I Speak Pictures

During the period directly following my discovery of Meredith's extreme way of visual thinking, I continued to unearth more and more details. She had said that she had pictures for every word, in addition to every number, every equation, and more. At one point, she told me that the reason I always had to tell her to "spit it out" was because she had to translate her pictures into words. (No parenting guilt there, by the way.)

So, one evening we were out at a restaurant for dinner and during our conversation, we were talking about an Internet game that Meredith and her brother play. During the conversation I asked her, "Are they on the same account?" I saw her hesitate just slightly and quickly asked her, "Did you just see pictures when I asked you that?" She said, "Yeah. I saw a group of people for 'they,' a butterfly for 'same,' and a cash register for 'account.'" Fascinating...that was another jaw dropping event that really put things in perspective.

One thing I'm reminded of is what Ronald Davis describes in his book, "The Gift of Dyslexia."  Davis explains that there are no pictures for dolce sight words like, "the," "for," and "or."  In the example above, you'll see that Meredith did not describe any pictures for "are," "on," or "the," which were the other words in the sentence.  Davis learned through his own experience that sometimes when reading sight words that don't have pictures, one can become disoriented.  One part of the therapy that he developed has people use clay to come up with their own "pictures" for these sight words so that they will have something to "see" when reading and avoid becoming disoriented.

It is commonplace for picture thinkers, or "Mavericks," to make pictures for what they hear--particularly figures of speech. Just imagine what you would see in your mind if you thought in pictures when you heard things like, "Keep your eyes peeled," or "I sang my heart out," or "I threw my back out." No lie, I just asked Meredith if she had any other figures of speech that particularly bugged her besides peeling your eyes and she said "I sang my heart out" really grosses her out. Then I asked her about "I threw my back out" and she said, "Mom, stop! You just made Merebith throw up!"  She said that people really need to be careful about what they say around visual people because the pictures can be disturbing.  As if anyone would really censor themselves let alone even be aware of it.

The movie, "Temple Grandin" beautifully illustrates how visual thinkers "see" idioms. When Temple hears about "animal husbandry" for the first time, for example, she sees in her mind the classic painting of the farmer and his wife with the pictchfork, except the farmer is standing next to a cow wearing a bridal veil.  They did such a great job with that movie and if you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend it!