How do you know if you have Executive Dysfunction?

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That whole statement perfectly describes me.......... Its almost creepy how well it describes me....

If you have AS but you don't have ED, then you don't have AS.

AS and EDF topic

How are these two related/connected?

I can't agree with you. Are you making assumptions or do you have some sort of proof?

Being given complex instructions about how to "begin" and "manage" and "organize" a school project always just made part of my brain cringe, and it made another part of my brain go, "Haha! You're kidding...right? You're not?! Um...o-kay...... What exactly do you expect me to do, again? My mind is currently on Saturn, by the way... Hey, I'd love to accomodate you, teacher, but... you be talkin' crazy!"

The idea of beig organized is very pleasant, but getting there is just too painful to bother. How does one find a way to organize their life???

That's me, totally.


EXACTLY!! My notes rarely helped me, and seemed random when taking them, unless the teacher specifically said we needed to know those specific things for the next test. But when she's just lecturing (rambling), even the notes I think are worth taking end up being off-topic in her opinion, apparently, because the info I deem significant doesn't help me much on the tests. I always seemed to need more hand-holding as a student than most of the others, and, of course, teachers can't stop to give individual attention to students, only the standard collective attention that somehow helps NTs make great grades.

The education system's motto: One size fits all.

Interesting update: My wife just read in Temple Grandin's book "Thinking in Pictures" that people with Executive Dysfunction have, in their frontal lobes, too much wiring, and not enough connections. Like a bunch of tangled wires that cause confusion in the brain because of their sheer number (and maybe some of them are not even well connected), and that huge number of cables are therefore difficult for our brains to keep proper track of. Like, there's a mess in our brains, therefore there's a mess in our bedrooms.

That makes sense for me, because I'm a slow learner... except I'm not. Let me explain:
When I'm learning something, I get it right away. Then, I immediately forget what I learned, even though I had it just a second ago. I therefore have to be taught again (and I can often enough do the re-teaching myself adequately enough, so that saves embarassment from having to ask the person to train/teach me the same thing over and over again.

But, it seems like my brain is literally changing connections counterproductively while I'm in the process of learning. It's so aggravating! Other people's brains seem more hard-wiring, but my wiring keeps on changing.
Imagine a pair of technicians who are in charge of connecting up electric cables. Each technician is in charge of one end of the particular cable they're supposed to connect. The first guy, the one at the start end of the cable, always does his job right. But the second technician keeps changing his report, yelling, "Okay, it's connected! Wait! It came out again! Wait, let me connect this other cable instead -- maybe it will work better." First guy: "Alright, I'll connected the starting end of that new cable." Second guy: "Okay, ya, this new cable is working better than the old one, and the electricity is flowing more steadily. Wait! It's out again! Let me try a third... wait, lemme try the first cable again. Okay, it's working perfectly now." And then it actually does work steadily. It just takes a long time for my brain to find stable connections to remember what I'm learning. I guess that's a learning disability, even though I managed to pass high school without any special ed. (Granted, I failed 3 courses and had to re-take them over the summer, but I finally dragged my ExD mind over the finish line that is high school completion. It just sucked that I didn't have the personal help and attention I needed from my teachers to REALLY get a handle on the knowledge I was supposedly learning.)

What I'm saying is, learning is a very scrambled process for me. It never seems so in the beginning -- I always understand things instantly and perfectly, and then immediately forget them. But I retain the memory of having had the understanding only seconds ago. It's VERY frustrating!!

Last edited by Ragtime on 05 Jan 2009, 11:24 am, edited 1 time in total.

I know the feeling! I'm always so jealous of students who seem to be able to take only a page of notes and it's nearly everything that's on the test from that lecture. I write down pretty much anything the teacher says, so far as to writing down what the students ask/bring up so I can write down the response. I usually have good notes because I do that, but sometimes I miss a major point, and it's frustrating. I don't understand how there's any "signifigance" in any of the things the teacher or professor says, or how to tell if it is/isn't.

Yep, me too. Sometimes the students will all be audibly and/or visibly surprised in unison at something the teacher has just said, and I'm just sitting there, thinking, "What?" The same sometimes happens in conversation with people. They'll get to their main point, and I'll not be able to detect that it's their main point, much less what they're angling to get me to do with that information. Usually, I can wade through what they're really saying, if it's someone I really know, but my brother is an exception to this rule. He can talk and talk, and I have no idea where he's going with his thoughts, despite the fact that he is a very focused, deliberate thinker -- he's a business manager with a Type-A personality.

Sounds like a real-time comprehension deficit.
Maybe you think you're understanding what's being said when in reality, you actually don't.

