Think of an idea and a picture of a light bulb appears! Say "get the picture?" and you're asking someone if 
they understand. We routinely use expressions that mean something different than the words. Consider these: you are my sunshine, opportunity knocks, make a bee-line. To ‘get the picture’ requires not only literal dictionary word meaning, but how we picture the idea words create.

Our brain uses picture thinking daily. When picture-thinking our brain receives what we’re imagining. Many famous people known for their picture-thinking intelligence -- Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Charles Schwab, Jay Leno – succeed because of their ability to think in pictures. These same people struggled with word-thinking tasks such as reading, writing, spelling.  

How can this be?  Well, when your brain works best by imagining what you’re reading, and you come upon a word that has no picture, you ‘draw a blank’. We can easily picture things – flower, elephant.  Other words with less easily pictured meanings --  on, of, was – ‘draw a blank’. What’s a picture thinker to do?  might see the letters in different order --  no, for, saw.   Gets confusing, doesn’t it?

Research shows that becoming aware of the feeling that comes with the Uncertainty that accompanies words with ‘no’ picture is at the root of substituting other words (saw/was, on/no, of/for), getting a different picture than the author intended. This is NOT because of something wrong with your brain. Instead that feeling is when your imagination turns on to try and help you. The idea of being ‘present’ ‘oriented’ ‘focus’ is when a dyslexic knows to shut off their creativity so their brain can get what their real eyes are seeing – instead of substituting words. 

Q.  "My son (and husband) has trouble reading and understanding but does not think he ‘sees’ in pictures.  How can we help?"

A.  When speaking of “Word” and “Picture” thinking.  The idea of “Picture” thinking refers to using multiple senses.  

In order to read quickly and also understand what they read, individuals still need to develop a good, fast connection between the words the eyes see and what those words mean. Whether they can consciously visualize the meaning of a word or not, ‘meaning’ is usually tied to a sensory impression.  You can know what the word ‘red’ or ‘diamond’ means by having some impression of the color or shape of an object looks like. An example is this:  You can’t go and search for your car in a crowded parking lot without having some preconceived image of what makes your car look different from all others.  Some words like ‘loud’ or ‘pungent’ or ‘cold’ don’t have visual impressions tied to them… but of course, they do still have a sensory impression connected to their meaning. 
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Only if you know what ‘cold’ feels like, can you know what the word means.

When trying the idea of having your son and husband ‘get the picture’ of what they are reading, keep in mind that the words "seeing", "visualizing", "picturing" etc. are sometimes used very literally by a non-verbal thinker. As his eyes are closed, he cannot physically "see" anything. Changing the wording is often very helpful: Instead of asking, "Do you see ...?" try, "picture/imagine what … looks like?" or similar wording.
 
Of the most importance is to remember that opening the door to the role of imagination and use of multiple senses creates multiple opportunities for learners to ‘get the picture’.  I recall a young man saying at the end of his program, that having tools “made me use my imagination, that was locked in the basement”.  

"Several students including my son seem smart, but struggle with reading and spelling. How can I begin to understand and help?" 

Many famous people known for creativity and imagination struggled with words and letters. The Einsteins, Edisons, Schwabs and Lenos of the world survived their struggles and succeeded because of their way of thinking.  

Current research gives some clues: Dr. Linda Kreger-Silverman developed the concept of the visual spatial learner to define students who think in images. Brain scans show dyslexics read better with alternate strategies since information flows along different pathways in the brain, according to Rumsey and Horwitz of the National Institute of Mental Health.

Word thinkers, also known as auditory sequential thinkers, can be described as step-by-step, requiring mastery of one area before progressing to a higher level. Consequently, these superior analytic skills easily make sense of words and the letters they are made of –thus reading, writing and spelling come naturally to those learners. Picture thinkers, also known as visual-spatial thinkers, are more self-directed exploratory and look at new concepts from multiple angles, making sudden intuitive leaps. This creativity and imagination natural to picture-thinking turns on at will. When this talent applies to a letter or word, a word can different than how it looks on the page and writing or spelling may come out differently than expected.  This state is called ‘disorientation’.  

The disorientation happens so naturally that we are unaware that what our brain sees and hears is not what has been written or said. Most of us have disoriented when things do not make sense to us. Disorientation can be as simple as the feeling that our car is moving when it’s not or being so absorbed in a movie that we lose sense of where we are. Since the brain disorients as a result of a person being really good at creative thinking, the creative thinker can turn their disorientation on and off to fit the situation. 

