Episode 52 Leveraging Claude Ai for Executive Functioning: Tips & Strategies

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Erica: Welcome to the Personal Brain Trainer podcast. I'm, Dr. Erica Warren.

Darius: And I'm Darius Namdaran, and we're your hosts. Join us on an adventure to translate the scientific jargon and brain research into simple metaphors and explanations for everyday life. We explore executive function and learning strategies that help turbocharge the mind.

Erica: Come learn to steer around the invisible barriers so that you can achieve your goals. This podcast is ideal for parents, educators, and learners of all ages.

Darius: This podcast is sponsored by Dyslexiaproductivitycoaching.com. We give you a simple productivity system for your Apple devices that harnesses the creativity that comes with your dyslexia.

Erica: This podcast is brought to you by Goodsensorylearning.com, where you can find educational and occupational therapy lessons and remedial, materials that bring delight to learning. Finally, you can find Dr. Warren's many courses at, learningspecialistcourses.com. Come check out our newest course on developing executive functions and study strategies. Hey, Darius, it's great to see you today. I'm very excited about this episode. Tell us about it.

Darius: So, Erica, I wanted to talk today about AI and executive function. Now, AI has huge amounts of benefits for children and adults in all sorts of different ways. Today, I'd really like to concentrate on one particular AI called Claude from anthropic, which is an interesting shift and twist on how you can use AI in the workplace, because it's got a much bigger window of memory than chat GPT. So, for example, chat GPT, at the moment, you put in 2000 words into chat GPT, and it remembered 2000 words of what you said. But if your conversation goes into 4000 words, 5000 words, 6000 words, and it's a long conversation, it just remembers the last 2000 words, and so it can start forgetting and getting amnesia, whereas Claude remembers 70,000 words. It's just like a whole different ballgame in terms of the context window is the term for it having a context window. So it remembers the context of your conversation going back 70,000 words. So let me put that into those random numbers into context. So when you're talking for an hour, that's 7000 words.

Erica: Wow, okay, that's a lot. And I'm thinking also of, like, if I'm reading a long article, chat GPT can't handle it, but Claude could, cloud can.

Darius: And, then if you think about a novel or a textbook, that's about 70,000 words.

Erica: Oh, that's very helpful. Thank you.

Darius: So it's really useful to future proof. This conversation we're about to have, Erica, because AI is changing all the time. Context window is super important in terms of working out what an AI is going to do for you or not going to do for you and to save you a lot of frustration. So what's going to emerge over time is that people will use different AIs for different tasks.

Darius: Chat GPT's exploded onto the market because of this incredible chat interface. And what it means is with chat GBT, you can direct the AI through a conversation to where you want it to get to. You're like, no, I don't want you to say it quite like that. Say it like this. Oh, okay, thank you. And it changes. Oh, and you think, oh, that's great. I've got about 90% of the way there. Whereas before you would do something with AI and it would be one and done, it would present something and it's like 80% there. And you're like, yeah, it's great that you managed 80%, but I want to finish a job, so it's 100% done. And so this conversation means, right, why don't you do this, take that away, emphasize this, and it does that and it gets 90% there. Right, let's do this, let's do that. And it gets 99% there. You might copy, ah, and paste it into some text, into a document and edit it a little bit and then paste it in and say, proofread this. And then bang, you've got something that is exactly what you want, like an email, for example, and it can do that context window. But what happens when you want to have a conversation around a podcast you've created, and you've got the transcript of a podcast or a, meeting you held with someone, and you've got a 1-hour transcript? You can't put that into chat GPT, but you can put it into Claude. And I thought it would be useful to talk about that.

Erica: Yeah, I think it's really useful. And I know for a lot of my students, if they are reading a really complex article or a really complex book now, you can actually put the whole text of the book in there and say, can you give me a bullet summary of five bullets for each chapter, just to give me just the overview of what the whole book is about? And it will do it almost immediately. So that's so incredibly helpful. So I'm glad we're talking about this because there are so many ways that chat GPT is limited because it can't handle the amount of text. And I like how they do it, too, is they kind of hold it as a whole instead of you pasting the whole thing in while you do it. Just then turns it into one tiny little block that it makes sense of.

