Executive Function: The Brain’s Organizational Blueprint

Simply put, this is self-directed attention.

Also known as self-restraint.

The ability to hold things in your mind. Essentially, visual imagery — how well you can picture things mentally.

Self-speech, or internal speech. Most people think of this as their “inner monologue.”

The ability to take the previous four executive functions and use them to manipulate your own emotional state. This means learning to use words, images, and your own self-awareness to process and alter how we feel about things.

How well you can motivate yourself to complete a task when there is no immediate external consequence.

Experts sometimes like to think of this as “self-play” — how we play with information in our minds to come up with new ways of doing something. By taking things apart and recombining them in different ways, we’re planning solutions to our problems.