Where Does Self-Control Come From?

let's read Barkley's 1997 book "ADHD and the Nature of Self-Control"

Last week’s public post touched on the theme of self-control in concepts of flow and hyperfocus, which I’ve been digging into since. A deeper analytical dive into executive function has been a long time coming — I once polled paid subscribers on potential topics and “the politics of executive function” was the winner — so let’s actually, finally get into it!

Of course, we must start with Dr. Russell Barkley, whomst I have previously called my archnemesis, mostly just because he gives me big right-wing retired cop uncle lecturing me at the dinner table vibes¹ (but also because, being gaydhd, I obviously live for the drama).

You’ve likely tripped over Barkley’s work if you’ve read anything about executive function,² which he’s spent most of his career studying and theorizing. He’s retired now, but recently started a Youtube channel where he presents aesthetically hideous PowerPoints on various topics like ‘ADHD as Motivation Deficit Disorder’ and ‘Why Dr. Gabor Mate Is Worse Than Wrong About ADHD’.³

I do appreciate his commitment to accessible science communication, but my feelings as a viewer are also accurately summed up by this Reddit post:

An Evolutionary Theory of Self-Control

To truly analyze executive function as Barkley theorizes it, we must dust off his 1997 book ADHD and the Nature of Self-Control.

One of Barkley’s absolute icons is the late science popularizer and humanist Jacob Bronowski, whose paper Human and Animal Languages inspired him to theorize about where self-control might be located in the brain. Bronowski was a polymath whose work was kind of all over the place, but we do love a messy bitch.

He was deeply interested in both science and poetry, and this paper was his attempt to explain the difference between human language — which he calls a ‘structural system’ — and the ‘code book’ of other animals. The main factor differentiating the two, he thought, was delay.

The human brain takes in a message, stops to think about it internally, and then puts out a response. This delay makes it possible to separate our emotions from our communications, to conceptualize the future and the past, and to create an internal voice that helps us think before we act. Bronowski wrote:

“There must be some biological mechanisms which produce this delay in the human brain..”