Darius: Yes. Because it saves it as a document file in that content window. And it doesn't just blow to all out with 70,000 words or whatever yet. It's clever. And I just thought our listeners would find it interesting to kind of look at this, what the possibilities are. Like, I've been working with clients on this, and I thought they would find this useful. Like, take for example, you're a counselor, and you're doing some behavioral counseling, okay? Now, obviously, you do this with your client's permission, but this particular one transcribes the meeting with the client, okay? And anonymizes it so that neither he nor them can be identified in that transcript before he puts it into Claude. So there's no breaches of privacy or confidentiality. So it becomes the counselor, the client, and that's it. And it's a conversation. Now what's interesting here is he's created a conversation in, okay, which is their initial conversation. And then he tells Claude not to give any comments or opinions or add any information, but asks a key question like, please pull out all of the references to their health condition in that. Ooh. Because you know how you have a conversation and you don't want to be going through a form saying, right, tell me about this. What happened in 1980, what happened in 1999? And you could, it's very good for you administratively because it gets the information out into your form, but it doesn't build that rapport, that trust, that conversation, et cetera, which is what you really need in that kind of counseling environment. But, in order to write up your notes, you do need these things put into the right order so that if a court had to pull your records because something happened to that person in the future or whatever. So basically, for a lot of people, their notes are legal documents.

Erica: Oh, and I know so many people that just say, that's what I can't handle is having to take notes from my sessions. And technically, you really don't have to anymore as long as you are recording. You'd have to get permission to record. But if you are recording sessions, then you can essentially use AI to write your notes and you can have them write your notes however you choose to.

Darius: Well, what we're doing, we've developed a process with him, for example, it's fascinating, because I've taken lots of principles, and this scenario might be interesting for people to see the principles that we're using. So, first of all, we were doing multiple different conversations, and they're all separated within the chat window at different times, and you just open a new chat and so on, but there's no connection between them. So what we're doing is, because Claude has got this context window of a novel, you put the conversation in for meeting number one, and then you ask, please list all the health discussions, bang, bang, bang, bang quotes, please pull out all the family ones. Please talk about all the suicidal intents, please, all these markers, et cetera. And he's got his report structure, okay? And then he pastes those, into the report structure, and he adds his own kind of take to it. As the counselor, my observation was this. My observation was that and so on. And then he will take all of that, paste it back into Claude and say, right, this is what I was thinking. this is my assessment. Please clean it up and proofread it and understand the context of my approach. It cleans it up. He pastes it in, and that's his assessment. Now, here's the magic. Okay, now, that's magic enough, but this is the real magic. Session number 1234. What he wants to know is, how have things changed in their health in relation to the original assessment? So they might be in session six. And part of his reporting requirements for grade A type notes is to say, to be noted, the health condition, although that's not the focus of the therapy, but the health condition, has deteriorated. They're on this level of drugs, and this might impact some of the therapy, but what it's doing is you can ask. It's a question, has there been any changes in this? No. Has there been? Oh, yes. Such and such. How has their homework been? How has this developed from the original assessment criteria and goals? And you can put all of that in there. And it's just fascinating to have this kind of copilot with you that has the same context window as you do.

Erica: But they have a much bigger working memory. It's very, very interesting because I could also see the enormous benefits in school. Any child that has an IEP or a 504 that someone's notes could be looked through, and they could, because when reports come out, they have to do a summary. Well, you've got 30 different kids. Forget about it. We can't handle it. But it could do it for you. And then you could be like, oh. Not to mention the fact that you might be like, wow, I didn't even see that. I missed that because I wasn't thinking of that kid, and I forgot that they had that going on.

Darius: let me understand what you're saying. So you're saying the teacher would put the IEP in there and then put in what their provisions are, and it could spit out what the teacher are meant to be doing? Is that what you're saying? Who puts in the stuff?

Erica: You could put in the IEP goals, and then throughout the semester, they take little notes, and at the end of the semester, you put in the IEP goals, drop all of the notes, and say, create a summary.

Darius: Yeah. Well, no, I would actually put in the whole IEP. The whole document.

Erica: Yeah. That's what you do in the beginning because that establishes a baseline.