By simply turning off the feeling of imagination and creativity, the picture thinker can be certain their brain accurately receives how something looks or sounds when working with letters and words. Once certain of what is seen, the picture-thinker can rely on the order and sequence not naturally apparent to them and achieve better results with reading, writing and spelling.  

Looking through the lens of word and picture- thinking can explain types of smartness and struggles with sequential tasks like reading, writing and spelling.  As author Tom West writes his popular book on dyslexic learners “Seeing What Others Cannot See”, our world needs both types of intelligence. Respect and use of both word and picture-thinking gives success with word-based tasks and brings students to the computer-based, visually-oriented careers awaiting them, all part of school success. 

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As time passes, we hear words associated with these images: remember baby going from “ga ga,
goo goo” to associating sounds with people and things around them with that first “ma ma” or
“dad a”?

As baby grows she may be part of the 20% continue to recognize ideas by an image (picture
thinker) she senses for it. Another 20% do not see the image, instead they hear the word (word
thinker) – like a radio and maybe what the word looks like. Most of us are in the remaining 60%
(20 + 20 + 60 = 100) the population. Thus we sense with both TV/image, and Radio/sound. Are
able to imagine ideas? Try this: Picture an elephant; do you see an animal or the word? Many of
us, of the 60%, see both word and picture. Yet some ‘picture thinkers’ sense an image, ‘word
thinkers’ hear the word or see the letters that make that word.

Those of us for whom dominant picture thinking is natural, while bright eager curious persons,
will have problems in learning and life. Why? Most classrooms rely on word-based teaching and
learning; in this setting the 20% who naturally think in pictures can experience trouble. How?
Let’s see what happens when we think of some ‘easy’ words: Picture a ‘lion’; you may see a real
one or another image like a cartoon one. (I always see the Lion King). Now picture a ‘how’ – do
you see an image or the word? Try ‘who’; do you see a picture for this idea or the word? When a
word does not prompt a picture that represents what it means, then the thinker that must see a
picture when hearing a word to understand what that word represents, sees nothing…she ‘draws a
blank’.
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Picture thinkers trying to figure out what picture goes with words like ‘the’, ‘that’, ‘of’, ‘how’,
‘who’, who know they are as smart as their classmates, feel frustrated or confused that everyone
else can read and write so easily, while they can’t and they don’t know why. This picture thinking
ability can be at the root of dis-abilities like reading, writing, comprehension, ADD – for children
in school or grownups in the adult world. Picture thinkers succeed in classes and career fields
that rely on their gifts like art, drama, music, discussion-based debate, hands-on science, project
based courses, because of their way of thinking, not in spite of it.
Are you a word- or picture-thinker or are you in the majority for whom both come naturally?
Next time you or someone you know don’t seem to ‘get the picture’ consider the possibility that
they are picture or nonverbal thinker, navigating a word or verbal thinkers world.
Tom West’s book "Seeing What Others Cannot See" Linda Kreger Silverman’s book, "Upside Down Brilliance
– The Visual Spatial Learner", and Ron Davis’ book, "The Gift of Dyslexia" all share this idea and
suggest ways picture thinking is natural and how to use this gift in a world that seems geared to
word thinkers 100% of the time.

Try this scenario – Youngster and mom have different pictures for a word…
A three year old put his shoes on by himself. His mother noticed the left was on the right foot.
She said, “Son, your shoes are on the wrong feet.” He looked up at her with a raised brow and
said, “Don’t kid me, Mom. I know they’re my feet.”

April showers..."Bring May flowers" OR "May bring flowers" 

AHA! you caught that. You saw and read the same three words, ‘may’ ‘flowers’ ‘bring’, yet their message is different based on the order you read them in.  Your picture varies with each sequence of words.  Continue reading beyond these three words and the additional information you gather will help you adjust your picture so you might understand what the writer intended with those three words.

Imagine yourself a youngster who attends a good school, has a good teacher, parents and homelife, yet with reading the ‘good’ stops.  You cannot fill the expectation that those black marks on the page – letter symbols you’ve learned the names of --  will translate to words you will say and know the same each day. 
 
