Swimming in Your Thoughts

Meredith just started swimming with a new swim team. She has always loved swimming, but it really has to be the right environment. For instance, the last team we joined practiced in an enormous indoor swim complex that was exceptionally loud and chaotic, which meant the coaches also yelled a lot. Not good. Then Meredith swam with a summer league where she enjoyed practice at the outdoor pool, but detested the meets which were loud, long, chaotic, unbearably hot...you get the picture.

So, she is so enjoying her new arrangement. There are maybe 10 kids at the most at her practices, swim meets are optional, it is at an outdoor, heated pool, and the coach is a very sweet mannered young woman. I'm shocked that she is actually wanting to practice three times per week because she complained so much in the past about going. Obviously the difference is the sensory environment. The...sensory...environment. Nine times out of ten the sensory environment is what stresses Meredith.

And that brings me to the point of swimming as an attractive sport for people like Meredith--highly visual thinkers who have weaker auditory systems (i.e., Mavericks). Swimming quiets down all the noise so the auditory system isn't working in overdrive. It eliminates visual distractions so the visual system isn't engaged in it's perpetual scanning mode. The elimination of the auditory and visual distractions allows you to enter that state-of-mind where you can freely wander through your thoughts (without being accussed of daydreaming). The physical aspect probably helps in engaging the right brain as well.  You don't usually get too cold or too hot.  Really, it is quite ideal for this breed.

I once was talking to my massage therapist during a massage (why do I always do that?!) and she clearly was a Maverick. She told me that her work place environment is perfect because it is dark, there is soft music, and she is doing something physical--all of which really allowed her mind to wander into places she enjoyed going to. She appeared to be so fullfilled with her work.


So, as always is the case, Merebith is following along with Meredith and has also started back with swimming, but she has her own Olympic sized pool. Guess who her coach is? Michael Phelps! Apparently he struts into practice wearing all eight of his gold medals around his neck.  Merebith loves swimming.

Dogot, meanwhile, has his own smaller pool filled with oil. His favorite thing to do is to lie on his back and spit mouthfuls of the oil up into the air. Can't you just picture it? Of course when he gets out, he is covered in oil. No problem!  He just rolls over to this huge blow-dryer looking machine and when he turns it on, it blows all the oil right off. How convenient!

Maverick Minds and Dr. Cheri Florance



Do You Think in Pictures, or...

Do You Think in Words?



One person drastically influenced my perception of visual thinkers forever: Dr. Cheri Florance.

When I discovered that Meredith thought in pictures, I of course went looking on the Internet for information. After looking at many things, I finally settled on contacting Dr. Florance because of her compelling work and the fact that like no one else, she was describing my daughter Meredith better than anyone else I found. Dr. Florance discovered a specific type of visual thinker. She calls them "Mavericks" or having a "Maverick Mind." First, I suggest watching this remarkable video about how Dr. Florance was able to reach her "unreachable, unteachable son."

On her website, www.maverickmind.com, Dr. Florance describes The Maverick Mind:

The Maverick Mind, discovered by Dr. Cheri Florance, is a brain that functions at above the 99th percentile in the visual pathway and below the 1st percentile in the verbal pathway. Mavericks have such strong visual thinking that an enemy relationship has formed between picture thinking and words.

Child Mavericks
Often the symptoms of a Maverick are similar to symptoms of Autism, Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) or Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). When Mavericks are misdiagnosed from a symptom assessment, they can become frustrated and appear unmotivated. Some Mavericks are diagnosed as gifted in certain situations. When Mavericks are correctly identified and begin appropriate training, they often experience success very quickly.

Adult Mavericks
Adult mavericks often are very visually quick thinkers who can jump ahead to the bottom line or manage a crisis brilliantly. Conversations can seem too slow and unnecessary. We have seen hundreds of medical students who do a superior job performing in a lab and fail when taking a reading-writing test on the same subject, law students who are excellent in practicum and fail the bar exam, executives who can easily see solutions before staff members resulting in friction at work, and spouses that have trouble with intimacy because lingering over a conversation is counter intuitive to them. Visual thinkers are the best of the breed. The most famous thinkers throughout history, Einstein, Churchill, DaVinci, have been primarily visual.

Today, Dr. Florance works with Maverick children and adults all over the world through the "Brain Engineering" program that she developed. Meredith and I worked with Dr. Florance for about six months. Meredith made some significant progress and I received a top-grade education as well!

Lesson number one from Dr. Florance was that there are two main thinking pathways: verbal and visual. The verbal thinking pathway processes information using words and the visual thinking pathway processes information using pictures. Dr. Florance refers to those strong on the verbal side of the curve "Lexicoders" and those on the visual side of the curve "Opticoders." Mavericks are "Super-Opticoders" and can think in dynamic, video-like fashion.

Dr. Florance also explained to me that on a bell curve, most people use both verbal and visual thinking pathways, switching back and forth based on which one is most appropriate for the task at hand. The outliers (i.e., Mavericks) on the visual side are those who she terms Maverick Minds and the outliers on the verbal side could include those with Nonverbal (i.e., visual) Learning Disorder. I'll elaborate more on this in future posts.