Episode 82: Executive Functions - Flare and Focus

Below you can view or listen to Episode 82 of The Personal Brain Trainer Podcast.

In this episode of 'The Executive Function Brain Trainer Podcast,' hosts Dr. Erica Warren and Darius Namdaran explore the concept of 'flare and focus' and its impact on executive functions. The discussion delves into how the terms, commonly used in design thinking, can be applied to cognitive processes like brainstorming, prioritizing, organizing, and time management. Through engaging analogies and stories, like the behaviors of honeybees and the double diamond design process, they highlight the importance of balancing divergent (flaring) and convergent (focusing) thinking. The episode offers practical insights for students, educators, and professionals on how to optimize this balance for effective problem-solving and creativity.

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Erica: Welcome to the Executive Function Brain trainer podcast. I'm Dr. Erica Warren.

Darius: And I'm Darius Namdaran. And we're your hosts, sponsored by iVVi. Imagine turning your meeting's audio into a live mind map instantly so you remember what matters. Well, try iVVi for free now at Ivy App. That's ivvi.app.

Erica: Sponsored by GoodsensoryLearning.com Engaging remedial materials that bring delight to learning. Hey, Darius, nice to see you.

Darius: Hey, Erica, nice to see you too.

Erica: So what have we got going for today?

Darius: Well, I came across this phrase called flare and focus, and I think it's a fascinating phrase zoology, and it's got a lot to do. We can learn a lot from executive functions from it. Flare and focus is predominantly used within design thinking. A lot of designers use it, developers use it, and basically flare means they, flare out their thinking and then they focus on their thinking. So there's two different kinds of thinking. And I just want to talk about these two words. And they're just such useful words. And if we can stitch them into executive functions, you can see where they weave into the executive functions more explicitly, because a lot of people are using flare and focus within unconsciously doing executive functions with it. So I just wanted to unpack and make it more intentional.

Erica: Yeah, that's really cool. And it reminds me a lot of how I often talk about opening and closing your aperture, but it also reminds me of whether you're zooming in or zooming out. Mind maps allow you to see the big picture, which where you're zooming out or where you're zooming in. So this is going to be fun.

Darius: Yeah. So let's just kind of start with how do we define flare and focus? Okay, so basically, if you think about flare as starting from a point and then flaring out like flares on your trousers or a fan fanning out. Okay, so basically, if you think about your thinking fanning out a wide angled lens with a wide aperture, like you see, you're seeing the big picture. And this really relates to the ability to brainstorm, to be cognitively flexible, to ideate and things like that, then you've got focus, which is the ability to prioritize, the ability to organize, the ability to sort of mute out less important things and amplify important things and follow through on something. And this really relates to working memory, inhibitory control, and time management. So you got both of these aspects happening within everyone all the time, and you just emphasize one or the other.

Erica: It's funny, it makes Me think of the universe like flare is almost like the big Bang. Right. So the universe is constantly moving out, whereas focus is where you're looking at one specific star, one specific planet.

Darius: So I think it's really nice to kind of, you know, you meet certain people who are just always in flare mode. They're always big picture; they're always firing out different ideas. And then you'll meet other people who are always in focus mode. They're like, right, how do we drill this down to the next achievable step? And how do we act on this? And let's turn this into a plan and act. And you need both. And so let's look at the strengths of flare and focus. A lot with minds that flare very naturally are very divergent thinkers. They're often the problem solvers, the innovators, the entrepreneurs. They often have dyslexia, adhd. They co-occur so often, you know, these entrepreneurs with dyslexia and adhd, so on it. But this flare type thinking is not exclusive to them, but very much this divergent thinking.

Erica: I think a nice way to think about is, you know, when people think of attention deficit. It's such a misnomer.

Darius: Yes.

Erica: It's really attention surplus, which is more in line with flair. They're able to absorb more. I mean, and that's why they have a hard time focusing. Right. Because they're absorbing so much and they're aware of so much. I, I, I wish they would change the name because it's such a, it gives you such a really the wrong impression of what it is. It's really attention surplus.

Darius: Attention surplus and focus deficit. I suppose instead of attention deficit disorder; it's focus deficit disorder. it's not actually

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Darius: attention deficit. It's, they've got huge amount of attention. It's just spread out widely.

Erica: They're experts at flare.

Darius: Yes.

Erica: They're just not very good at focus.

Darius: Yes, yes.

Erica: Unless, unless they're in a flow.

Darius: Yeah, unless they hyper fixate and then they really go into focus. So they're flaring out, they snag on something that really catches their attention and then they go into hyper focus. And so you've got flare and focus happening within adhd. You've got flare and focus happening within creativity. For example, the British Design association talks about their industry standard for how to understand the creative process. It's called the double diamond design process. Have you heard of the double diamond design process?

Erica: I have but tell us about it.

Darius: So like the double diamond design process Is like, you flare out to capture your ideas, and then you focus in, and that's your first diamond. And then from the end of that diamond, you flare out again, and then you focus back in. So you've got double diamond. And the power of a double flare and a double focus is that, you know, when you're ideating, you think. We think the answer is in this general idea. In, this general area, you might ideate about your ideal customer, avatar, et cetera, who your user might be. You then narrow that down to, oh, we've got 20 different possibilities. Let's narrow it down to two or three or maybe even one. And then once you've nailed that one, you then go and experiment on that and flare out from that, and then you focus back in from there. And so actually, if you were to draw the diamonds on a route map, on a map, they wouldn't be going in a straight line. One would be going in one direction, focusing, and then it would change direction, and it would be a double diamond. And you'd kind of zigzag to your end destination, but you'd get there faster rather than the big, long winding ramble. And that's the double diamond design. And this flare and focus. Actually, I should give credit. Who was the chap that does vnote that you introduced me to?

