All in the Family

Although the focus of the blog is on my daughter Meredith, I wanted to tell you about my son Tyler as well.  Although (so far) Tyler does not seem to possess the same visual processing style as Meredith and my husband with the filing cabinets and assistants, he certainly shows signs of having pretty exceptional visual skills.

When Tyler was six, we walked into the living room to see him quietly drawing away on a piece of paper.  He had been watching Star Wars, but paused it on a frame of Yoda.  When I looked at what Tyler was drawing, I was shocked.  This is what he drew:

Now, I realize I'm Tyler's Mama and as such, I'm hugely biased.  But even trying to keep my objective hat on, I think this drawing is pretty remarkable for a six-year old.  I'm not sure too many adults could draw that off the tv with such symetry.

Here is another example of a Pokemon character the Tyler copied from a book at the same age:

And just today, Tyler told me that he does in fact have some colors for letters and days of the week, indicating that he is also a synesthete (i.e., someone who experiences synesthesia) like Meredith (see this earlier post on Meredith's synesthesia).  Just for the record, Tyler said his days of the week are colored as follows: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday.  He described his letter "a" as illustrated below.  Tyler spent time with me on the computer to get the turquoise background, the font for the letter "a", and shadow on the letter just right.  I find it interesting that it is three-dimensional.  As with most synesthetes, the colors and details are very, very specific.  That's usually how I know that someone is actually "seeing" the color and not just making it up. 

I'm going to keep this as a record and see if it remains stable over time.  If you are a synesthete, you too can record your synesthetic experience for a large study called the Synesthesia Battery that Dr. David Eagleman is conducting at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. 

I once corresponded with a doctural student in England who studied at what age synesthesia emerges in children.  She found that it seems to emerge in the early elementary years.  This could be why Tyler never said he had colored letters before, but now he does--he's now in Second Grade.

This discussion about Tyler illustrates two points that I want to share with you:

     (1) Visual thinking is genetic, and
     (2) Sibling IQs are closer than you think.

Dr. Cheri Florance says that brainprints -- or basically the way you think -- is genetic to some degree.  It is very commonplace that if there is one predominantly visual thinker in a family, there will be many more. Take my family, for example. My father was an electrical engineer and designed nuclear plants. My mother was an English teacher, but also is a talented watercolor painter. My oldest brother is a brilliant engineer and mathemetician as well, and my second oldest brother is a talented architect (hello visual-spatial talent!). I have had various positions and interests, but have been drawn to the visual arts as well with photography (www.angelaeatonphotography.com). My youngest sister has found her niche in nature study and also has various visual arts as hobbies (www.montanapulpworks.com).  Those weren't shameless plugs--just wanted to give you something to look at!

Doctors, engineers, mechanics, artists, hair stylists, graphic designers, computer programers, first responders--these are all examples of highly visual career paths.  It is interesting to look at people's hobbies as well.  If you have a highly visual person in your family, look at a little closer at the family picture to see if you see this trait more often than not.

To my second point, Dr. Linda Silverman (the person who coined the original term "visual-spatial") explains that siblings generally are within 5 - 10 points of each other's IQ scores (go here for more information).  I mention this because I think it is very common for parents to say that one of their children is gifted and the other is not.  Dr. Silverman discusses how often the second child will have very similar traits, but because they compete with the first-born child to some degree, their gifted traits may manifest themselves differently.  It is worth giving your "non-gifted"children a second look!

A note on "gifted."  Who really knows what gifted means.  There are many different definitions by many different institutions.  I don't like to toss that word around and proclaim to the world that I have "gifted kids."  What I have found, however, is a pretty high correlation with what I'm reading on the "overexcitabilities" and high-intensity nature of gifted kids and my own kids.  I have found the literature on the emotional needs of the gifted to be extremely helpful in dealing with my kids.  It is really in this context that I talk about gifted.

Synesthesia...the OTHER Big Discovery

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When I discovered Meredith's filing system of pictures, I went to Facebook to tap into my friends to see if anyone knew about this or had similar systems.  My friend Brad responded by saying that it sounds like Meredith might have some synesthesia.  Synesthesia?  

