The Ten Best Books for Understanding Executive Function and the Brain
I love reading. I’m always in the middle of reading something, usually something about the brain or something that reminds me of our capacity to be amazing. Not only do I love reading, it’s gotten me where I am today. Most of what I learned about executive function, I got from reading. Not from grad school, not from seminars, from books and applying what I read in those books in therapy.
People often ask what my recommendations are, and I’m more than happy to list some. In fact, I have a pretty extensive (and growing) list of recommended reading in my online education community. There’s not room for a comprehensive list in a blog post, but here are my top 10 reading recommendations for learning about cognition and executive function.
The End of Average by Todd Rose
The foundation for what I practice and teach about executive function (or all speech therapy, really), is that we need to meet kids where they are. It’s so easy for therapists, educators, and even parents to get caught up in what we think kids should do that we overlook what they are doing. That’s especially common with issues with executive function. We often focus on correcting behavior when the most effective help we can provide is to meet kids where they are and empower them for self-leadership. The End of Average: Unlocking Our Potential and Embracing What Makes Us Different by Todd Rose provides some helpful suggestions for understanding and appreciating the uniqueness of individuals.
2. Assessment and Intervention for Executive Function Difficulties by George McCloskey et al
When identifying issues with executive function, it is critical to have some kind of framework for understanding how it operates in everyday life. McCloskey’s conceptual model of executive function skills has been key to informing my therapy techniques. I also use and recommend the McCloskey’s Executive Functions Scale (MEFS) for assessing executive function. Assessment and Intervention for Executive Function Difficulties by George McCloskey et al is a good companion to the MEFS scale.
Here’s one of my favorite quotes from his book:
“Executive functions are directive capacities that are responsible for a person’s ability to engage in purposeful, organized, strategic, self-regulated, goal-directed processing of perceptions, emotions, thoughts, and actions. The EF system gives commands to engage in processing but do not carry out the commands themselves. Executive functions are not the capacities we use to perceive, feel, think, and act. Instead, they are the processes that direct or cue the engagement and use of the capacities that we use to perceive, feel, think, and act.”
3. Executive Functions by Russell A. Barkley
One of my all-time favorite books on executive function is Russell A. Barkley's Executive Functions: What They Are, How They Work, and Why They Evolved.
One challenge of understanding and working with executive function is finding a good conceptual framework that helps you see, categorize, describe, and ultimately address behaviors related to executive function. I rely heavily on McCloskey's skill clusters framework, but Barkley's is also very useful. Barkley's theoretical framework for executive function is based on self-awareness.
Here’s a favorite quote:
“The capacity to imagine a hypothetical future from an experienced past is one of the three most important or foundational EFs. The other two are self-directed attention (self-awareness) and self-restraint... Together they create the human sense of the future.”
4. Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene
Dehaene is the leading neuroscientist studying the visual word form area of the brain. He has revolutionized how we look at reading. His book Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read really helped me connect the dots between various aspects of the complex literacy network.
5. Livewired by David Eagleman
Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain by David Eagleman is a highly readable book about the brain, including some of the latest and most fascinating research. It’s not specific to executive function, but it’s a good starting point for learning how the brain works. It’s also a little less academic than some of the other books in this list. This is truly one of my favorite neuroscience books by one of my favorite neuroscientists. It will blow your mind!
6. Age of Opportunity by Laurence Steinberg
Some of my favorite clients are adolescents. This age group is near and dear to my heart, maybe because they are so often misunderstood. This book really upended some of my own assumptions about adolescents and helped me meet their needs in therapy. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times—we need to meet kids where they are. Age of Opportunity: Lessons from the New Sciences of Adolescence by Laurence Steinberg has really helped me do that with my adolescent clients.
We know that birth to five is a critical time in a child’s development, but it is not the only important period of cognitive growth in the life of a child. Steinberg suggests that the period of brain development in the form of reorganization during adolescence is just as profound as that in earlier childhood periods. In particular, the prefrontal cortex and limbic system are two cognitive areas that undergo significant reorganization during adolescence.
One of my favorite quotes from the book highlights a concept that has been crucial to helping develop executive function in clients of all ages—we need to scaffold tasks by difficulty to strengthen brain functions:
“Strengthening the brain is like going to the gym for weight training. You can maintain a certain level of strength by working out with the same weights day after day, but if you want to get stronger, you need to either increase the amount of weight you lift or the number of repetitions you perform. Something similar applies to neural circuits.”
7. The Philosophical Baby by Alison Gopnik
The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life by Alison Gopnik is a fascinating book filled with research about how a baby/toddler learns and develops through "experiments.” This book highlights the need for child free play, but not in the typical fluff book about "kids should play" way. Yes, we know. Kids learn through play, but show me the research! Alison Gopnik does just that, sharing lots of research and examining child development from a scientific perspective.
8. Uncommon Sense Teaching by Barbara Oakley, Beth Rogowsky, and Terrence J. Senjowski
Uncommon Sense Teaching: Practical Insights in Brain Science to Help Students Learn by Barbara Oakley, Beth Rogowsky, and Terrence J. Sejnowski is a great book for everyone, but especially educators. Barbara Oakley is an educator turned neuroscientist. She has a beautiful way of making neurosciences accessible and applicable in the classroom.
My favorite part of her book is her analogy for working memory. “You can think of working memory as a slightly slanted shelf that doesn’t hold things very well. When you place balls (pieces of information) on it, they roll off as soon as you let go.”
Working memory is like rolling a ball down a ramp. It goes down the ramp, and then it’s just gone. How do we get the information from the working memory before it falls off the ramp and get it into our long-term memory? The answer is retrieval. There has to be some kind of activity that forces them to retrieve the information. This is why visualization is so powerful. We’re giving them the receptive language and they immediately have to do something with it. They have to create a picture immediately. They have to describe what they see to you immediately.
Visualization is great for nonverbal working memory. Add verbalization of that visualization, and you are dealing with verbal working memory.
9. Peak Mind by Dr. Amishi Jha
In Peak Mind: Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention, Dr. Amishi Jha presents a great analogy about attention that I use all the time.
Attention is like a flashlight. We only have one flashlight that can be directed either inwards or outwards. For our children with complex bodies, their attention flashlights are often focused inward, toward their body. They may need to use the bathroom and be unable to communicate that to someone, and therefore be distracted by that interoception (internal body signal). These children may need frequent repositioning, however slight, to increase comfort and support, and these repositions can cause distractions. A simple itch that they themselves cannot scratch can quickly take their externally shining flashlight inwards. There are countless examples of where the attention capacity of our children with complex bodies and complex communication needs is being drained at a rapid speed throughout the day. We need to be sensitive and mindful to this as we support them.
10. Seeds of Learning, by… me!
I wrote my book, The Seeds of Learning: A Cognitive Processing Model for Speech, Language, Literacy, and Executive Functioning because it was a book I needed. There was a gap in our understanding of speech, language, and literacy and executive function’s role in their development. Executive function made sense of so many things for me, and I wrote this book to share my insight with other speech language pathologists and educators. If you want to understand the critical role executive function plays in speech, language, and literacy, check it out now.
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