How frustrating.  Something must be wrong.  Sometimes, if these are isolated experiences that are the exception and not the rule, isolating a confusion or two about specific letters and sounds will fill a gap from a missed lesson or simple confusion. 
 
However if enough factors as simple as described above exist and continue, difficulties growing out of this frustration will sorely test not only the student’s stamina, but all associated with her or him.  Take the situation seriously.  If you feel something is not right, many sources exist for you investigate to guide you in keeping a learning difference from becoming a learning disability. 
 
Sue Hall’s book "Fish Don't Climb Trees" reminds us of the range of talents we bring to what we do.  Imagine a monkey prize swimmer and that fish making her way up the trunk of that tree.  She reminds us that limiting reading instruction to sounding out and memorizing is like expecting that fish to climb the tree. 
 
Do not just ‘consider the possibility’, but ‘EMBRACE the possibility’ that by learning more about your child’s way of thinking and doing you can better celebrate your child’s talents, feed their passions, and work to cultivate their emotional as well as intellectual growth – in the end you will have raised an empowered and enthusiastic learner.
 
May April showers bring May flowers for you and yours.  

I provide programs of the Davis Dyslexia Association International (www.dyslexia.com) and the Davis Autism Approach (www.davisautism.com).  In my 30 years experience before learning about Davis, I used the best word thinking approaches to help the learner put-together or take-apart sounds to read and spell words. Before the Davis approach recognized the value of employing our natural picture thinking, all dyslexia approaches relied on relating sounds and symbols.  We know that one size does not fit all, thus one way of doing things will not help everyone. 

With dyslexic thinkers, using word-thinking approaches is like trying to download Apple into Microsoft, both being wonderful systems.  Educators and parents can be fooled when a person gains the skill of recognizing and naming words, yet lacks understanding, remains confused and frustrated, often with the feeling of dislike for the activity, upset stomach, frustration when all their trying results in little success. 
 
With autistic thinkers, the world they live in feels made up of random pieces – and each piece is in the ‘now’.  When stuck in the ‘now’, many experiences surrounding them can be overwhelming or be the opposite and not register in their consciousness. The resulting behaviors look like sensory sensitivities and ADD hyper- or hypo- attentiveness. 

The Davis approach is different from every other approach – A fully certified Davis Provider gives the learner credit for being smart in a picture thinking way and provides them with tools to rely on the certainty that comes with knowing how to make sense of language whether reading, spelling or writing. 

It took me decades to discover and two years for each certification with the Davis Dyslexia and Autism Approaches to offer learners a way to ‘make sense’.  Don’t wait until you’ve tried other approaches only to realize that no matter how you try to get the information into the brain, confusion and anxiousness turn on a stream of uncertain possible outcomes picture-thinkers are capable of creating in their multidimensional way;  this results is uncertainty about what is accurately occurring. 

If you and your child and teacher are not getting expected results, consider the possibility that using the only approach relying on getting to the root of struggles using their creative, picture thinking intelligence will be their way of ‘making sense’.

Q- My son had such a hard time learning to tell time. But the problem didn’t end there – even now, he has such a distorted sense of time and he tends to spend too much time on a minor part of a task, leaving no time for the remainder of the job.

A- When a person struggles to correctly decode while reading aloud, anyone can guess that this person probably has a learning disability. Yet beyond struggles with reading, having a distorted sense of time or losing track of time on a regular basis is another aspect common when using picture thinking which we can resolve by using the learner’s strengths.

Disorientation (not getting the true facts from one’s surroundings) is a mental state that some learners use to solve problems and get different perspectives on real-world puzzles. However, without control of this same skill the learner will experience a distorted sense of time. Sleep is an excellent example of disorientation; it is common to wake up confused by how much time has actually passed.

Hyper focus is another facet of disorientation – when a person tunes out the rest of the environment in order to focus on one thing only. Hyper focus has its place in sports and many other places, but when a person repeatedly fails to complete tasks or assignments because he spends too much time on one step of the job, he needs to learn how to control his focus and better understand time. 
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What to do: Introduce the Davis focus and self-regulation tools of orientation point / alignment, energy dial, and release. These tools increase the learner’s self-awareness.

With the three decades of ‘time’ I’ve worked with Learning Different children and adults, learning about the role of distortion of time that comes with ‘disorientation’ explains how struggling is often part of the profile of smart learners who struggle.  Once we, as learners, realize our problems arise from how smart we are, the entire picture changes from needing to be fixed to being able to manage on our own. 