Erica: Nick Koshnick.

Darius: Nick Koshnick introduced this to me as a chat. He just took it as common parlance from one of the people that he had met with dyslexia, about flaring and focusing. And it's just quite a nice parlance where you're just saying, oh, I. I'm just going to flare for a moment. It's a bit of, you know, jargon.

Erica: I love that. I love that. I mean, and by saying that, you're preparing somebody and you're also building some degree of compassion, and you're saying, hey, all right, I'm just going to. I'm warning you, I'm warning you. I'm. I'm going to flare. And so then the person's ready, right? Because if they're in focus mode and you're flaring and you don't really give them a heads up, you can go awry on your conversation where there can be some degree of frustration where one person wants to focus, and the other person wants to flare.

Darius: Yes. And actually, this is the beauty about human beings and life and working together is that we complement one another. And you need these to work in partnership with each other. You need to flare out, and then you need to focus down. You can't be flaring all the time, otherwise you never get anything done. You can't be focusing all the time, otherwise you get to a certain point, and you miss opportunities. Okay. Oh, I've got a lovely story about missing opportunities about honeybees. Okay. And it kind of ties into flare and focus a bit here. Okay. I used to be a beekeeper. I love honeybee stories. Okay. And I don't know if you know that honeybees tell each other where the honey is. Well, the nectar is and the pollen. I'll just call it honey for simplicity. They tell the bees where the honey is and by a waggle dance. Did you know that?

Erica: A waggle dance?

Darius: A waggle dance. Have you heard of the waggle dance?

Erica: I have not.

Darius: Well, it's amazing because if you take, a honeycomb out of the hive, you will see bees just wandering around doing their thing. And then you'll see some bees waggling quite energetically in the middle of the. On the honeycomb. Okay. And what scientists have done is they've worked out that what the bees are doing is they are giving directions to the other bees as to where they got the honey from. Wow. Yes.

Erica: That brings a whole new. It just kind of blew my mind in the sense of how could they possibly communicate? Spatial skills. Spatial. Like a map through a waggle.

Darius: Yeah. So what they do the way they do it is the top of the hive vertical

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Darius: points to the sun. Okay. So they orient everything to the sun. Okay. So they've just come back. The sun is in a fixed point in the sky. It's moving a little bit, but not enough for the short time the B says, right, you waggle, waggle, waggle. So it does like three waggles and moves three body lengths forward, which is a unit of measure in bees. So that will be like 300 meters that way and then it'll turn to the left and it'll start saying, then you need to go 200 meters this way and then you need to go this way. And it'll show a route along roads and down a river and then there will be a junction that will be a big tree and then that will be a shift in direction. So they're basically communicating through the waggles. How to get facial waggles? Absolutely. And depending on the vigorousness of the bee, waggle shows how good Stora is. So if they're kind of like. Yeah, yeah, it's kind of like average, you know, one bee will listen to another one bee doing a waggle dance and there'll be another bee doing another waggle dance to the other side of it. And it'll decide, actually, this is the one I'm going to go for, because they're more enthusiastic and they'll copy that bee, and they will follow the route exactly to where the nectar is.

Erica: Oh, that's fascinating. So they copy the bee so that they get the map kind of ingrained into their body through movement. Yeah, it's a kinesthetic memory.

Darius: Absolutely. They feel it. Yeah.

Erica: So it's a visual then? Kinesthetic?

Darius: Well, it's completely kinesthetic because they feel it. They feel the orientation accord because it's dark. It's dark inside of the, the hive. It's black, you know, 37 degrees centigrade and black. And so they just can't see it all.

Erica: Then how do they know that they're. How do they know that the bee's changing direction?

Darius: They feel it because the bee rubs up against them and they push all the bees that way and feel it. Yeah, and they can feel it on the honeycomb as well. Anyway, so they've done the waggle dance and they've gone and flown, and they've got the nectar, and they come back and then they do the waggle dance, and they carry the passer on to the next person, the next bee. Okay. Now if the bees. This is where the flare and focus comes in. Okay. If you're a typical honeybee, you'll do exactly how you're described it. Okay. 80 plus percent of bees will just follow what bee has just told them to do and they'll go and get the nectar. They're so well organized. They don't just randomly go out because it uses up a lot of energy to fly somewhere, which is nectar, to get more nectar and bring it back. So there's a price to be paid to get the nectar. They have to use nectar to get nectar and so they don't want to waste it. Okay. I mean, these bees use a lot of energy, so they're very efficient. Now, if they were super-efficient, you would think that 100% of bees would, would follow where the directions are to the honey. Okay? But if they did that and they really focused, everyone focused on the wagon. This is the difference between focus and flare. If they all did that, they'd all finished the nectar in that patch of ivy or whatever it is, and then they fly back and they do not know where to go next because everyone's telling them to go to the one place. So what the bees have done is about 10 to 15% of them don't follow the waggle dance. They go their own way, and they find honey by accident. And then when they find it, let's say 1 in 10 finds it, they get a new haul, they come back, they do the waggle dance really excitedly because there's tons. And then all the other bees start going to this new site.

