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."