Darius: Yes.

Erica: Then you put in all the notes, and then you ask it to create the end of the semester summary. Then you could even do a summary for the whole of high school, even if they had different counselors.

Darius: Yes.

Erica: So that you could really measure the growth.

Darius: And one of the things I've done with clients is I've got them to put as a parent, I've said, you prime Claude, and you say, Claude, you are an expert advocate for IEP and special education, and you know all of the requirements and criteria for this. And you're an ex-head teacher of, ex principal of one of the best dyslexia, ADHD schools in the country. Okay, so Claude is like, right? Is that what you want me to be? That's what I'm going to be. And you go, right, this is the IEP for my child. Now give me advice as to what my next step is. This is an email I got, from such and such. How would you assess that against the IAP strengths and weaknesses? It would give you the strengths, it would give you the weaknesses, et cetera. And you've basically got on hand an expert in special education needs right at your fingertips whenever you need it. That's got the whole context of your child's needs.

Erica: And if it came out with a report and you didn't like the voice, you could show it a sample of the voice that you want and say, I want you to assume this voice, this vocabulary, or I want you to rewrite this for a 7th grader, or I want you to rewrite this for a professional of neuropsychology. So it's lovely that way. And I think what really gets me excited about this is for even learning centers, because I have a friend who's running a learning center in Louisiana. And she has lots of staff and she wants to have baselines, and she wants to, establish growth across her students. But it's very hard to do that when you have all these different staff. But if she has the different staff take notes and she has the baseline notes, and they take notes, and then you throw it all into Claude, then you really can quickly and easily establish very specifically what type of growth the students are experiencing. That can be everything from quantitative evidence, such as scores on, particular tests, to qualitative evidence from the individual sessions where the practitioner may say, wow, we had a breakthrough today. And all of that, every little detail, even though it's coming from different people, different locations, can be pulled together and turned into the most awesome report. That's completely comprehensive. And that's completely true.

Darius: Yes.

Erica: And you're not missing any little details. And that's the problem.

Darius: Now, all of okay has been where Claude is being asked to be a selector of information. You're just selecting quotes, selecting information that's already being created by human beings in conversation and so on. So Claude is being instructed at this point, don't be creative. Don't start giving your opinion or anything like that. Just select the relevant information that is pertinent to this particular thing. Okay. Now.

Erica: And you have to qualify that. You have to tell Claude, or sometimes Claude will come up with stuff that isn't necessarily true. So what's most important when you're using this resource is that you really are very specific about what Claude can and can't.

Darius: so I think there's protocols that are going to build up over time. So one of the really useful things is, for example, to ask Claude to, if you put in a report or something like that, and you want it, to proofread it, ask Claude to create a number system, like a legal document, like Section 5.1-point A, Section 5.1-point B. So every paragraph is kind of identified. And so you could say, Claude, where did you get that from? Oh, I got that from not just some Random paragraph in the middle of a document. It's itemized. And you go, ah, ah. That's why acts of Parliament and so on have these breaking down. So you can go to exactly to where you're referencing, for example, which is a little tip.

Erica: I love that idea. Can I spin off of that?

Darius: Yeah, spin, spin.

Erica: Say you have a learning center, and of course, you could have three different students named Sue. So what you'd have to do is make sure that you have, and it could be in numerical, it could be something that's very unique to that individual. So anytime somebody writes notes, they would have to label so that student would have a certain code or a certain. Just so that you didn't have that cross contamination.

Darius: Absolutely.

Erica: you had students that had the same name.

Darius: Yeah. What we established with this client that I was talking about was for sue, for example, their official portal for each one of their clients creates a unique identifier, which is, like a six-digit code. But you don't want to use that. That's the interesting thing. Neither do you want to use the first name and the surname. So what you would do is you take the first letter of the first name and the last three digits of the code. You know how they do with your credit card sometime and put them together. So even if someone got the claw, they couldn't identify it within a system or et cetera. Do you see what I mean? so you anonymize it even more, but you still got an identifiable little three-digit number that won't be replicated. You won't get very many Sue 8116 or whatever, although Sue's full number might be 7654-3816 or you could even do.

