300 million data points and then we can use those to continually evaluate the algorithms to make the interventions better and then we have these assessment reports that we can generate automatically to the to the teachers to have and then to print out reports to share with parents or use in planning meetings another dimension is implementation the schools get hit teachers get hit with so many new things to do every year they got so many problems managing their classroom there's a book written about what goes on behind the classroom door you really don't and i've heard quotes from teachers say well we've got the first thing we ask at the beginning of the year we're given these 10 new programs which one do we think is not going to be around in the next couple years because then we can ignore that one they're overloaded and implementation is a real problem one thing we can do is track implementation constantly because we know every time a child logs on and whether they do the programs or not and then that gives a possibility to identify classrooms that are having problems and then to provide support specifically for those teachers in those classrooms and then we realized that we when kids are logging on we wanted to make some changes in the program to help them engage more and i said oh well we can ask them how much they're liking the games right with little smiley faces and then we make these changes that's what a marketing company does right so why can't we turn this technology that's used for so many other purposes and for making money primarily and marketing research why can't we turn that and use it you know actively for positive purposes like education so we wanted to know whether or not the kids liked the games more after we made some changes we put some smiley faces up there we make and we make these changes and then they rate i like the games i don't like the games the games stink you know whatever and then we get in a couple of weeks you know thousands of responses and we can decide we're going to do then i thought well we can ask the kids more questions if we ask them one question a day we can ask them how do you like school do you think you're a good reader do you enjoy play time you know and we could then now then become interesting questions come what you do with that information and we're very careful about all that but we feel an obligation if we have enough information to say there's some problem that some children are having then we should share that with the teachers and let them know that the limitations on our information but if we have a child that doesn't feel good about themselves actually says they're depressed we might find out about it this way so yes ollie the technology enables a variety of data gathering that is useful in multiple ways thank you so much goldie bruce i spoke about a couple of points that i wanted to follow up on one is teacher retention um and the other is this idea of you know these you know another program that we have to another another silver bullet which is a very understandable feeling that teachers have when they've been implementing programs that don't that haven't necessarily worked and i know that mined up you've you were kind of a pioneer in having to address some of those concerns and explaining to teachers and to administrators that these types of programs are not curricular add-ons that they're that there's that they're integrated and that they not only benefit the students but that they also can benefit teachers and get out get out that teacher retention so i'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about the the some of the maybe anecdotes that you've come across just in terms of um how the program has not only impacted the students in their learning but also has impacted teachers and school climate yeah well well first of all um we've had we have you know a myriad of stories of of teachers that really walked by a mined up classroom and went why are your kids uh so good uh why are you we're taking shots right in their inoculations why are they not crying where ours are um these are kinds of things that we we did here but it but but when you realize that you know your teachers are overwhelmed um my mission always was to give them the program because it will help them they need to understand they're not just doing this for that for the children they're also doing it for them because rarely does anyone do anything for them is that they don't realize they are stressed they go home they have their own personal issues they have to learn about how to self-regulate themselves they need to learn about how to focus intention enough to be able to look at basically an intention to be happier to be more present for your children the self-awareness that comes around with the children also can come around with you and so we have on our website and we're you know also working with teacher care and teacher care was something that we talked about back in the day and when we were you know spending time together you and i and i were a lot of people actually focusing on that then teacher care i think i think this should be in every single uh teacher's college um every everything these teachers need to know when they go into the field because it only takes four years or at least something like that for a teacher to leave the force we want teachers to actually feel more you know feel better and have the tools so ultimately we have decided that not decided but we're having a teacher care course online which we are creating now on our online program because it's vital the other part is is parents so parents have come to us and said i love this for my child it's amazing but we need this we need this so i wrote the book you know ten mindful minutes for that reason but what i what i learned was is that it became a big book but not because of me it became a book because it's what people needed parents also need to have the program they need to understand it so we've been having parent programs in here and in the uk we also there and it's been amazing what parents are beginning to learn not only about their children but about themselves so self-regulation lack of reactivity these kinds of things that you can actually benefit from will actually enhance your basically your life in a very positive way so mind up we changed mind up a little bit so it isn't just for schools and we put the other byline which is mind out for life because it is for life it's something that you can use and tools that you can use for the rest of your life so our teachers are vitally important and they need to have this care but ultimately nobody's going to take care of them but them so these tools that we give them or tools that they will be able to use throughout their life and that i think is important in all ways where you can i can stop violence stop anger a lot of things that these kind of programs can do and it's simple so the other thing when we talk about teachers are getting all these programs they're completely overwhelmed