Erica: So no, it's. But it's not honey, its pollen, Right?

Darius: It's nectar and pollen.

Erica: Nectar, yeah. Ah, Nectar and pollen. Pollen. So I guess there are those that are flaring out to find new.

Darius: That's right.

Erica: Is. And then those that are focusing in that are. Because they can be more direct. They're not.

Darius: Yes.

Erica: Wasting.

Darius: Yes.

Erica: Why can't human beings be this efficient and work together this way? I mean, it's just.

Darius: Well, the thing is, we are this inefficient, efficient in many ways. If you think about this, I have a theory. Right. Okay. I researched this a bit. So scientists have gone in and tried to figure out why some bees follow the waggle dance and some don't. Okay. There's a lot of research on bees. And what they've concluded is that some bees follow the waggle dance. Okay. But they misread. They can't. They're like dyslexic bees. They read the message wrong. Okay. And so they go the wrong way.

Erica: They

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Erica: take a left instead of a right.

Darius: Yeah, that's right. So often very young bees who haven't quite learned how to interpret the waggle dance, go out there, start following it, and then they go the wrong way, and they find something new, and they come back and do the waggle dance to where they actually went. So actually, I think there's a genetic reason why people have a disposition to be dyslexic or ADHD or whatever. And we think of these as problems. They're not problems, they're just different ways of thinking. And there's a role for that different way of thinking. Like, there's a role for these bees that don't follow the directions they go. They flare out. And so often there are certain people who tend to flare out, and there's certain people who tend to focus. And when they work with one another, you get the great harvest. It's like some people are hunters and some people are gatherers. So these people who are much wider angled thinkers, big picture thinkers, they're doing this scanning of the horizon, hunting for Signals of prey, of opportunity and so on. They go find it. But they're not necessarily very good at gathering at all. So they come back, and they tell the tribe, look, I, just found this. Great. Why don't we all go out there and get it? And they're like, fantastic.

Erica: You guys look at it, I'll find the next one.

Darius: That's right. So it's like some people are like long sighted and some people are short sighted. And if you were long sighted in the savannah, you could spot things in the distance. It's like, great, you go spot it. I'm shortsighted. I'll go right up to the animal and process it and skin the hide and all the rest of it, et cetera. And, according to your abilities.

Erica: What I love about this discussion is we're often talking about executive functions as kind of. It's your own executive functions and this is almost executive functions working as a team.

Darius: Yes.

Erica: So when you start to combine flair and focus, there's more of a societal benefit versus an individual benefit. It's about collective benefits. That's something kind of lovely because we haven't really talked about the collective benefits of executive functioning diversity. And there's something really beautiful about that. I just love the term neurodiversity because it really does take the stigma out of so many of these disabilities. And so many of these disabilities really do have these unique ways of processing and looking at things that have value.

Darius: Yes. Yeah. I think even thinking about short sightedness and long sightedness, historically people have been short sighted and long sighted. And I remember when I was really young, my grandpa would tell me to look out the window at the boats and read the names of the front of boats in the sea. And I had really good long sight and he didn't. But he had a great deal of wisdom about each one of the boats coming in. And he knew them by name and so on. And so there's young and old working in partnership. There's long sighted and short-sighted working in partnership. likewise. We do that in all sorts of different abilities. So let's look at some of the challenges of flare and focus. I mean, one of the things is with flaring is you can I see this sometimes with certain people that I know with dyslexia or often with adhd is you can be so wide a thinker that you want to keep your options open all the time.

Erica: Right. You can get stuck in the flare, in the expansion.

Darius: Yeah. And you're just expanding, expanding. And you feel. I've Got to keep. I've got to. And often it's. I see this often with dyslexia. It's a common trait when it comes to answering a question. Okay. So if you write a question down, an essay question, and you ask them what do you think this essay question is asking you, they will have such a flare of an idea and expand the scope of the question so much that they'll feel overwhelmed by it. And you're like, no, no, no, that's not what they were asking. They weren't asking you to explain every single Renaissance painter in history, in a 2000-word essay. No, they were asking you to choose two Renaissance painters and compare them. Ah, okay. I was thinking about the 100 that I know about, and you're like, no, no, no, let's ease this down. And that's where this flare and focus comes in. So sometimes you can flare out so much that you get overwhelmed, and you just say, I'm just not going to do this. I can't do this. This is too much for me. And it's true, it is too much for anyone if you flare it out that much. But that's not what was being asked.

Erica: Right. Because I see so many kids, they get the question, but they then take

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Erica: a little diversion and another little diversion off of that, another little diversion off of that. And then all of a sudden, when they're done, I say, go back and read the question. Did you answer it? Oh, I started to, and then I got went down this rabbit hole and then that rabbit hole, and then that rabbit hole. And that. I suppose flaring can lead to a lot of rabbit holes.

Darius: Absolutely. And, in the workplace, you would call it expanding the scope.

Erica: Well, it's funny because in a way, if you are going down a rabbit hole, you are focusing to some degree.

Darius: Yeah, you are. Yes.