Erica: Their first initial, last name, and birthday as a string of numbers, because it would be the ODs of having.

Darius: Yeah. But it would be revealing some private information about.

Erica: I'm so glad you said that. Bravo. You're absolutely right. Yeah, good point.

Darius: So that's a huge area to explore with Claude. And there's so many possibilities. Like you're working with one particular child, one particular adult, one particular scenario, one particular project, you can just keep putting it in and having this ongoing conversation. And so there are people with AI, what they do is they go back to a chat that they're having, and they continue on that chat.

Erica: Yes.

Darius: And so you could do that with, like, a blog post. You write a blog post, you say, these are my thoughts. This is how I've written a blog before. Please write a blog post like this. It does it. Nearly there. Do it a bit more. Nearly there. Oh, got it. That's good. And then when you put in the next one, it uses all of the previous information as instructions, and then the next one becomes easier. So you're not recreating the wheel all the time. And that's the advantage of a context window being that big.

Erica: Now, I only have the free version of Claude. Does Claude save your discussions?

Darius: Yes.

Erica: If you don't have a membership. Yes, it does. Now, I did notice the other day I was using it and it locked me out because they said I needed to buy the full version. So I think you have, I don't know how many, something like maybe 15 free ones a day or something. I think it said that in an hour I could start up again, but it did have some limits.

Darius: And then I guess you, 50 interactions every 3 hours.

Erica: That's pretty generous. And then you can always upgrade. Do you happen to know what other benefits there are to upgrading? Because I know with Chat GPT, if you upgrade, you get a more comprehensive program.

Darius: Yes, I mean, I don't know the upgrades on Claude at the moment. You see, Claude was created by people who left Open AI and Chat GPT a year or so ago. They created Claude, and Claude is kind of moving in a slightly different way than chat GPT is. Claude is really very much focusing in on long form textual. The way Claude speaks, and the way Claude writes is really quite nice and a little bit better sometimes than GPT Four. The other advantage of Claude is that GPT Four is only available currently as of October 2023. Things will change in a very short period of time, but at the moment, GPT Four is only available to the paid members, whereas Claude two is available and is nearly, if not better than chat GPT four is free. And so you can get a free, high-quality version of GPT Four through Claude.

Erica: Okay, that's neat. Now, I'm just curious, have you explored it all with Bard? Because when I was collaborating with a colleague of mine on a Zoom call, I was using chat GPT and Claude, and he was using Bard, and Bard is the AI version of Google. Have you explored Bard at all?

Darius: I have not. So I think that'll be another conversation once we get to that. I've got one other really interesting experience that I really want to share with you, Erica.

Erica: Oh, please do.

Darius: That I think will be quite interesting to talk about. So another client who has autism of mine, I said to her, look, you've got autism. Let's look at how AI can help you with autism. And she said, it can help me with autism. And I said, well, let's see, let's try this. And I said, let's take the transcript of our first meeting, put it into Claude with this instruction. And the instruction was, please help me understand the social and emotional cues that were going on in this conversation.

Erica: Wow.

Darius: I pasted in the conversation and Claude came back and said, when Darius was saying such and such, she was very excited by that and felt really reaffirmed and when such and such did this and did that, and it just analyzed the whole interaction. But what went totally crazy was. And we both remembered this conversation. It said, there was a moment, Darius, you interrupted her at this point, and she was silent for a while, and I think she felt you overrode her. And I was like, too right. I did. And then afterwards, it was like, she said this, and you said that, and it, resolved it, and both felt happier. It's like, just these interactions. And then it started to say. I noticed when she leaned forward and said, such and such, you did this and started to fidget, and it was clear that she was really excited about what you were saying. And, the client and I were reading through this, and we were going, hold on a minute. That happened? But this was a transcript. It didn't even hear the audio. It just had the words. Okay. What Claude was doing was inferring that when someone says something like that in the language, their body, their movement would probably be that they were leaning in and doing this. Or when someone's saying that they're probably fidgeting or whatever.

Erica: Maybe it could also detect the volume of the voice.

Darius: No, it couldn't. There was no audio. It was just words typed out.

Erica: Oh, wow.

Darius: Okay, now, hold that thought. Right?

