Dr. Bruce Wexler on the ACTIVATE™ Program and its Breakthrough Impacts on Youth Executive Function

Dr. Bruce Wexler is Professor Emeritus at Yale University as well as a member of the BrainFutures Advisory Board.

BrainFutures has partnered with Dr. Bruce E. Wexler of Yale University and the Howard County Public School System to implement ACTIVATE™, an evidence-based executive function intervention, across 12 schools in Howard County, Maryland.

ACTIVATE is a cognitive training program employs computer-based activities to enhance focused attention, self-control, cognitive flexibility, and working memory, resulting in improved academic performance. Strengthening executive functions can also help prevent and address mental health challenges such as ADHD, substance abuse, and depression, and can equip students to benefit from other mental health interventions.

Since ACTIVATE™ was launched in Howard County in the fall of 2024, nearly 1,200 children from Title I elementary and middle schools have participated, with preliminary results showing statistically significant improvements in self-control among children completing more than 400 minutes of ACTIVATE. This work is funded with the support of the Maryland Community Health Resources Commission (CHRC).  

To learn more about our ACTIVATE™ implementation in Howard County, MD, please click here.

What do you wish everyone understood about the importance of executive function?

Executive cognitive functions are essential for managing actions and emotions, and organizing and managing information we receive. They include focused attention, self-control, memory and cognitive flexibility. They predict academic performance more powerfully than IQ, and are compromised by poverty, ADHD, learning disorders, substance abuse and mental health challenges such as depression and schizophrenia. Poor executive function in 3rd grade predicts failure to graduate from high school, substance abuse and teen pregnancy. The negative consequences continue into adulthood with unemployment, under-employment, substance abuse, legal problems and compromised mental health. Fortunately, executive function can be improved, which is exactly what ACTIVATE™ is designed to do.

How did your role as a researcher and professor at Yale lead you to create ACTIVATE™?

Our brains are organized hierarchically from single cells, cell dyads and local neurocircuits to brainwide neurosystems that integrate the activity of millions of neurons pretty much across the whole brain. Thinking and emotion are products of these neurosystems; they simply do not exist at lower levels of organization. Hubel and Wiesel won the Nobel Prize for showing that the connections among neurons that create the neurosystems are shaped after birth by stimulation from the environment. Disorders of thinking and emotion are what define illnesses of the brain, so if you want to treat these illnesses or improve or maintain thinking ability in children or older adults, you have to strengthen the neurosystems. When I was teaching a seminar for psychiatry residents at Yale, some said “this theory is interesting, but it does not matter because all treatments are drugs.” Given this challenge, I decided to see if I could harness the brain’s neuroplasticity with digital perceptual/cognitive tasks that selectively activate and strengthen under-developed or under-functioning neurosystems. I created ACTIVATE™ and received an NIH Director’s Award for “high innovation, high impact, paradigm-changing research.”

Can adults benefit from executive function training as well?

Adults can certainly benefit from our digital neurotherapy. There are three published papers and two additional studies showing improvements in multiple aspects of cognition after using our REJUVINATE™ program. The average age of participants in the five studies ranged from 35 to 85 years old. In three studies they were patients with depression and their depression improved more than with drugs and without side effects.

What are your hopes and plans for ACTIVATE™ in 2025 and beyond?

The problem of academic achievement gaps in math and reading related to poverty is, frankly, a disgrace in a country of our wealth and an injury to children with lifelong consequences. The evidence that ACTIVATE™ can improve executive function and academic proficiency in children from disadvantaged backgrounds is very strong. My three hopes/plans are:

1. Improve student engagement with the program by creating a new user interface with higher production quality and incorporating some of the engagement features developed so successfully by the computer game industry, but now in the service of neuroscience-based intervention to improve student outcomes and lives.

2. Analyze, with appropriate partnership, our unique 100 million data points of responses of children of different ages to perceptual/cognitive challenges that differ incrementally and systematically.

3. Increase the power of ACTIVATE™’s proprietary, real-time, training-individualization functions, based in part on the analyses in #2.