Could executive function be described more clearly?

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I've seen people around here talk about impaired "executive function." I get the gist of what it means from the Wikipedia article, but I'd like to see it explained in plainer language, maybe with examples and its specific effects on AS and other spectrum disorders.

It seems to apply to my fear that my life 10+ years from now will be pretty much the same as it is today. I'd like to know a bit more though, and what coping strategies exist.

Me too, but this helped: "I can formulate a plan. I can follow the steps in a plan. But I can't hold more than one step in my head at once, or visualise the interaction between steps".

If that were accurate (and I am not sure), then it would explain why I have problems with even simple tasks when steps get changed, even though I can do an extremely complicated job very well when it goes to plan.

Executive Function is being able to do in the proper order each minor task in order to complete a more complex task.

For example, to prepare a glass of water, you would:

1. Get up from your chair.
2. Walk into the kitchen.
3. Open your cupboard.
4. Select a glass that you want to drink out of.
5. Pick up the glass and put it on the counter.
6. Walk to the refrigerator.
7. Open the freezer.
8. Pick up an ice cube tray.
9. Walk back to the counter.
10. Twist the ice cube tray to get the cubes unstuck.
11. Pick up a cube and put it in the glass. Repeat until the glass contains the number of cubes you want in your drink.
12. Walk to the sink.
13. Put the ice cube tray under the faucet.
14. Turn on the faucet and leave the water running until the ice cube tray is full.
15. Turn off the faucet.
16. Walk back to the refrigerator.
17. Open the freezer.
18. Put the ice cube tray back in the freezer.
19. Close the freezer.
20. Walk back to the counter.
21. Pick up the glass.
22. Put the cup under the faucet.
23. Turn on the faucet.
24. When the glass is almost full of water, turn off the faucet.
25. Walk back to your chair.
26. Sit down.
27. Drink from the glass.
28. Set down the glass on the table, desk, or floor.

A person with poor executive functioning may skip steps, may try to do steps out of order, or may forget steps. This may result in things like walking back to your chair with a glass of ice instead of a glass of ice water, or leaving the cup of ice water on the counter, or leaving the filled ice cube tray on the counter, or completely forgetting that you walked into the kitchen to make a glass of water and so leaving the glass on the counter, empty, and then walking back to your computer.

Other examples would be things like starting to prepare food, putting it in the oven to cook and forgetting about it, then when you realize again that you are hungry you go back to the kitchen and start to prepare something else, or opening a package of food, removing the packaging, and throwing the food in the trash.

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Planning the Future - Realistic dreams - realistic goals

Assorted ideas - Executive Function

What do you want to do? What do you want to have? What do you want to be?

In 1 year? In 2 years? In 4 years? In 10 years? In 20 years? In 44 years? (Age 21 to age 65)? In retirement?

What career field do you want to be in? What kind of education or training is needed? When do you want to marry? How many children do you want? Where do you want to live? What kind of house do you wish to live in? Where do you want to go on vacation? and so on...

Completing tasks on time and on budget.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goal_setting

http://www.grove.com/

http://www.dreambigcollection.com/

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http://www.ataglance.com/

http://www.plannerpads.com/

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Executive Functions - Planning, prioritizing, sequencing, self-monitoring, self-correcting, inhibiting, initiating, controlling or altering behavior.

http://www.waiting.com/glossarye.html

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Assorted Business Principles - Many Ideas

http://www.naphill.org/

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http://www.ja.org/

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http://www.tourettesyndrome.net/disorde ... sfunction/

http://www.tourettesyndrome.net/disorde ... sfunction/

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http://www.daytimer.com/birk/

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Priorities List:

Priority 1 is ____________________.
Priority 2 is ____________________.

Planning - From the cradle to the grave so to speak.

Actions - Accomplish a definite task _____________________ (fill in) by a definite completed date certain (month/day/year) __________ (fill in).

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http://www.dalecarnegie.com/

Vision statement - Mission statement - Goal statement - Values

Values = Example: God, family and the Green Bay Packers (Vince Lombardi)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statement_of_purpose

http://www.nightingale.com/

Other

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/theymadeamerica/

http://www.leadershipnow.com/preparationquotes.html

These are good examples. Here's the one that has stumped me my entire adult life:

Let's say you have a job that's paying you reasonably well, you're not getting filthy rich, but surviving. You know you're not going to have that job forever, that it could disappear out from under you unexpectedly, and in any case, you're going to want to retire someday, and you'll need to have some way of taking care of yourself and your family besides any tiny amount you get from Social Security. So how do you go about ensuring your long term financial stability?

No, seriously. "open a savings account" is an inadequate answer. You need a detailed plan, a REAL plan, not just a vague suggestion. How are you going to make sure this all works out? Who do you call? How do you know you can trust their guidance? Should you invest? In what? What does that really mean? Is it safe? Could you end up worse off than you started? Do you even have enough left over at the end of the month to do anything with? How come other people seem to be able to do this stuff like its simple when it makes your head spin thinking about it? What the hell is a 401K, anyway?

