Do Your Planets Have Papparazzi, Too?

One day, Meredith and I were laying in my bed talking and one of those incredible conversations unfolded little by little.

She started by saying, "You know what the weirdest thing to me is? Gravity." We talked about it for a few minutes and the conversation took a predictable course into the topic of space in general. Meredith shared with me that she always thought of the planets as different colors. Pluto, for example, was purple. At one point, I asked her what color Saturn was and she said, "Whoops, Mrs. Toler forgot Saturn in that picture. Let me get another picture." What she was saying was that during our conversation, she was looking at a mental picture she had of the Solar System from Mrs. Toler. Mrs. Toler was her third grade teacher. Meredith must have been looking at a picture her teacher had drawn on the board of the Solar System in which Saturn was missing. Fortunately, Meredith has multiple mental pictures of the Solar System.  She said it's hard to count, but she estimates maybe she has about 100 pictures in her mind.

So, as Meredith buried her head in the pillow, pausing the conversation while she was looking for a more complete mental picture of the Solar System, I asked her where exactly she was looking for this new picture. She explained to me that she has three places to look for space. There is "space" as in a physical area like a person's bedroom or a museum room. Then there is "space" like in your personal space (or your "space bubble" she explained). Lastly, there is a file on "space" as in outer space.

I asked her if she remembered when one day she told me that she had gone to her mental pictures of the Solar System and started labeling it with words for the first time. It was about two weeks after we started our therapy with Dr. Florance to improve her verbal thinking system. It was one of the obvious signs that the therapy was really working.  It was so remarkable. Now instead of just thinking of the Solar System in pictures, she was thinking of it in pictures AND words.

Then, of course, Meredith started telling me all about each planet and how they were each different personalities.  (I didn't know this at the time, but this is another example of her object-personification synesthesia.)

First, there is Sunphie, the Sun. She is bossy and talks like a California teenager.  For example, she tells Vestean (Venus), "You should really get some life on your planet."  Vestean answers back, "Why don't YOU have life?"  Sunphie replies, "Because I'M smokin' hot!"

Mercury and Mars are brothers--Max and Mark Murcer.  Mark is always mad at Max because he copies him.

Earth is the Peacemaker and his name is Earthen.  He is SO happy all the time since he is the only planet with life.  Earth's Moon is kind of boring.  He says, "Hello...thank you for landing on my face."  He is sort of like a butler for Earthen.  But as he circles Earth, he moves close to Vestean who is always asking him for things when he passes by.

The funniest and most clever thing of all, to me, is that she said the stars are the paparazzi taking pictures of all the planets.  The stars' twinkling, of course, is the flash going off on their cameras.

Next comes sophisticated Jupiter whose name is SJ.  He says, "Hello, fellow citizens!"  The hurricane is his birthmark. Saturn is very mature, and Neptune is hyper, constantly saying, "Hi star, hi star, hi star..."

Poor Uranus is named Urinater and he always has to pee, as you can tell from the expression on his face.  Lastly, shy little Pluto is named Penelope Purple.  Everyone else calls her "Penelope P."

Meredith said she could talk about the Solar System for hours and hours, but of course that would bore everyone!

Watching T.V. Shows...In Your Mind

"Do you know what I do in school when I'm done with my work?" Meredith asked me.  "I watch SpongeBob."  Now, I had just learned about how Meredith thought in pictures and in movie snipets, so I had a feeling she didn't mean she actually got to watch a cartoon at school.  She explained that she can close her eyes and watch SpongeBob in her mind whenever she wants.  Hard to believe, for me anyway.  I later learned that she also has Merebith edit the cartoons to take the commercials out.  It really interests me to think that she can do this--that she can repackage her visual memories, let alone watch t.v. shows in her mind.

When I was working with Dr. Florance, she told me that she had a client who once told her that on Saturday nights, he would make some popcorn, settle down in an easy chair, and watch a movie...in his mind!  I wonder if those people who seem to remember every movie reference have this ability as well...I certainly don't!

It is hard for me to imagine how one does that so I had to take Meredith's word for it.  But one time not too long ago, I was able to witness for myself that she can do this.  Meredith had wanted to listen to some CDs in her room, so we got a CD player from Goodwill and found some old CDs from when she was younger.  The first CD we put in was a Disney Princess CD.  For some reason that I can't remember, Meredith was upset at that time and was rolling around the floor in distress, as happens when she is really stressed out about something.  Then suddenly, she stopped, closed her eyes, and started moving her finger in the air in concert with the music.  At the same time, I saw that her eyes were moving under her eyelids, like when you do when you're in the rapid eye movement phase of sleep.  It became very clear to me that she was watching the Disney movie that corresponded to the music.  After a few minutes, I asked her if she was watching the movie and she said yes.  I asked her to describe what was going on and she described it in great detail, including what each character was wearing.  Seeing it for myself was quite something. 

If you have a very visual child who is upset, maybe you could try to elicit some visual memories through music like the above example.  Using visuals is a very good way to recharge the Executive Functions of a visual thinker.  Sometimes, visual thinkers can get stuck in a loop of sorts, repeating the same thing over and over or simply getting in a place they can't find a way out of.  This is the verbal thinking pathway experiencing a glitch. 

I have had success bringing out puzzles and other visual-spatial games to help get Meredith unstuck.  One good thing to do (besides STOP talking!) is to start playing with the game you brought out and pretend like you don't know what to do with it (instead of ASKING your child for help).  For example, we have a magnetic mosaic game which comes with patterns to copy.  I started trying to make one of these patterns and purposely acted confused (without talking).  Meredith quickly jumped in to do it herself and within a few minutes, she was able to calm herself down. The hardest thing to remember is to keep quiet.  Talking just requires more energy of the child to listen, which is a function of the verbal thinking pathway.  In these situations, you want to bring the child back into her most comfortable environment--the visual environment. 