the one thing on this program which is really interesting because i see that and i see the amount of things to do on these programs and boxes and stuff and here's to do this and try that and think it's all under the beautiful thing of social emotional learning and i don't put any of it but it's a lot i have taken my mind up and tried to keep it as simple as possible and the online program that we're doing now i have said to the people who are developing it i want white space i want teachers to be able to feel feel what mind up is and enjoy the process of learning about it as if it's for them i want the colors to be right i want the sounds to be right i don't want it so complicated that you've got 18 000 things to do because it's not it's simple to be able to to to apply this to yourself but and to your classroom so all of these things that you're talking about i completely wholeheartedly have been thinking about for a long time keep it simple and make sure that teachers know that this is for them too thank you well we have covered a lot of ground in this conversation so far we've talked about how you know executive function skills that are fostered by programs that um whether they're mindfulness-based programs or executive function uh specific training programs can actually interrupt the achievement gap we've talked about how they are fundamental to making sure students get the most out of the learning that even a great teacher is going to have a hard time putting more content in if those executive function skills aren't developed we've talked about um the sort of the the equity issue and how critical it is um in in uh helping students address the effects of poverty and or adverse childhood experiences we've talked about teacher retention and the benefits that teachers get uh both in in being able to have uh sort of better classroom environments but also better internal environments um as they as they also benefit from these programs um and also be able to teach more pointedly to the core underlying issue that might be other than what might be presenting in a child's behavior so i just thank you both for this rich discussion and i know that we have other questions that have come in so i am going to pass it over to glenda again and um she'll she'll ask some wrap-up questions but goldie and bruce thank you both so much it's always an honor and pleasure to be with you both thank you thank you thank thank you again i'm always learning something from you bruce we're not finished with youtube but i want to thank you for that beautiful discussion and really all-encompassing but we still have questions from the audience and from me so if we can make the answer short because i have five or six questions the first one says what advice would you offer to parents who would be looking to advocate for ef executive function programs at their schools could either of you answer that parents wanting to make sure they have one or both of these programs in their schools because they realize how important this work is uh parents is really interesting for the parents i think they have there's a way bruce actually to go and look online and find out some of the the these programs that are out there um i personally think that what bruce is doing is extraordinary i think brain must be involved um so one has to look at these various programs that they could find in social emotional learning castle and choose the one that you think is the best one uh and then you there's a phone like we have hello mind up or whatever you end up calling that number and and you the other part is this parents can do a lot but it's the principal and it's the school superintendent and it's the teachers that have to buy into it so uh it's really really important that's why research is so important uh and and so i wish everybody luck and and i would say band together and uh make sure that you know you're not necessarily overspending for these programs um these life skills these way of being but good for them i would add to that the brain teachers report and that that's a great tool for them and they should bring that and make sure that the principals read it it argues it provides a foundation for why executive function is critical and gives 10 evidence-based programs from a third-party perspective and then as goldie said if they find some programs they're interested in they could get more information from by just inquiring and there could be little packets that could be put together for groups of parents i think that parents could be very important advocates in some school systems for getting this adoption here yeah i do too that's why i say hold together you know put a group together yeah no absolutely brain futures that's it okay take a look those are the those are the the primary best of the best i think you're right and they've been vetted um when we think of preparing students for future jobs and industries and economies that don't exist yet why are ef skills executive function skills so important are they still important they're even more important yeah yeah go ahead you go first okay they're even more important because these are the skills that enable you to keep learning we think about cognitive flexibility we talk about working memory not only that we just put in a grant application yesterday i think to the department of education and it turns out and this was just a supportive stem so you're talking about stem would be a type of curriculum that would be helping to create a workforce that would be appropriate for our country's needs right going forward so first of all our argument is if kids aren't proficient in math in elementary school they're not going to be interested in stem and they're not going to be able to do well in stem they're self-image so you have to start to develop these basic and we know that executive function is essential and improves learning math but in addition there's other research that shows that executive functions are particularly important specifically for computer programming so we have the general argument that executive function is lifelong learning skills and that education has moved beyond the obligation of schools have moved beyond making sure the kids have a certain sense of content facts to making sure they know how to regulate themselves to be productive happy people and can continue to learn because the facts and and and as you say glenn the expectations of and the roles they'll have to fill we can't anticipate now if we start training them for those now they're not going to be what they need later they need to shift the focus from this content material that used to be the main goal to learn enough content to be a good citizen of the country that's still important but they have to have the cognitive abilities and the self-control and the executive function to participate effectively yeah so i want to add to that too because i mean all that's very very important but what i'm discovering today is that oftentimes the people that are in were in the world of