That's poor Executive Function in action. And the key word is INACTION.

One of my Exes works with Alzheimer's patients and their families and when a person is being assessed for Alzheimer's one of things the examiner tests is the person's Executive Function. They ask them questions like "If you were going to plan a little dinner party for your friends, can you tell me how you would go about doing that? What would you do first? And after that?"

Sometimes they can't follow the idea through from beginning to end, often they don't even know where to start - that's a pretty clear indicator of cognitive impairment, since most women of a certain age have planned and carried out these types of social get-togethers a hundred times in their lives.

And this is exactly why I was not diagnosed with ANYTHING when I was younger in spite of being a complete wreak. I had undergone tests that involved questions like this. I can answer these types of questions in theory quite well. This is why I can teach personal leadership skills for a living! But can I practice what I have in mind or what I can tell others? No. Never. Not unless I take a few hours out to write down a detailed list and then run it by someone else to make sure that it makes sense... then maybe

If I were to plan a dinner party, It would either need to be very simple and involve guests that already know that I ignore important steps entirely, or I would need guidance from someone else through the entire process. This is why I really hate certain tests. like the MMPI-2, which we've discussed here recently. Merely asking questions may be helpful, but without direct observation, questions reveal very little. This is also another reason why children are more easily diagnosed for such disorders as ADHD and Asperger's; they have observers in the form of parents. As adults we tend to learn the correct answers to questions. That does not, however mean that we apply them.

Good, simple website about Executive Dysfunction.

http://home.comcast.net/~kskkight/EFD.htm

Hope this helps.

That's a great example, and while executive dysfunction effects me in a variety of other ways this is very easy to relate to.

Wow. For me it would have a lot more steps that involved raising myself to a certain height of thinking so that I could even understand what was going on, turning on my eyes/etc. so I could understand what I was looking at, figuring out where my body was, sending motion signals to my body that finally worked, and a number of related things, including doing all these things repeatedly throughout the whole mess because I can't do more than one at once so things are always falling out.

I find the term 'Theory of Mind' much more baffling than 'Executive function'

There is NOTHING theoretical about 'Theory of Mind'; it is a very REAL impairment.

I guess the term was created by and FOR non-Autistic professionals, working in the field of Autism

Yeah, which to me is like medication created by and for eunuchs working in the field of erectile dysfunction.

Hm... I do this all the time. I didn't realize it was anything but a bad memory.

Back some years ago when I was a lot more frazzled I started having worse-than-usual problems with things like that long list. I found that counting the steps as I went helped a little. I was always amazed at how many steps are really involved in doing the simplest things.

PS That list doesn't include "sub-routines" such as "accidentally drop ice tray, ..., accidentally knock over glass when reaching for dish-rag to sop up spilled ice-tray water, stop to feed cat because she keeps getting in the way because she's hungry, ad infinitum."

Higher level executive function also involves multitasking which is where I completely fail.

I could perform all of actions that you listed without having to think about it. However, on days where I have several chores/tasks that I have to do I will often waste a huge amount of time being completely indecisive about what should be tackled first. I especially have problems when the tasks require to stop at a stage of partial completion in order to attend to another task. Many times I will just continue on with the first task until completion and then get angry with myself for forgetting to do the other thing.

I'm not all that clear on exactly what Executive Disfunction is either......but I have a crude grasp of how it affects me, which may be of some use - basically I seem to have difficulty in shifting my attention from the detail to the Big Picture and back again. I'll typically get stuck into performing one aspect of a task, and I don't readily notice any changes that would require me to alter the particular script I'm running. If I do manage to tear myself away from the detail, then it seems too messy when I return to it, because of the alterations, and I become confused. To me, planning and doing are completely separate things, and the planning must be properly done, and pretty much set in stone, before the doing can be started. It's not so bad when I myself have discovered the need for a change of plan, but when it's other people ramming their wacky changes into my finely-tuned procedures, it's almost unbearable. Recently in my workplace I've called one guy a bastard and told another one to go away for committing such offenses, and that kind of offensive remark isn't normally part of my repertoire at all.

I also have trouble with plans in general. I can make and use them for relatively "simple" jobs, particularly technical tasks that I'm designing myself and intend to perform fairly soon, but the very idea of having a "life plan" leaves me cold. I like the freedom of having no particular plans, and if I force myself to follow a script for life itself, I just rebel because it feels so stifling. My action plans always ended up full of ridiculously difficult, boring, unnecessary or out-of-date tasks, I have no faith in them and I feel better when I just drift along on horse sense and pragmatism. Even simple "to do" lists annoy me greatly.....perhaps it's because I've tried and failed to actually do so many of them - some of those lists have really haunted me and made me feel stupid. So these days I prefer to just hold stuff in memory and pray that if it's important enough to me, I'll remember. I still find shopping lists usefl, but they're pretty straightforward and quickly implemented.

That too.