Language in Pictures

For picture thinkers, the English language can present so many strange pictures.  Last week, Meredith told me that she hates homophones in particular--words that sound the same but have different meanings.  One example she gave me was "duty" vs. "dooty." (You can see where this is going, right?)  Meredith says that whenever she hears that a teacher is on "lunch duty," she gets a disturbing picture of the teacher on top of dooty. 

Last weekend, the students at Meredith's school ran a water stop for a local marathon. As we were driving to our volunteer spot early in the morning, we went over the instruction sheet. The instructions said that in addition to handing out water, a portion of the students were going to be on "Encouragement Duty."  It just took one look from me with my eyebrows raised for her to share what she pictured that to be.  She said she pictured a pile of dooty holding up signs and cheering.  Wouldn't THAT be something to laugh at!

Some people need more processing time when they are told something, when they read something, or when they see something.  But what many people probably don't realize is that for some people, it is not because they have "slow" processing speed.  Visual thinkers, for example, tend to have extremely FAST processing speeds.  It's just that they are processing something else--like why a pile of dooty would be acting like a cheerleader!!  They need to sort out the pictures from the words--something I think almost all of us take for granted, especially with the plethora of idioms and other figures of speech in the English language.

This reminds me of a really funny example given by a great blogger for Psychology Today, Lynne Soraya, who writes about life with Asperger's Syndrome.  In her post, she writes:

During a recent trip, running through the airport, I caught a brief glimpse of something that made me stop dead and burst out laughing. I know it must have seemed strange to those around me - but that's not unusual. The unique way my brain processes sensory inputs had played yet another trick on me.

Suitcase-bearing travelers made quick course corrections to navigate around me as I turned to re-examine the door I'd just passed through. A decal on the door read, "No smoking" and "Pets must be kept in cages." That wasn't what had made me laugh - what made me laugh was how my brain, desperately trying to make sense of the visual chaos of the airport, had translated it: "Smoking pets must be kept in cages."

Look to Mental Pictures to Judge Emotional States

Yesterday, Meredith had a bad day and came home crying saying that she was depressed.  She even missed her soccer game because of it.  The problem was that I couldn't pinpoint the source of her emotions. It's not as simple as asking her what is wrong, because often she can't find a way to express her emotions and asking her sometimes just makes her that more upset. Usually she will show that there is a problem by crying, refusing to do anything I ask her to do, getting upset with any little inquiry or suggestion I make trying to help her, and being very over reactive to any minor stress. In these situations, the only thing that I have learned to do is to give her lots of space, remove any stresses, and provide opportunities to refuel her right brain like drawing, watching TV, listening to music, or playing with her dolls.

So, she watched lots of TV, drew me a picture, sang and danced in her room, and had lots of good snacks.  I didn't insist she go to her soccer game, do any chores, and made sure her little brother stayed far away.  After dinner, she came into my room and we were able to talk rationally about what was bothering her.  She had mentioned a few times last week that she was struggling with some math concepts--the relationships between fractions, decimals, and percents in particular--so I thought this could be it...especially since I knew these are generally difficult concepts for a visual thinker like Meredith to grasp.  And sure enough, that was it. 

Meredith said that she just doesn't get the concepts and can't process what her teaching is saying.  She has always struggled with these concepts in math.  She says that all she hears is "Blah, blah, blah."  Not in a disrespectful way at all--just that she literally can't process what she is hearing; it doesn't mean anything to her.

Over the last few months, I have learned a really good way to judge how Meredith is feeling or what problem she is experiencing by asking one simple question: "What's Merebith doing?"  Meredith told me that during math class last week, Merebith was in a coma being kept alive by a machine.  And because Merebith is Meredith's "Control Center," (according to Meredith) no learning was happening...the factory was closed essentially.  That gave me a pretty good idea about how math was going for her lately and what her emotional state was.  Merebith always displays an exaggerated version of how Meredith is feeling--she's like a cartoon character in that way.  This exaggeration is really helpful because it leaves me little doubt as to what Meredith is feeling!

I know that Meredith really enjoys geometry (hello again visual-spatial strength!) and so as a contrast, I asked her what Merebith does when she is doing geometry.  Meredith told me excitedly that Merebith wears a T-Shirt that has a lot of colorful shapes all over it and the words, "Math Rocks!"  She also wears a visor and has a pencil tucked behind her ear.  Usually, Merebith is furiously doing math on her paper because she loves it.

Continuing with this topic, I asked her if Merebith acts in any peculiar ways if she is having trouble or having a lot of success in other subjects at school.  The one thing she told me was that in Language Arts, a lot of the time Merebith has a frog stuck in her throat.  Merebith gets a frog stuck in her throat when Meredith is trying to figure out what a particular figure of speech means (Meredith understood the irony that Merebith is acting out a figure of speech during these times).  Until Meredith understands the figure of speech in question, Merebith continues to choke and Dogot uses the Heimlich Maneuver (in his robotic nature) to try to dislodge the frog.  Once Meredith understands what the figure of speech means, Dogot successfully dislodges the frog from Meredith's throat and it goes flying across the room and hits a wall--splat! 

At least I know that Meredith understands irony...

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!