computer in the world of looking at this and stem is one uh same as one and but that what they're lacking with all due respect is is aspects of our humanity that actually are making working together very difficult the there is this this word called grit it's my favorite word um but there but but i look at our young workforce today and people are having trouble hiring because a lot of the people in our workforce today are actually wanting to leave early uh they really don't want to work overtime without there's a lack of connectivity if you will uh with this it makes it very difficult and quite different than it was i'd say when we were young um you know look listen if you're if you learn to play hockey in your hockey play you're gonna you're gonna have grit when you get older i was a ballet dancer you have grit there are things that actually can build more grit and more connectivity and i think that's why the sel the idea of understanding executive function knowing what executive function can actually do understanding what empathy is and how we want to create something for the greater good an idea that it's not just about us that there is this part of us it's a this is a growing organism right that we all have a part in um i think that's important too uh thank you both another question um is it true that executive function deficits can be mistaken mistakenly categorized as a learning disability and on the other hand could they be miscategorized as a mental health or behavioral disorder so executive functions are so important if you look at learning disorders if you start with a diagnostic or category of a learning disorder and then you study those children they almost all have executive function problems so the question you know sets off a little bit of artificiality here the the artificial distinction in mental health problems executive functions are compromised in almost every one substance abuse depression schizophrenia and adhd now our program actually is a non-pharmacologic treatment for adhd it works for 53 of kids just without without medicine it works just as well as medicine with because executive functions are so important in these things it's not a surprise when we consider the centrality of the ability to regulate yourself regulate your mood it's in depression it's the executive fund the models of depression the brain models of depression are an imbalance of these systems where the executive function systems like goalies been talking about are no longer able to regulate the emotions and then they become overwhelmed further it shifts around and the emotions further and further overwhelm the executive functions so executive function is the center of all of this thank you um this is a little bit uh off uh something we haven't covered um one of our audience is saying could goldie and dr wechsler comment on the internet and social media and how we can protect our children's developing brains and what this person is actually talking about is this uh young man called tristan tristram i i don't have his name but he's just put out a documentary on the social media and how the social media companies are so to speak pinging and manipulating our children's brains in a way that they aren't aware of and parents are not aware of either and she is asking she is a psychiatrist by the way who's asking but she's asking how can we protect our children's brains from manipulation by the social media companies i think it's a really important question that's a really important question and i know bruce you've got some ideas on that sure um i i think that uh uh you know this is uh i hate to say it but this is what it is it's where parenting comes in um you've got to stop your children from getting online all the time they also aren't old enough yet to process things so their executive function is just developing they they their their brain is just developing so we have to realize that a developing brain can only accept so much information at once number one and number two may not have the experience to differentiate one thing from the other so i i feel like and you can go further on this one um but but i think that it's a parent job to be tough and to say no this is enough you've had this for a certain amount of time and we're not going to do this now and and and that's it's quite hard to do but but there's no one that's going to legislate it other than a parent because no one has the uh when there's money concerned and when there's a lack of i think and i think a lot i'm gonna say empathy because if you have it you if you realize that you know your job is to basically put something out there but you're looking for money you're looking for all the wrong things and actually you know kind of trying to you know bring people into hooking them into something and i think it's just like psychological warfare so i'm gonna throw the next one to you because i'm very passionate about this you know what i agree with with everything you said uh the question has so many dimensions to it and worries that people have a first of all we can say some people worry just about screen time per se and for me the issue there is more what you do on the screen time because i would say to to parents well if the child was reading classical novels for two hours a day but happened to be reading on their tablet instead of on a book would you be so concerned so it's it's what the technology is being used for in part now the technology though does have certain features that make it potentially more problematic because the ability to do st level stimulation the level of arousal and the skills that these computer people have to engage people i mean the reason what do the computer people want to do or making games they have one goal to get the kids to use them more and more and more that's called addiction and they actually activate some of the same brain regions so these are important issues and i think just like with drugs like goldie says it's a parent responsibility beyond that there are other interesting questions about what's the difference between being stimulated by you know face-to-face versus other types of talking but i know you want to keep the answers i know what an interesting subject but you and i bruce will talk about that because i'm fascinated with what you know when i die yeah big uh you know full class or full feature film coming out about it i think it's called the social media dilemma or something like that and it's going to be fascinating because what we understand is that the companies without our permission are doing this pinging and every time a child either answers a ping or looks at the the device it's a dopamine shot and they don't have any idea so to goldie it's why you're saying the parents are trying to get the kids off but they can't help thinking i want more of this yeah the arousal and addiction part clinton addiction we at least want to bring up the subject make parents aware they're they're fighting a you know one side they're fighting a giant a couple yeah