Like most people, I had no idea what synesthesia was.  Through Brad and Google, I learned that synesthesia is when a person has a sort of cross wiring of their senses so that when they experience one sense, another sense is triggered.  Examples include seeing colors when you hear music, seeing letters and numbers as colors, or getting a particular taste in your mouth when you hear a particular name.  The synesthestic experience is involuntary and automatic and doesn't seem to change over time.

There are two theories about how or why synesthesia occurs.  The first theory is that people who experience synesthesia (synesthetes) have more cross-wiring between sections in their brain.  The second theory is that everyone has the same wiring, but some people have overexcitability or less inhibition in these areas. 

The most common form is called grapheme-color synesthesia where people see written letters as colors.  For some reason, it is really common for people to have their color for letter a as red.  Therefore, whenever I suspect someone has synesthesia and they tell me that their letter a is red, I'm pretty sure they're a synesthete.  Of course, letter a doesn't have to be red.  In fact, synesthetes colors are very individualized and very specific.  People won't just say their letter b is blue; they will say it is a light blue with a little turquoise tint to it. 

 A quick test with Meredith and I find out that yes, indeed, she has different colors for her letters.  But something was strange.  I discovered that if I wrote a word in color and none of the letters were in the colors that she "sees" them as in her mind, she was unable to see them. I had discovered this when we were on a camping trip in our RV.  After digesting this for a day or two, I tried another experiment with her that I won't ever forget.  We were driving on the highway and I saw something written on my McDonald's soda cup: "Keep [Texas] Litter Free." (The word "Texas" was red and the other words were black in case you can't see the color on your screen.) I showed it to Meredith in the back seat and asked her to read it.  She said, "Keep Litter Free."  You don't see this word Texas?  She responded, "Well, I see a letter 'a' floating there, but that's it."  Wow.  She only saw the letter a because the letter a is red to her.  She explained that she has always seen these extra letters floating around, but she never understood why.

The questions were running through my mind. What about school? Teachers use color all the time.  Dry erase markers on the board, vis-a-vis markers on the overhead, and textbooks are full of colored text as well.  I thought about the fact that in her class, they had a small dry erase board where the lunch choices were written every day...with a red dry erase marker.  Ha!  I thought I found a hole in her explanation because she went up and made her lunch choice just fine every day. But no, she explained that there was one boy who always talked out loud and when he would go up and read the lunch choices, she would go follow him so that she could hear what they were and make her choice. Holy cow.  She had found all sorts of ways to compensate.

Then Meredith tells me that if she happens to see a letter written on the board in the color that she sees it as in her mind, she also hears a sound.  Like a dog barking, an alarm, and a slide whistle.  That information almost put me over the edge.  I mean, that's a little crazy to imagine about your child.  

In researching synesthesia, I learned that one of the foremost experts on the subject is at Baylor in Houston--Dr. David Eagleman.  I contacted him and we had a conversation about these peculiar issues that Meredith was experiencing.  He said that he hadn't heard of the kind of word blindness that she was experiencing, nor had he heard of the letter-color-sound connection before.  Great...you never want to be the exception in science!

We made some immediate accomodations for her in her classroom.  We made sure the teachers only used black markers and she was given a black and white copy of any colored handouts.  Fortunately, after the issue came to light, Meredith was able to somehow figure things out on her own and now she doesn't experience the word blindness anymore.  As for the barking dogs and slide whistles?  I bet those are still there.

I saw a video with Dr. Eagleman today and he had a really good example of what it is like to experience synesthesia.  He showed a photo similar to the above picture.  He said that more than likely, you had an automatic thought in your mind, "Barack Obama."  That is how the synesthestic response works, except maybe you experience colors, tastes, feelings, or sounds instead of the word, "Barack Obama."

Do your letters have colors?  What about your days of the week?  If they do, chances are that someone else in your family has a red letter "a" as well!  For a family of synesthetes, it's fun to start arguments over what the correct color is for Monday or Tuesday.  Sometimes I have to pinch myself and realize that if anyone else would be listening in on our conversations, they would probably think that we had all lost it!