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.

Conscience Visualized

For more than a year I've known about Merebith and "The guy who wears khaki pants."  Meredith has described her little girl Merebith as a seperate person but basically herself.  Admittedly, thoughts of schizophrenia entered my mind, but they never really took a foothold.  I wasn't putting my head in the sand about it--it just didn't seem to fit with what I saw.  Although Merebith has her own persona, it doesn't actually seem as though she is a voice telling Meredith what to do.

It came to me the other day that Merebith is just like Meredith's conscience in visual form.  I learned from Dr. Cheri Florance how her son, who at an early age was using a completely visual way of thinking (he had no verbal skills and was diagnosed as deaf and mute), didn't have that internal voice that most people have.  In her book, "Maverick Mind," Dr. Florance explains in detail how in order to read, one has to be able to pronounce things in his mind.  For example, would you be able to know the difference when reading "chef" and "chat" if you couldn't voice the words in your mind?  From this lesson, I learned to question the concept of the internal voice in relation to visual thinking.

So, the way I see it (pardon the pun) is that perhaps Meredith at an early age had such a strong visual brain that instead of developing that little voice, she developed more of a little person.  And perhaps as she learned to speak, the little voice developed in the form of the little person talking.  We'll never likely know how it developed and I'm simply speculating here.  But what I know today is that Merebith is the vehicle by which Meredith talks to herself.

Here's one example.  As kids do, Meredith did kind of a dumb thing.  A few days ago she had gotten herself a snack and put it in a small bowl.  When she was finished, apparently she was playing with the bowl, holding it on her mouth by sucking it.  Admit it, you probably did this before.  As with most things, however, Meredith did it to the extreme and ended up breaking blood vessels just below her bottom lip.  Now she has a bruise there that looks like she has a soul patch--it's just a lovely look on a young girl.

The point of the story is that I asked Meredith at some point during the day if she ever argues with Merebith and she said yes and that in fact, she's mad at Merebith because for the last three days she has been rolling on the floor laughing and pointing at Meredith's chin.  Can't you just picture that?  If you, yourself, gave yourself a big bruise on your chin, wouldn't you give yourself a hard time just like Merebith?

Mechanic at Work

Here is a photo of Meredith helping me make Tom's Christmas present this year. Many visual thinkers love hands-on activities...that's the best way to teach my Meredith for sure. I need to remember that she learns better through exploring than verbal instruction though--a repeated mistake that I make and a cause for sure-fire mother-daughter clashes. We take it for granted that everyone's verbal skills are equal...don't you?

Some visual thinkers have such a strong visual mind that it causes conflict with their verbal side (speaking, listening, reading, and writing). This can cause symptoms in any or all of these areas. If you would have asked me if Meredith had strong vernal skills, I would have said yes, because she always had a strong vocabulary. However, after we learned of her strong visual mind, we discovered that Meredith's listening skills were very weak--something she had learned to hide very well. We thought for many years that she was just oppositional...but we just didn't know that verbal instructions and directives were playing to her weakest side. Did you know that parental guidance is 98% VERBAL?!? That causes a problem if you have a highly visual child.

We began working with Dr. Cheri Florance (maverickmind.com...I'll talk more about her later) who suggested we give Meredith's teachers a questionnaire designed to identify any weaknesses in these verbal areas. Turned out that Meredith failed or had difficulty with listening skills about 80% of the time. No wonder she struggled in school--an environment where listening is the number one skill, making up 76% of time in elementary school. The further one progresses in the education system, the higher that percentage gets.

A visual thinker tends to forget what they hear and remember what they see. School--or "Verbal Land" as Dr. Florance refers to it--plays to the students with strong verbal skills. Throughout history, many of the most creative thinkers who changed the world in novel ways struggled in school.

No wonder Meredith is thriving in her new school environment. This year she is attending Odyssey School. It is a school for "Bright Kids Who Learn Differently." Meredith loves all the hands on activities and the focus on multiple intelligences. Now she is relearning things that she only "heard" before. Remember, visual thinkers forget what they hear and remember what they see!

The Treasure of Files

Merebith holds the key to the "Treasure of Files"

The "Treasure of Files" is where Merebith works. It is where Meredith stores all of her mental images and Merebith helps her to retrieve the files. From what she has described, Meredith has lots and lots of files and Merebith is VERY busy at her job. Meredith told me that sometimes Merebith works so hard, she has to pause, huffing and puffing away! I have heard Meredith describe files for each grade, files for vacation memories, files on people that contain words that describe that person in a font and color that she associates with that person--I'm white with orange heart polka dots, for example.

The day she told me this (the BIG discovery day), I was testing her with questions (because c'mon...how could she possibly do this?).  I asked her to tell me what was in the "A" file, and she started listing off her friends and classmates whose names started with the letter A. She looked up when she was telling me what she saw...I remember learning that you look up when you are accessing your memory. I asked her if she had a file on her principal, Ms. Hohmann, and she looked up, not responding right away. She kept looking and looking and then said, "Oh, there it is! It was misfiled under letter G." Whoa, I did not see that coming. I have come to understand that if Meredith doesn't have a file for something, she won't be able to remember it. That is why it is important to give visual learners the big picture, or some sort of context before teaching them something. They need to attach it to something. Dr. Florance taught me that the engine of the visual thinking pathway is the "Associator." Visual thinking works by association. It is not sequential or time-based...time is not the strong suit for visual thinkers!!! Anyone who lives with a strong visual thinker is keenly aware of this!