Erica: But it's a diversion. It's a diversion off the path, so to speak.

Darius: That's right. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's the nature of focusing, is you are hyper focusing, maybe, or you're focusing on one particular thing or a number of different threads. But the nature of focusing compared to flare is that you're intentionally using inhibitory control to say, no, I'm not going to do that. No, I'm not going to do that. No, no, no. Yes. And during the flare, it's like brainstorming. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Oh, and this, it's like improvisation. You know, we went down the river and you fell in the water. Oh, yes, I fell in the water. And then I caught a crocodile by the tail. Oh, yes, you did the crocodile. But the crocodile had a hippopotamus in its mouth. Oh, yes. And it's the improvisation kind of rule of. Yes. And, you know, that's kind of like the flare mode, but then the focus mode is the no. no.

Erica: You know, it's so funny because I can be very focused, and I usually am, but I never. I never have to say no. I just. I just am focused. But I think there are those people that do have to consciously say no.

Darius: You have to say no. And if you're thinking about it as a creative process. Okay. It was probably the easiest way to understand it. Here are a bunch of different opportunities for us. All of them are reasonably quite good. So let's say the honeybee example. There are 10 different locations, but if we rank them, that's a 3, that's a 5, that's a 6, that's a 7, and that's a 9. What am I going for? I can only go one place. I'm going to the nine. Okay. So you just listen to the instructions on the nine. You go to the nine, you come back, you listen again, et cetera. And that's the nature of focusing, is kind of being very goal focused, very target focused. It's this complete focus on your chosen priority.

Erica: So what are the challenges of focus?

Darius: Well, I think the challenge of focus is you can spend too much time on that task.

Erica: Right. You lose the big picture.

Darius: Yeah. You're like, oh, I was meant to go and, get honey, you know, and you get honey, and you get honey, and you get honey. And then you say to the honeybee, can you fly back? And you're like, oh, no, I've got too much honey. I've got too much nectar. I'm too weighed down. I can't fly back. So the honeybees got to weigh up. They've got to get enough honey to make it worth their while to have made the trip, plus a bit extra. So they've got more to give back to the hive. But they can't take too much because then they can't fly back. So they got to weigh up what's the optimum payload. And in a way, that's part of the focus. It's like you can expand the scope too much or you can be a perfectionist where you're like, oh, no, I've got to do it exactly right. Oh, this is not perfect yet. This is not perfect. And that's part of this double diamond design.

Erica: Interesting. Bringing Perfection into it. That's very. The perfectionistic quality of being too hyper focused and just not letting it go. And one of my favorite sayings is a work of art is never finished. It's merely abandoned. And, you know, I. I see that with my artwork, my pottery, with my writing. You can always spend more time working on it. But it's interesting. Sometimes you work on it so much that it's completely different. It's like you could have almost written two blogs, two completely different blogs. And you can keep massaging something until it is just.

Darius: Yeah, I think that's where this. You know how Brene Brown talks about shame and, also the shitty first draft. Have you heard of her shitty first draft?

Erica: I have not heard about that one.

Darius: Yeah, it's a bit rude. Sorry. But that's her terminology. Okay. And basically what she says is every first thing that you do, book, blog, podcast, whatever, there's always a shitty first draft. And you've got to allow yourself to do that first draft. Okay? And

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Darius: technically, in the British double diamond, that's the first diamond.

Erica: Interesting.

Darius: And the second diamond is where the gold is. Okay? So the first flare and then the first focus is not the end of the matter. If you're a perfectionist, you'll want to flare out and focus and have the job done. But actually it's an iterative process. You flared out, you focused, and you think, this is pretty good. I was nearly there, but I'm going to flare out a bit more just to see if there's a few things that I kind of missed on this. And then I'll focus in with what I learned. And then you hit the mark.

Erica: You know what I love about this is this could be such a fun tool to teach kids. Really teaching them what flaring is and really teaching them, what focus is. Because there's something a little playful about it and. And for a teacher to be able to say like, oh, this is a really great first draft. And I'm curious. Let's flare for a minute. Right? How could we make this better? Let's go into a flare. Or let's. Let's go into a focus here. Let's focus on this one part of your essay. How can we make better? And teaching them that lingo. Because there's something really kind of lovely about that.

Darius: Yes, absolutely. I love the terminology. It's new to me. I mean, we would call it divergent thinking, and convergent thinking would be the technical terms. You know, you wouldn't say that to someone. Let's do some divergent thinking here. Let's do some convergent thinking. But flare and focus. Really nails on the head.

Erica: Yeah. Or sometimes I'll say, let's open your aperture or let's close your aperture.

Darius: Yes.

Erica: Or we've often used the analogy of the blinkers. Blinkers, meaning that that's what it's called when we put those kind of leather. What do you call them? Restrict. But I think. I don't think many Americans use that term. But they restrict the eyesight of a horse.

Darius: That's right. Yeah. It's like a cap, but instead of on the top of your head, it's on each side of the eyes. So you're looking forwards and only look at what's in.

Erica: Right. And you're not distracted by what's on the sides.

Darius: If you strap two caps to the sides of your face and, that would be what it would be like for the horse. Yes.

Erica: Right, right. Psychological. It's tunnel vision.

Darius: Tunnel vision, absolutely. And do you know what? It's interesting. I've been using. I've been wearing a cap recently a lot more. And, Because I find it makes me be just a little bit more focused.