Erica: Okay. Yeah.

Darius: Now, here's the principle I think is so powerful with this, is that you can use AI like a mirror to mirror back and self-reflect. This is part of executive function, this metacognition, this self-reflection, and self-improvement. So what happened in that was I saw lots of ways that I did really well with my client. First interaction. But then there were some where, it pointed out a few things, and I was like, I knew that I felt that inside. And she said, you know what? I felt that inside. It wasn't a big deal, but it was like, yeah, well, noticed that was right. And it was us getting to know each other sort of thing. Now, here's where the big deal comes. Let's wind it back to the cognitive behavior. The therapy coach. Okay. I asked him to pay, so he's pasted in his session notes. Okay. We then went through the session notes and wrote the notes of the meeting, pulled out all the relevant things, saying, yeah, that's good. That's the notes of the meeting. That's that sorted. Proofread. Okay. So now it's like, actually, I would like to reflect on how I managed in that meeting as a therapist. okay. Nerve wracking. And I said, now you tell it. You say you are an expert in CBT therapy, and you are a lecturer in how to do it and an expert mentor of CBT therapists. Please look at that and give me the strengths and weaknesses of what I did there. And it would go through and say, strengths. You were very empathic. You did this, you did that, you noticed this, and you built up the confidence. She started to say that you put in some action points. You got the homework; you reflected on the homework. There was some transformation. You reaffirmed her transformation and goes through it, and you go, right I did. And then weaknesses come along and saying there were moments where you concentrated more on the form than you did your client. Now it's not looking, it's not hearing, it's just reading and inferring what you did from it. It's like, hold on a minute, I'll just put that in, and it will critique certain things. And you go, do you know what? That's a fair point. Do you know what? That's a fair point. And so on. It won't be harsh; it'll be gentle like a mentor and so on. Isn't that incredible?

Erica: You know what it makes me think of this coaching course that I graduated from recently and it would be really cool to start to record my coaching courses and then ask it to give me feedback. Say this was my training. I could throw all of my training in it, all of the materials, and then ask it to give me feedback. That's so interesting. Wow. I have some people I need to share that with in coaching that are going to be like, oh, that's going to be really helpful because if you are to pay people to give you feedback on your coaching, it's extraordinarily expensive.

Darius: Yes.

Erica: And what I love about this is it really encourages people to continue to grow because I think people get into these little habits and they just rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, rinse, and repeat. And there are times where, but that also that we just don't even necessarily have that self-perception of what we are doing. That there might be a phrase or a word or anything that we do that may not be that helpful and we could actually break some patterns that we're not aware of that could make us better therapists, teachers, practitioners. That's cool. You have to be brave to go there, but that's what we should be doing. I just shouldn't.

Darius: And, actually, it's sometimes easier getting that feedback from an AI in an interesting way.

Erica: Yeah.

Darius: Because it's not, personal person saying to it, and it has a way of saying it that is really quite respectful. Now it gets even better.

Erica: It's not emotional.

Darius: Yeah, even better. It gets better. Tell me, you ready for the next one? Right?

Erica: Yes.

Darius: Imagine you started session one, you've done the assessment, you've done session one, you've done session two, you've done session three, you've started to ask for feedback at the end of the sessions and so on. You're at session eight at the end of it. Okay? You could ask it questions like; what transformations have happened in my client during that period? Have you observed what changes in health, what changes in their outcome, outlook, family, taking it from different angles? What about this angle? What about that angle? Et cetera? And that could go into your final report. And it's like, gosh, yes, I forgot they came from here to here and so on. But this is the biggie. Okay. you could then say, how have I implemented the feedback you've given me over the last sessions? And that relates to what you said it would say earlier on in the session. I started to mention how you used to use forms quite a bit and interrupt the flow of the client while you've filled something in. I've noticed that in the last few sessions it's hardly noticeable when you're filling things into forms and so on and then et cetera, and it gives you that positive reinforcement of what you've achieved. But then points out you are still tending to dot, dot, dot. And you're like, you're absolutely right. And sometimes for your professional evaluation or if you're a trainee, you're like, I'm going to write that in. I have done this. I have changes like that. I am still aware that I am doing such and such, and I intend to work on that in the next sessions when it gives that self-awareness. Anyway, what do you think about that? Because it's not just a, one off, it's ongoing.