I have that very same problem, so I got a note taker thorugh my schools office for persons with disabilities.

I wish I could get help through disability services, because college has become so stressful for me. However, I'm not officially diagnosed with anything except two anxiety disorders, so there's no help there.

If you decide to get diagnosed, get all the insurance products you will need. I don't have a couple of insurance products I could use simply because of high rate of suicide in people with ASDs. The diagnosis will help in many ways though, through OPD I am also getting a tablet pc funded by the government that I can use for class, plus I keep it in the end. Only problem with a diagnosis is you might become uninsurable.

Following on from a PM ragtime sent me:

There wasn't a diagnosis when we were children. In fact it is kind of rare to get a separate diagnosis of Executive dysfunction, as from understand it. I actually got one around 2004. It came before my Asperger's/ASD diagnosis and was pivotal (still is).

I think part of the reason it is not given the attention it deserves is the different disciplines involved in this clinical area. Behaviourists (typical psychologists and psychiatrists) acknowledge the presence of Executive dysfunction, and even believe it is part of other conditions they regularly diagnose, but show little interest in measuring or investigating it, and won’t “diagnose” it separately because it is not a behaviour or pathology. Behaviourists are by and large the predominant force in diagnosis pretty much any condition of the mind, and they are interested (unsurprisingly) in how a person behaves. The reason for this is simple: In the past it was easy to observe peoples behaviour, they knew very little of the functional side of the brain and how that would affect how you do things. Now there are professionals who are more interested in how a person’s brain functions and less so in behaviour, they then to have the prefix ‘Nuero’ to their job such as nueropsychologist / nueopsychiatrist, etc.

I think there is still quite bit of rivalry between behaviourists and functional based professionals. Really much of traditional psychiatry is pseudo science. It is not all useless they have made some good observations, but their approach isn’t a rigorous one and they can be quite resistant to change that in my experience.

In response people saying executive dysfunction is just a part of ASD or pre-existing conditions. Yes this is true however, executive is a huge area. People mean different things when talking about it. It includes areas such as judgment and emotions. Technically Autism itself meets the requirement for an executive dysfunction. Believe it or not so does savantism. Savantism may have its advantages but is considered a dysfunction of the typical executive function, not that they will offer treatment for it, but scientifically they often will use that term to describe these types of conditions. Usually when you are diagnosed with it, or just in general usage, they are referring much more to the planning an organisation side of things.

When I talk about my executive dysfunction I’m talking about a clinically significant dysfunction. Many people will have subclinical cases, or have other ways of compensating that are enough to negate a problem. I do think that all ASD people do have it, but I don’t think that everyone with ASD has it in the same severity.

What is interesting about my diagnosis is the examiner did not simply put “Executive dysfunction”, but rather “a Frontal/Executive dysfunction”. Notice the ‘a’. It is a dysfunction in the frontal executive area. The frontal lobe is where much of executive function is said to take place. It is the part of the brain the pulls all the other parts together as the brains main processor, hence the word “executive”. However the executive is not a physical location, but frontal obviously is.

The way they test for it is a day long aptitude test. There wasn’t much in the way of an interview or behaviour assessment, because they are not interested in how people feel or behave just how their brains function given tasks.

There are many components to ASD it is multidimensional, so it is not accurate to call it a exclusively social condition in this day. Yes social is important, but depending on where you are in life and what you have managed to deal with, it might not be your only priority.

Much of what we know about how the brain function comes from people with brain injuries. Using elimination they are able to figure out which parts of the brain are concerned with different things. When someone has a brain injury, especially a frontal one, they will typically have the more severe executive dysfunction sometime called ‘dysexecutive syndrome’ amongst many other names that mean the same basically the same thing.

My gripe is that professional focus much of their work either on people who are a little more than subclinical i.e. a bit messy and disorganised OR the most severe. There isn't much inbetween. Behaviourists typically don’t measure ED, so much ask you to do silly things, that a two year old could do, that are designed to detect the very worst of executive dysfunction and dementia type symptoms.

There are some interventions, to help with planning and organisation. They never work with me because they are dependent on how good your executive is in the first place. Every task especially menial tasks relies on your executive. As with anything it is about having something that is useful to you, it doesn’t actually matter how you brains function so long as it does that.

It's like the joke about the guy who wants to join the Procrastinator's Society, but keeps putting it off.

Or, like when a pharmacist gave my father a child-proof cap for his arthritis medication.



Or, of course:
Patient: "I need some talcom powder."
Nurse, walking away: "Walk this way."
Patient, observing: "If I could walk that way, I wouldn't need the talcom powder!"