Picture Thinkers

A linear thinker sees four useful bookmarks. A dyslexic sees a pinwheel.

My kids are picture thinkers. Ronald Davis puts it this way:

The primary thought process of the dyslexic is a nonverbal picture thinking mode. . . . In a second, a verbal thinker could have between two and five thoughts (individual words conceptualized) while a picture thinker would have thirty-two (individual pictures conceptualized). Mathematically, this works out to between six and ten times as many thoughts. . . . A picture thinker could think a single picture of a concept that might require hundreds or thousands of words to describe. . . . Picture thinking is estimated to be, overall, 400 to 2,000 times faster than verbal thinking.

—The Gift of Dyslexia, 1994, p. 98 

So this is why I often say that my children, though I know and have mastered much more than they, are smarter than I. But really I believe that we have different smarts that the other must learn to appreciate.

This is why my children seem impulsive, though they both have been cleared of any attention-deficit or impulsivity disorder. This is why they interrupt me (hmph!), though I've trained them till I'm blue in the face to listen to others first and to not walk into a room talking, as if everyone should stop and jump right into their thoughts.

It's because they've got a picture in their heads. It's a fully formed picture, and the words they are using to describe it are simply a pain in the neck to form, so they want to get them out now. And when I am trying to say words to them, they are already forming a picture, viewing their image from a different angle, flipping it over, and analyzing it. All before I finish my paragraph.

So what is Charlie's viking potato doing in this picture? Isn't it obvious? Yeah, not to me, either.

The problem is, they miss a lot because they don't have the patience for words. They assume a lot, and they miss the details. Their model is already up and running, but they left out a screw here and a bolt there. They would rather the imaginary model in their brains fail than to suffer the agony of listening to one more sentence.

Except every once in a while, I know I've got their attention. They hear a new thing, get a new picture from the words coming from my mouth. They listen. Then they ask for more.

"But how does it do that?" . . .  "And then what happened?" . . .  "What if you did it this way, Mom?"

But in a minute or two, they have formed their new pictures, and they have moved on to their own worlds in which to process my words. And I am offended that they don't want to hear the end of my story, or my theory, or my idea.

But then in the end, the delight of their perspective beats out my irritation, and I find myself saying, rather than "But I wasn't finished," a bemused "Well, I never thought of it that way."