Erica: I love that. And I know in my coaching training, you always want to establish a direction. What's your goal? What would you like to achieve in our session today? And what would be really interesting is when you're done, to say, did we achieve the goal, number one? Number two, do you have any ideas on how I could have better achieved that goal? Yeah, because what it's doing is it's helping to make you more cognitively flexible.

Darius: Yes.

Erica: Because it might be giving you new ideas, new perspectives, new ways to get them to that particular goal, which is really interesting.

Darius: And you might say, I chose to use this particular protocol to help this client, and we followed this protocol, some CBT protocol. It might say, well, that CBD protocol is very, very good for this certain goal. We maybe might have considered using Myers protocol, blah, blah, blah, for doing something similar because it has more of an emphasis on this or that protocol. And so you could be using it on a protocol level as well. Not even just a technique level, personal technique level, but on a protocol level.

Erica: And you could even say, can you give me a list of ten questions that I could ask that could help guide and facilitate the direction that the client chooses?

Darius: Yeah. Did I tell you the story about writing a letter to the janitor of a church?

Erica: I don't believe so.

Darius: Okay, so this is also quite an interesting story and scenario that develops. I do. This group called the Productive Dreamers. It's a group coaching session, and I was telling them about AI and showing them how to use Claude. And we took this scenario where this person was a volunteer in this church, and she had gone to the church and walked around it and saw lots of different kind of health and safety things that needed to get done. But she hadn't got round to writing the letter because she's dyslexic. She finds it hard putting it into writing and making it formal. And so she'd been putting it off. So we did a quick mind map of our thoughts and then I just asked her to talk through it. She did. We took that transcription, put it into Claude, and we actually put it into chat GPT, because it's quite short. Put it into chat GPT and said, please turn this into an email. 30 seconds later, its dear facilities manager, I was going round, and I noticed X, Y and Z. and it was a beautiful email. And, yes, it was done. And I said, so, do you think it's ready to send? And they were like, totally. I said, we could send it right now, but I said to them, let's see how far we can push GPT AI here. We could then ask, please read this email and from the perspective of the facilities manager and tell us how you think the facilities manager would respond to this email or how he'd feel. Right, yes, how he'd feel. And, in that letter chat, GPT said, well, if I'd got this as a facilities manager, I would feel a little bit upset that you hadn't mentioned all of the things that I'd already done in the facility. You just talked about all the things I'd done wrong.

Erica: Yes.

Darius: And we were all like, oh, my goodness, that's so true. And so we said, could you please rewrite this letter to acknowledge that he has really done the foyer really well. That transformation of such and such is really good. So she added that in chat, GP cleaned it up, rewrote it, and I said, are we ready to send it now? And they said, yeah, sure. And I said, hold on a minute. there's one more thing. And they're like, what else could there be that could be good. And I said, well, yes, but we don't just want to send a letter. We want to see transformation happen. We want to see the facilities manager actually do something about this.

Erica: Right?

Darius: So, chat GBT, please read this letter and tell me what sort of things would actually motivate a facilities manager to do something about the points raised. And it came up with, well, as a facilities manager, I would have my own building development plan. I would have my own supervisor goals and health and safety requirements. These are all things that would motivate me to action if they were involved in it, but I would probably have limited resources and could do with some help to implement them. And so we're like, oh, of course. What suggestions you'd make? And it would say, well, what if you offered to go in and help clean up some of the library and so on that you mentioned? Of course we would do that. Well, it wasn't in the email, was it? And other things. So we said, write this email again. Now, this is not a big, long email. This is still a short email, right? Please write it in that context. So the email went along the lines of, dear facilities manager, really loving what you're doing and what you've done. Understand that you've probably got, a development plan for changing the facilities. I've noticed a few things here, like this, this, and this. If it was okay, we would love to help. I could organize a team of people to come in and help and manage it, but we would just need you’re okay, how do you feel about that? Et cetera, blah, blah, blah, and ready to send. And I said, is that ready to send? And they're like, totally. That is totally ready. And I said, you're right, it's ready to send. So, number one, we had some good language articulated, so it wasn't just a random, rambling email. Number two, it acknowledged his perspective, and we got feedback of his perspective. And then, number three, it actually spoke to his motivations. How about that?

