Researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health also suggest that a “use it or lose it” process may be occurring in the frontal lobes during this time. Neural connections that are used are retained, while those that are not exercised are lost. If this is the case, then the practice of executive skills is critical. It means that kids who practice executive skills are not only learning self-management—independence—but in the process developing brain structures that will support their executive skills into later adolescence and adulthood. Practice is important to acquisition of executive skills for another reason. Researchers who study the brain using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) have found that when children and teenagers perform tasks that require these skills, they rely on the prefrontal cortex to do all the work rather than distributing the workload to other specialized regions of the brain, such as the amygdala and the insula, two parts of the brain that are activated when making quick decisions that affect safety and survival (the fight-or-flight response). Adults, in contrast, can spread out the workload in part because they’ve had years of practice to develop the neural pathways to make this possible. Activating executive skills takes more conscious effort with children and with teenagers than it does with adults, which may help explain why they are less inclined to engage their working memory to perform tasks of daily living.
Peg Dawson and Richard Guare in Smart but Scattered