I was listening to the podcast of this On Being episode this morning and get to wondering about its application to addiction treatment and recovery. (The first 15 minutes or so cover the really relevant concepts.)
The interviewee is Adele Diamond, an educator, researcher and scientist who focuses on early childhood and the role of executive function in academic and life success.
She broke executive function down into three areas:
- inhibitory control
- working memory-the ability to hold on to a concept and explore. examine or play with it
- cognitive flexibility
She has an early childhood curriculum that is focused on fostering/supporting the development of executive function. In the interview, she discussed some activities and tricks designed to develop or engage executive function. For example, her curriculum uses particular kinds of play and drama. She also gave an example of helping kids who mirror write by asking them to write problem characters in red pencil. (Just stopping writing and picking up the red pencil was enough of an intervention for most kids.)
This got me thinking about addiction as, in part, a disorder of the brain’s executive function. If one of the tasks of early recovery is to restore or re-develop executive function, what strategies and activities could help accomplish that? What strategies do we already use, or do mutual aid groups use, to achieve this?
What are our red pencils and how can we find more of them?