Erica: Isn't that. Well, and of course it is. It's focusing your vision because it's blocking off some things.

Darius: That's right.

Erica: And vision is probably our biggest sensory input.

Darius: Yeah.

Erica: So what I'm curious about is how can we balance flare and focus? Because I think, so many of these things, it really is a balance. It's a balance of finding people that perhaps work with you, that balance you but finding balance within yourself. And I think that there are times where I need to say to myself, wow, I've really got a flare. And other times where I've got to say, hey, wait a minute, I really need to. I need to focus.

Darius: I think our society is more on the side of focus, focus, focus, focus.

Erica: Education. Education absolutely is. And even probably workplace is.

Darius: And workplace.

Erica: Although it depends on what profession you're in. Because I can think of some professions where it's all about flair. Like if you're working in an airport and you're keeping track of all of the. The traffic coming in and out, they have to stay in perpetual flare.

Darius: Maybe. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Erica: You know, so I guess it really. But that's the interesting thing is that if you. If your default is flare, then what you want to do is you want to find a profession that really allows you to flare. And if you are perpetually focusing, finding a profession that honors that, you Know, it kind of bums me out that education can't spend more time honoring those that flare.

Darius: Yeah.

Erica: Because there's really something to it.

Darius: Yeah, absolutely. I think. So first of all, your question was, how can we find a balance? Is that right?

Erica: Yeah.

Darius: So I think first of all, it's self-awareness where you say I tend to flare, or I tend to focus. So that's. See, which is your default. Maybe some self-awareness as to I tend to flare more at night, or I tend to focus more in the morning. You know, so it could be time, time specific. Then once you know a little bit more about yourself and are a little bit more conscious

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Darius: of that, you start looking for intentional relationships where you can flare. Okay, so your relationship with a person or with art or a creative relationship, you allow that flare opportunity. I mean, for example, today with the developer and Ivy, we're, you know, as you know, we're, we're developing Ivy a, piece of software. I said to him, look, over the holidays we're both going to be working, but we need to create a hackathon. Okay? We, one day we're just going to play. We're not going to have any targets or anything like that. We're just going to come together. We're going to be on Zoom together for eight hours and we're going to try and create a little micro plugin for Google Chrome to do with Ivy. Okay, we're just going to have fun and in doing it, we'll learn lots about using AI. AI, the two of us, and a little project, we'll just do it together and if it works, great. If it doesn't, no problems. It's just a learning fun experience. That's really a flare experience, isn't it? And it's playful and fun, whereas the rest of the time, often we're like, right, we've got to focus. Let's do our sprint plan, let's work out, prioritize what our key ideas are, et cetera, let's time them, let's give ourselves an allocation of resources, et cetera. You know, it's quite structured and systematic. So I think if you know who you can flare with, that's another thing. And then also balance it with another person who's willing to be your focus and who needs someone to flare with, you know, and balance. Or maybe you just need to be around lots of other people who are brainstorming all the time, very artistic in art school or whatever, and they're just flaring left, right and center, and you're Setting each other off on fire, which is great. So there's a lot of what places do you put yourself in? And then there's other things as well. But I'll stop there because I could keep going.

Erica: I'm also thinking that if you have a personal flair and a personal focus, it's very different than when you have it with somebody, because what somebody else helps you to do that you can't necessarily do yourself is pivot. So there's. To me, there's another piece. When you work with a person, there's focus, flare and pivot. Pivot would be them getting you to kind of shift your whole perspective. So if you're. If you think of yourself as on looking at the horizon and the beach, and you can focus and you can flare on the horizon, but someone can get you to pivot and turn around and look at the other side. So now you're not maybe looking at the sunset, you're looking at just the clouds that are lit up by the sun. And you.

Darius: The moon rise. Often when the sun sets in Scotland, the moon's rising behind you.

Erica: There you go. It's the moonrise, which is a complete pivot, which is different. But I find that I suppose anybody can, as a person, they can focus and they can flare, but it's harder to pivot. But when you're with other people, you're getting a combination of focus, flare and pivot. And the pivot is allowing you to look at things from a completely different perspective or just kind of like just shifting, turning, and looking in a different direction, which can be really. You know, it makes me think of cognitive flexibility. I feel like focus and flare is more of, working memory and inhibitory control and the pivot, which is a harder thing to do individually, but you can. Because you can say, I'm going to pivot, I'm going to look the other direction. I'm going to take a different perspective. I'm going to let go of my perspective and imagine what it must be like to have the perspective of this person or this thing. But I do love the idea of how when you're working with others and collaboration and cooperation, how it brings in more pivoting than usual. I don't know. It's kind of bringing in a whole new dynamic.

Darius: If you think about the double diamond design. Okay. And you've got one diamond joined to another diamond.

Erica: That's the pivot in there. That's the pivot. Ooh, that's good.

Darius: Yeah.

Erica: The pivot point.

Darius: Yes. And it's like a hinge. And I think that's why it's so important. When you see that diamond design and it looks like a bridge where you've got two arches, it's not going in one direction, it's not going in a straight line. It, pivots at that point.

Erica: It's lovely because it makes me think that in those moments where after you flared and you brought it into a focus, it's an opportunity for you to say, do I need to pivot or not?