they're fighting a giant and a lot of it's financial um i i really it's it's upsetting and i know what you mean i i remember the day when i thought well you know we're running the 911 tapes over and over again so children think it's happening over and over and over again please be responsible our news people our people in the media where is your level of responsibility when you're seating young minds that was then now it's like the train left the station and you know it's scary so how we actually can mitigate some of the the negative effects of this and you know i i don't i think we'll come out we are bringing it to the public's attention and we will certainly dwell on this some more in another expert series maybe the last question if i can read this similar to physical fitness campaigns that brought regular exercise into the schools or school meal programs that recognize the importance of nutrition for learning it seems like our nation's schools would benefit from an ef brain fitness campaign is is there a public private partnership that could be helpful here um really that's the basic question uh more program implementations in the public schools what would it take right right what would it take and i and i think bruce and i agreed uh because but yet i don't know because this is an antiquated system and it's very hard to get the education system to actually wrap themselves around anything innovative and new it's it's such an old system we have to change it and so but we just can't get enough research the more research we get the more proof we have it becomes an indefensible and unarguable truth and that is is that we've got to get this into our schools asap nothing better than mental health mental fitness and actually more productivity and optimism in our country and i think that's that's just an irrefutable truth bruce thank you i agree entirely and but the challenges are huge i mean i've been knocking my head against them in ways i never imagined i would when i had done this research in my lab for years about neuroplasticity and brought this program out i had no idea i thought that would be all you had to do but no you know and to actually get it implemented and i could tell you stories i know we don't have that much time for it but we had a school system with a one billion dollar annual budget you know there are 15 of them in the u.s with that size budget they spent 30 000 on our program got fantastic results the superintendent and chief academic officer moved to another city the new the new leadership came in they didn't even want to spend thirty thousand dollars on it and it was more evidence-based than you know than than most of what they were doing right and uh and nothing in terms of money so it's a we need to compete against forces that are entrenched and have a lot of resources behind them yeah i'll ask one last small question either what keeps you up at night or really what makes you optimistic about what's going on today maybe the latter one excuse me uh i don't mean about covert i mean about what's going on in ef in the schools oh in the schools yes yeah not that way it's not a whole personal question we're being asked i don't think yeah oh okay i'm kidding yeah yeah no i like the question yeah do you want to thank uh goldie or you want to answer first no i want to hear what you have to say well i could say this one so what keeps me up and uh what makes me optimistic sometimes for the same things i mean and it's excitement about uh learning the stuff we're learning uh and the excitement about the potential to be able to make a difference um but there's more than one thing that keeps me up at night unfortunately you want to know what keeps me up at 2 a.m or what keeps me up at 4am there's then there's the worry of course about whether you know with all the effort that i've put into this and other people but me personally at night how much effort i put in this over many years you know as a scientist and one scientific life and a committed citizen you know of the world and wanting to bring that knowledge out is is a feeling that you know i won't succeed yeah i mean it is interesting i think the optimism i have is about the time we're living in now is that i do believe in my optimistic mind is that more people are becoming more alert and more alert more aware if you will of the need for mental health interventions of ways that we're going to be able to sustain some more preventative measures uh because mental health is now becoming uh you know right in the forefront of some of our more uh more important obstacles that we're dealing with in in the world basically um so i think we you know the bad news is the good news and that is is that we're in trouble people don't know where to go and i think we're realizing right now that not only is it is is two and two important and abc's important and all of that but to balance out our brain create a better executive function to be able to actually create more health that will take people into the next part of our world and be able to have more ability to deal with some of the issues maybe some of the problems that we're going to be having and have a more cohesive world and that's the way i look at it and i probably will never stop looking at it and if i there's such a thing as reincarnation i'm quite sure i'm coming back to continue the ticket of the crusade so i'll play this part of the presentation when i have trouble sleeping at night cool okay great and thinking about you in the next life with the same bits well i wanted to tell besides thanking you for your both brilliant discussions today heartfelt brilliant and gracious and holly too i want to tell you what aspen brain institute may be doing in the next year we are going to try to create aspen just temporarily as a model brain health community and in doing so the first thing i want to do is try to get each of your programs in some part of our school system great that'll be the very first thing we do toward trying to create something like a blue zone but of a brain good and i think if we have a a crystal looking uh something repeatable or scalable thing that we can as one of you you said goldie i think more research more proof and you said the same thing bruce that's what we want to do it bring attention to this all of the subjects that we've discussed today so i'll definitely be in touch with both of you in the future and i hope we can take this thing toward to the public goldie before the next millennium lifetime thank you all again thanks to our audience for their questions thanks for becoming all of you us becoming educated on the science of brain health and uh please know that these programs are being recorded and people can come to aspenbraininstitute.org and ask for a recording of this exciting program i hope we can send this to teachers all over thank you great idea i mean this has been an excellent rounded discussion thank you thank you thank you thank you welcome you're welcome and ciao everyone oh lots of love bye holly bye bye bye