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!