00:35:00

Erica: It's like a pivot point within that sequence, which is kind of. Because. Right. You don't want to really pivot in the middle of a flare or in the middle of a focus. You want to pivot at either the beginning or the end.

Darius: Absolutely. You're right. Absolutely. There's.

Erica: There's something really lovely about that. There's a really good executive functioning hack there.

Darius: Yes, yes. It's quite a nice sequence, you know, because the sequence is honeybee, goes out, sees seven different options of potential places to go. The flare then decides. I'm going for the number nine because it's got the most wiggle. And it goes to that one. And then it comes back and it's. It decides, do I go back out to that, or do I readjust, pivot from that point? You know, and in a. And obviously it's coming back to the hive, so it doesn't use the image so well. It's kind of like once you're at that point, but we are constantly leapfrogging back, forward, forward. And it's this iterative cycle from flare, focus to pivot. I like it.

Erica: Yeah. And what I feel in my system is I think of students, right. So if a student is going to be most effective in getting their homework done, right. You flare out and say, okay, what am I going to do next? You focus in on one assignment, and you stay focused on that one assignment. You unitask. So, a student that wants to do homework, they have to flare out to say, okay, what am I going to do? And then they focus in on one assignment. And it's so important, and this is something that we've talked about quite a lot, is how important it is to unitask and not multitask. So staying focused on one task, then you finish that task. That's your opportunity to pivot. You flare out again, pivot. I guess you really pivot, flare out again. what do I have to do for this particular assignment? Then you focus and you get things done. But yeah. The chronic problem that I see in so many of my students is that they're multitasking. I watch my students; they're working on a paper, and they've got all of these notifications going off at once. And they go down that little rabbit hole and that little rabbit hole, and then they come back, but they're just not fully present.

Darius: They're not in the flow. And there's something beautiful about being in the flow.

Erica: That's it. You lose the flow when you don't honor the focus.

Darius: I suppose in a way, what we've talked about is when you're in flare mode, just be in flare mode. When you're in focus mode, just be in focus mode. When you're in pivot mode, be in pivot mode. And in a way, I think of these three phases of executive function as filter, focus, adapt. Filtering is working memory, focus is inhibitory control, and then adapting is cognitive flexibility. So in effect, the filter phase is like. In a way, like, a filter is very wide and broad. You're just trying to capture a huge net of information and filter it down to what you think is the most important. And then you focus and then you adapt. It's a loose connection with the process of filter, focus and adapt.

Erica: Well, it's interesting. You have. Or, you could even combine and say, go with the three Fs of filter, focus and flare.

Darius: Oh, actually, no, flare. No filter. I'm, replacing flare with filter. So flare, focus, and what would be another word for adapter?

Erica: Well, I would think of filters being more like focusing because you're filtering out the flare.

Darius: Yes, I. It is, but I actually, we'll have.

Erica: To explore that sometime. You and I will have to. Because I think that they could work well together. Filter, focus and flare. Yeah, yeah, I see how they do overlap. So what's so interesting? Go ahead.

Darius: The filtering is more, you know, when you've got a really wide angled lens and you're scanning, something, your kind of filtering the default horizon of things to look for the opportunity, the animal moving the opportunity on the horizon. Oh, there's a movement there. There's a movement there. And you're filtering everything out to try and find those things. And then you go, there are three opportunities here. That's just tree moving. That I think is actually a deer. And I'm going to go. And then you focus in, and you go running towards the deer or stalking towards the deer. So this filtering process is part of the flare in my kind of imagination.

Erica: so then it's really flare. Flare filter focus.

Darius: Ah,

00:40:00

Darius: yes, that's it.

Erica: It's flare filter float. Oh, my God. It's a tongue twister. Flare filter focus.

Darius: Exactly.

Erica: Maintain that and stay in that. You're in a flow. Flow equals flare filter and then focus.

Darius: Yeah. And those are the three component parts of staying in flow.

Erica: That was really satisfying.

Darius: That was good. Nice one. Nice one. That was really nice. Yes. Maybe I just discovered this week is something. I think I just discovered something quite important for me and I think for others that I work with. I think people with dyslexia, and processing difficulties often fall out of flow more often than others because they're doing multiple processes at once. Okay. And I've seen this. For example, I've been working with a, an executive and showing him how to do some executive function, coaching on task management. Okay. And so he's just typing in his tasks on a list. Okay. So he's focusing in on emptying his mind and just doing a brain dump of all the things that are in his mind to empty his mind. Okay. We've all done it. It's super important to do it needs to be part of our workflow. Okay. But here's what I noticed was happening. He's typing away his task. He's thinking about the task that's on his mind, and then there's a spelling mistake. So he goes back and corrects the.

Erica: Spelling mistake and he loses his flow.

Darius: Yes.

Erica: Yes, you're absolutely right. And I'll tell you why. Because dyslexic skills, the core skills, aren't built to automaticity.

Darius: Exactly.

Erica: Things like a, spelling mistake or. Or even if you. If you're a typist and you are not a touch typer, that can get in the way of flow.

Darius: Yes.

Erica: As well. Or if you are not really an automatic reader where you're still decoding words. I mean, and of course, all of these things take up cognitive space too. So it's. It's a combination of it not being automatic and it is taking up cognitive space, which just disrupts the flow.

