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."

Taking Mental Pictures and Triggering Mental Slide Shows

Meredith says that she's been taking "pictures" ever since she can remember--that is, she takes a mental picture to remember something.   (To be more accurate, Merebith takes the picture with her camera as you probably guessed!)   It reminds me a lot of the children's book series, "Cam Jansen," where the main character is nicknamed "Cam" because she takes pictures of everything like a camera by blinking her eyes, which helps her in solving small mysteries.   Or on a grown up scale, I'm reminded of the new T.V. series, "Unforgettable," in which a detective uses her ability to remember everything she's seen and to take mental pictures of crime scenes to help solve crimes.  Maybe this ability to take pictures is more common than we realize.

One picture thinker I know defies the male stereotype by noticing any little difference in his house...like a new photo frame, a new pillow, or whether a knick knack moved to a new location.  He explains that all he does is compare the before and after pictures he has in his mind--like those "find the difference" games in magazines.

Apparently, some visual thinkers can combine all of these individual pictures (or "slides") to make up a slide show--sort of like swiping from photo to photo on an iPhone, only much, much faster.  If you saw the movie, "Temple Grandin," it would be very similar to the scene where she hears "shoes" and begins to see pictures of all the different kinds of shoes she's ever seen in a very fast slide show fashion. 

Here's an example of one of Meredith's slide shows.  We recently moved only two houses away from our old house.  A family with a young girl moved into our old house and Meredith often goes to play with her at her house.  Meredith says that everytime she enters the old house, all of her memories from living in that house start playing.  All 11 years of memories from that house!  She described the memories as slides that appear only for a nanosecond each, but all together, they last for about an hour.  She can't control it--it's an automatic response that goes from start to finish.  I asked Meredith if she can turn those pictures off, but she responded, "It's like putting a dollar in a vending machine. Once you put it in, you can't take it out." 

I assume this automatic memory response happens to most people, but on a smaller scale?  Like whenever I smell curry, I think of my trip to India.  But my memories are pretty vague and definitely don't appear as a slide show in my mind.  Or whenever I use my teaspoon set when cooking, I think of the different advice my mother and my best friend's mother gave me about whether to pour the ingredient into the teaspoon over the batter or over the sink.  But triggering 11 years of memories from start to finish every time you walk into a childhood home?  That's amazing.

I asked Meredith what her first memory in this slide show was, and she said it was coming in to the house for the first time...as a baby.  OK, this is where my radar goes up and it really is hard for me to believe that.  She said she remembers me looking at her with bags under my eyes (hmmm, maybe she does remember!) and she remembers her Dad gazing at her with the extreme love of a new father.  Lastly, she describes leaning over her crib and watching her drool drop down to the floor.  Who knows.  I do find it interesting that she wasn't describing memories as if she filled in the blanks after seeing baby pictures of herself.  She was describing things that she saw from her point of view. 

Ironically, as I'm sitting here writing this, Meredith and I were looking at this photograph of her on the bookshelf.  A company had come into her preschool (without the parent's prior knowledge) and dressed the kids up for these slightly over-the-top pictures.  Meredith started telling me how she was really upset that day because people were dressing her in different clothes--besides the cowboy getup, she said they dressed her in fairy wings.  Again, I had no knowledge of this because I never even knew that this was taking place.  She said they made her sit on a ladder in front of really dark background walls, and she just didn't like it.  The thing about this is that she was only 2 1/2 years old when that picture was taken.  I didn't really think it was possible to remember things from that young of an age.  So, maybe there is something to what she says... 

I would love to hear if anyone else can take mental pictures or has memories from a very young age--say under 3 years old.  Please share your stories! 

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!

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.

The BIG Discovery!

Meredith was in fourth grade and starting to struggle academically.  She had always been a poor speller, although she would ace her spelling tests.  She received good grades up to this point.  But, fourth grade relied more on reading for learning.  I enrolled Meredith in Kumon--a private enrichment or remedial academic program, depending on your use of it.  Kumon relies heavily on building block teaching and uses lots of drill and repetition, a protocol I later learned is a terrible fit for a visual learner.  Visual learners do best getting the whole picture first and then filling in the details. They do not learn in a sequential manner.  And drill and repetition bore them to tears I have now learned. So, I asked the teacher on her initial visit to Kumon why she thought Meredith might have trouble with spelling. She responded by asking me whether Meredith was a visual learner.  I didn't know.  I said that she was always drawing pictures, so maybe?

Later the next day, after I had a chance to research what a visual learner looked like, I asked Meredith whether pictures worked well for her.  She said, "Yes...do you want to see my picture for 9+7?"  "You have a picture for 9+7?" I asked.  She took out some colored markers and this is what she drew:

She described number 9 as an alien who gives a gift to the little boy number 7 (see the helicopter hat?) who then gives the gift to his sister number 16 for her Sweet 16 birthday.  I asked Meredith if she had pictures for every number and she said she did.  "Every number?  12? 19? 51?"  "You're so funny, Mama," she said to me as if it was so funny to her that I didn't know that.

As I picked my jaw off the floor, we continued talking and I discovered that she has pictures for every number as well as every word.  Holy cow!  This was a lot to take in.  And if that wasn't enough, she then told me about her little "helper" friend in her mind named "Merebith."  Looking back, the dyslexia factor between "Meredith" and "Merebith" is fascinating.  Apparently, Merebith is a little tiny girl--sort of an alter ego (she describes her as basically herself, but a different person).  Meredith described to me in detail how Merebith wears a school girl outfit complete with a plaid skirt, a white shirt, a matching headband, Mary Jane shoes and black glasses.   This is the picture of Merebith that Meredith drew for me:

I really will never forget that day for as long as I live.