Erica: Thank you so much for telling me this story, because I've had scenarios where I've had emails, for example, from maybe client parents, that triggered me and created an emotional response. And your inner voice is, like, not being very nice. And there are times where I can't write back to them for a day or two because I have to wait until my emotional reaction is gone so I can be myself. But sometimes if you have to wait a day or two, that really agitates people. So this is really a great way for in those moments when you're in a super sticky situation and you might be getting emails or comments that are not so kind that it can help you to maintain a professional and compassionate voice that can Take a super sticky situation and flip it. Because I'll tell you, when the amygdala, is triggered, that's part of executive functioning, too. We can't be our best selves, and so I love how we can use AI to help us keep things on a professional, compassionate tone. So, I hadn't gone there with AI, and now I am going to go there, because even when I send an email to a parent, there's no reason why I can't drop it into AI and just say, hey, I want to be this, this, and this, and this. Is that the tone? Am I successful? Is there anything I didn't catch or think about? Wow, that was really helpful, Darius. Thank you for. Ooh, what a great discussion today. Oh, loved it.

Darius: This is just the tip of the iceberg with AI. I think a lot of this is just about mindset. At, the core of this is breaking people's mindset, that AI is there to just do the letter for me. No, it's not. It's there to make what you do better. It is processing. Absolutely.

Erica: It's executive functioning, Darius.

Darius: It is, absolutely. But what's the beauty of this? You know how we talked about this dual layer of processing as a base layer and executive functioning, sitting on top of that and then being, connected, that sometimes if you can't process something in your working memory very well, it affects your working memory. It looks like an executive function issue, but it's actually a processing issue, and sometimes vice versa. What's happening here is the AI is doing a lot of the processing, heavy lifting for you so that you're freed up to do the executive functioning.

Erica: Your working memory is freed up so that you can do the best processing. It helps with working memory because it holds more than you can hold. It helps with inhibitory control because it helps you with metacognition, and it helps you with cognitive flexibility, because it shows you new perspectives. Wow. And you know what that means. Your higher order executive functioning skills are going to be what you want them to be instead of what you're not aware of.

Darius: Yeah.

Erica: Wow. Huge. So AI really is an extraordinary executive functioning tool.

Darius: Absolutely.

Erica: Wow. This is great.

Darius: Forward to having loads more talks about this because it is so useful. I mean, you can now get AI to look at a photo for you and say, tell me about this photo. We won't get into the conversation, but there is just so many things that are happening that are so helpful if you have the right mindset to pick up this tool. And it's like picking up a tool. Do you pick up an electric drill? Some people pick up the electric drill of AI, and they turn it around and they bash the screw with the base of the drill. Brute force. Write this letter for me. No, there's so much more to it. To actually get that task done and drilled in and fixed and so on, you need to learn how to press the trigger, put it in, drill it down, and there's a nuance and a quality to it.

Erica: Prep the surface. I mean, all sorts of things, but yeah. So we have to learn how to use AI intelligently.

Darius: Aha.

Erica: We have to be conscious instead of subconscious when we're using this tool, and we need to learn and perhaps take courses on how. That's really interesting, Darius. That would be a really great course.

Darius: We ought to think about mean, because essentially, what AI is helping us to do is processes. Yeah. Like, what is the process of writing a letter to your facilities manager? What is the process of writing legally sound notes as a counselor? What is the process of reflecting on your work and so on? This is what we've been talking about, essentially.

Erica: Processes. Yep. Processes and perspectives.

Darius: Yeah. Okay, Erica, thank you for, having that conversation with me. I enjoyed it.

Erica: Oh, me too. Thank you for joining our conversation here at the Personal Brain Trainer podcast.

Darius: This is Dr. Erica Warren and Darius Namdaran. Check out the show notes for links to resources mentioned in the podcast. And please leave us a review and share us on social media until next time.

Episode 52 Leveraging Claude Ai for Executive Functioning: Tips & Strategies

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