Darius: It does. And. And really, we say you should only do one thing at a time. Okay. Now, on the outside, for this person, they were doing only one thing at a time. Yes. Okay.

Erica: Things. Yes.

Darius: But they were doing two processes at a time. Consciously doing two processes at a time.

Erica: Well, they were fine until they had a misspelling. Right?

Darius: Yes, absolutely.

Erica: So that they get derailed.

Darius: To be more accurate, we should do one process at a time, not one thing, but one process like this flare that filter and that focus. You should be doing one of these at a time, not all of them at the same time. Just like when he was typing in. so I said to him, look, you've got stop a minute. Does it. Do you care if that word is spelled right on your own personal to do list? And he says, no. And I said, well, why are you correcting it then? And he's like, oh, gosh, good point. I said, well, stay in the flow. Don't correct any spelling mistakes at all. Empty your brain out. And then if you want, go back and correct the spelling and do one process at a time. And that's the key, you know, you do one process at a time. And it's like, now, don't get me wrong, if you're listening to this, you might think, well, that doesn't make sense, because looking at typing in a, to do list, there's actually about five processes involved in there, you know. But what I'm talking about is one conscious process and everything else is on automatic. Like you were saying, Erica. So if you can spell automatically, great. If you can type automatically, great. If you can decode the words yourself, great. But if you find it hard to read, or if you hide it hard to spell, if you find it hard to type, whatever, you should be doing one process at a time in order to stay in the flow. And that's the joy of it. My wife finally, sorry, Erica, my wife was saying, people who talk about flow is they say that you should do a task that you're comfortable doing and has 5% uncertainty to it, and then you can stay in the flow. So it's stretching you by about 5%, but you're 95% in it and confident on it. And then you stretch by 5% and you can really stay in the flow. When you're doing multiple processes, that's often you're like, oh, I'm not good at this. Oh, I'm not good at that. Oh, I'm not good at this. And

00:45:00

Darius: you're constantly destabilizing the boat, as it were. So you can't stay in the flow and stay stable on the boat in the river.

Erica: And what you have to be most aware of is what helps you to maintain your flow. So, for example, if you're writing a paper and spelling gets in the way of your flow, is there another way to write your paper? Can you use speech to text, which enables you. On Google Docs, you can use voice typing and you can just speak It. But just speak it. Don't get too caught up in how it sounds or anything like that. Just get it out. And that's one of the great things about using AI is you can just get it out and then it organizes it for you.

Darius: Yes.

Erica: Which is so satisfying. But. But yes. I think what's most important is. And teachers struggle with this because they tend to teach the way that they learn. Oh, well, that worked for me. So I'll teach this strategy. But, helping students to figure out what's their way of processing. You know, I'll have parents say to me, well, Susie can't listen to an audiobook that's not reading. And I always say, yes, it is. It's reading with your ears. It's not reading with your eyes. Maybe that's not the way that you process, but that's the way Susie processes. And there's nothing wrong with that. There's everything right with that. And giving people the. The ability to choose what works for them and celebrate that and not make them feel like it's cheating or that it's wrong or, that it's unfair. It's whatever helps someone to process the information is what's best for them.

Darius: So completing this circle of flair and focus. Can you see why I was so pleased about these words?

Erica: Yeah, it's really fun.

Darius: And I think let's have a quick look at some of the tools and finish this off with some tools. Like, my favorite tool to work with flare and focus is mind mapping. So if you look at mind mapping, it's a real flare tool. You know, a lot of people use mind mapping to brainstorm a spider diagram. If you don't know what mind mapping is, it's basically a keyword in the center of the page. And then you do branches off it with keywords on top of it on top of each branch. And then you branch branches off that and it becomes like a tree of information, and you start to see the patterns and hierarchy of the information. That's kind of like a flare.

Erica: Well, it's more than a flare. Initially, it's a flare, then it's a filter.

Darius: Yes.

Erica: Then it's a focus. It's exactly what we were talking about. It's the focus Flare filter. Focus. It enables you. It walks you through and documents the pathway. It allows you to see the big picture. And then you can take any one of those little pathways and filter and focus. So you get into flow.

Darius: That's right. Absolutely. And I've. I just take the example of writing a Story, for example. Okay, yeah. So a child writing a story. I've got this beautiful story. Evie, who's in Ireland, she's a great storyteller. She won a storytelling competition, okay. And she ended up writing this book and publishing on Amazon. And she was like 12 years old. And she did my course on writing stories with the mind map with a story star. And basically what she did was she tended to flare and have way too many characters, way too many things happen in her story. Everything got lost, and it was. It never came to an ending. Okay? And we all know what that's like. That's pure flare, okay? But you need that flare. So you mind map that all out, and then the next thing is, it becomes like a fruit tree where you prune the branches of a bonsai tree, you know, you kind of bonsai it and you go, do we need seven friends for the main character? No, let's go for one or two. And you're like, okay, we'll get rid of this. And you prune that away, you know, filtering, you know, and you. And then there's like multiple. A few branch. You might end up with 10 branches. And you say, do we need 10 steps in this story? Let's think about the five main stages of a story. Oh, I'm missing this, I'm missing that. And you can start seeing a pattern, you know, in that sort of flare stage. And then you hone it down and you delete, delete, delete, delete, delete. And that's one of the most important things in a mind map, actually, is to delete and delete and delete as much as you possibly can. So it can seem actually very childlike and simple

00:50:00

Darius: after an intense process, rather than a big, complicated hundreds of words or 50- or 100-word map with four levels, deep branches. And you're like, no, do we need that? No, delete. Do we need that? Delete, delete, delete, delete, delete. And then that's the thing, right? And she talked it through, and she wrote the book. She wrote it out, she spoke out, and it was a really concise, powerful story. But that all happened. The edit of the book happened in the map. Because she was a very visual thinker, Beautiful. And so if you find tools that fit your mind, if you're a very flaring person, mind mapping can really start with the flare. And then you can start using it to sort of bend those branches into a focus, you know? And there's other tools that are amazing for flare. Taking Notes is great for flaring. Just take a note, put it into Apple Notes or Google Keep or something.

Erica: Well, let me just do a call out to what you're creating. You're creating this app which is now out Ivy. That's really great because it is a mind mapping tool, but it can just listen to you speak. It mind maps everything. It also gives you the sequence because it will also give you a transcript of everything that you've said. And there are all sorts of other cool features coming down the pike. Like it will help to create test questions and stuff like that. And it's such a great tool for really walking you through the steps of flare, filter, focus so that you can stay in flow. You know, I just have to, I just have to give you that little bit of a plug because it's quite an extraordinary tool and, and I'm having, I'm advising on this project, so I'm having great fun with this as well. So it's to add another, another F into it. Right. But yeah, it's definitely worth checking out because it's a really great way to process ideas. It's a great way to, to generate ideas, to organize ideas and to really help with the thinking process. But it honors many different ways of processing at the same time.

Darius: Absolutely. And I, I love integrating these different tools where you can speak out your thoughts, stay in the flow of your thoughts flow of a conversation. You know that it's being transcribed, and you can see it being turned into a map. And then at the end of the conversation you can actually use the map to kind of edit what you've said. Did we say this? Did we agree this? Are these, these are the main points. So it's a way of double diamonding it, basically. You know, you go back to it, and you say, right, we've got the Lego pieces on this map. Should we just edit this down to what we think are, what I call the seven gold nuggets? What are the seven things you want to take away from this meeting? Often, it's five or four, but often seven really valuable points.

Erica: But you know, if you've got a little kid that has great ideas but they're not a good writer, I mean, you could even just, you know, hop onto Ivy with, the two of you, like a mother or a tutor and just ask questions, just interview that, that child and it will mind map all of their ideas and then that's when you can then filter and then focus. And before you know it, they've written something quite extraordinary and it's theirs.

Darius: Absolutely. Yeah.

Erica: It's entirely theirs.

Darius: Yeah. And it's not an AI who's done like an AI summary of what they think your story should be or anything like that. It's just like keywords on a map. And really if anyone else looked at it, they would go, what's this all about? But because you created it along with Evie, you're like, I know exactly what this outlet outline is of the story. And they go into the second double diamond, which is. Or the third double diamond in that case, which is. Now I'm going to tell the story as, speech to text into Google Docs and then I'm going to go through and edit it, I'm going to put it into paragraphs, I'm going to polish it down and then it's finished. So it's kind of like this double diamond happens often in different tools as well. And I think Ivy's a, really great sort of bridge between what you're thinking and a final tool. So for example, if you wanted to create a PowerPoint presentation, you wouldn't be doing it with an Eevee, but you'd map it out in Ivy and then you'd export it to a PowerPoint tool like Google Slides and you'd put the slides in, add the images in and you'd have a well-structured slideshow or whatever. So the point I'm going to, I'm trying to make here now is it's really useful with the flare and focus to find tools that help you in those modes.

Erica: That helps. Helps you to flare and helps you to focus.

Darius: Absolutely. And there are certain things that really help you to focus, like, Google Apple Reminders helps you to focus. Because you've got a list of reminders,

00:55:00

Darius: you decide what's going to be at the top. Right. What am I doing next? I don't need to flare. I just need to go to the top of the list and do that one at the top and that's it. That's focus. And that helps me focus. And you're like, oh, I want to focus right now. Okay, I'll go to reminders. It'll help me focus. Oh, I want to flare a little bit right now. Let's do a map. Oh, I want to. Do you know what I mean? You find a tool as, as well as a person. So we talked about people you can do it with, but you can also do it with tools.

Erica: Well, it's a processing tool.

Darius: Yeah.

Erica: All of this, everything we're talking about today is about tools to help you process.

Darius: Yes. And then these two main modes, flaring mode and focusing modes, you know, they are processes. Absolutely. So flare and focus and executive functions. Who'd have known it? But we could have talked about that for a whole hour. But that was good fun talking about that.

Erica: It sure was. Until next time.

Darius: Until next time.

Erica: Sponsored by the Executive Functioning Remedial Assessment, an online tool that quickly identifies challenges and delivers targeted strategies for success.

Darius: Sponsored by Ivy. Imagine turning your meeting's audio into a live mind map instantly so you remember what matters. It's ideal for students and managers with dyslexia or adhd. Try ivvi for free now at Ivy App. that's ivvi App. thank you for joining us at, the Executive Function Brain Trainer podcast.

Erica: Check out our show notes for links and resources and follow us on social media.

00:56:42

Episode 82: Executive Functions - Flare and Focus

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