Contact us to determine options so you or your learner can succeed because of, not despite, your natural way of thinking. 

As Will Rogers once said about wasting time: “Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.” 

Q -  My children are great workers and players.  They work hard at doing what they’re asked to do, but sometimes getting their attention is difficult.  As a matter of fact, my daughter’s teacher tells me that she daydreams too much.  What can or should I do about this? 

A - Everyone daydreams sometime.  Daydreams don’t just happen; they are most likely prompted by an event  we see, hear, smell, feel, or taste, or memories that bring us back to something.  The triggering event turns our imagination on. 
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Other triggers – curiosity, boredom, confusion, and fear – may bring new or old ideas to mind.  During the time that we are seeing what our imagination shows us, the real world drops away, as our brain receives our imagined scene.  
 
Most of us use our picture thinking daily.  Because picture thinking is subliminal – faster than a person can be aware of – you may not be aware that you think in pictures. You will simply have a rich sense of ideas; call this intuition or nonverbal intelligence. 

Sometimes a person’s tendency for picture thinking is a cause for alarm as with a child whose parent brought her to me because of her ability to ‘see things’ and her poor reading ability. Sure enough, the daughter told me that I was surrounded by a field of pink.  What a relief to both parents and child to understand  her ability to ‘see things’ occurs when her imagination/mind’s eye turns on. Through our work together she realized she controls her mind’s eye on/off switch.

Simply stated, daydreaming is an automatic action for strong creative picture thinkers.  It is a survival solution when trying to solve the confusion accompanying a situation or a new word when reading.  Understanding how it feels when daydreaming occurs, allows her to shut off her imagination so her brain will see only the real letters so she stands a better chance of recognizing the word. 

Embrace your daughter’s daydreaming, provide her the perspective that daydreaming is not BAD, but a good ability of her great brain.  Check to see which of the triggers fits when she daydreams:  Curiosity, Confusion, Boredom, Fear. 

This automatic picture thinking can be interpreted as disability, rather than the ability that picture thinking is. If the help she receives in reading, spelling, writing, or understanding the spoken word is tedious and discouraging for her, consider the possibility that providing her the tools and understanding that come with respecting her picture thinking will give her control and pride about her way of thinking.
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Our perspective creates what we see.   A three year old put his shoes on by himself.  His mother noticed the left shoe was on the right foot.  She said, “Son, your shoes are on the wrong feet.”  He looked up at her with a raised brow and said, “Don’t kid me, Mom.  I know  they’re my feet.”   

Q- It drives me crazy that though my daughter can read at grade level, she substitutes little words; for example: ‘for’ and ‘from’, ‘was’ for ‘saw’, ‘of’ and ‘off’.   Will it help if I have her memorize lists of similar words so she can watch out for them?  

A- In the world of thinking, some of our brains see and hear words when receiving language – think of it as listening to a radio and seeing a stream of letters and words.  When our mind processes thoughts in this way we are using our ‘word thinking’. Likewise, another way the brain receives language is by creating scenarios of images brought to mind – this can happen so quickly that our imagination may not ‘see’ the scenes but have a sense of or intuition about the idea.  This rich world of experiencing ideas sometimes in multisensory ways involving how the scene may feel, smell, sound, taste is what is meant when we are using our ‘picture thinking’.  Most of us utilize a mixture of both ‘word’ and ‘picture’ thinking, though some of us think solely with words and others do not see or hear words but think solely with pictures. 
 
Try this experiment – what comes to mind when you see this set of letters – e l e p h a n t.  Most of us will have some version of a large grey animal. Now see what comes to mind when you see this set of letters – w a s. Most of us will see the letters ‘was’. One of these words – elephant -- generates an association with a picture or experience and the other - was – does not automatically call up an association. Asking our picture thinkers to differentiate words that are similar like was/saw by looking at sets of letter symbols is like you and I trying to differentiate language written in characters from other languages.  Chinese and Arabic characters come to mind, as do advanced statistical and mathematical formulas. To be certain about language, picture thinkers need all three parts of a word: what the word looks like – it’s spelling, what the word sounds like – its pronunciation, and how the word is pictured – its meaning. 
 
A 9 year old girl who struggled with reading at her grade level, often substituted words. Many were words that looked alike as when she said ‘proud’ for ‘poured’. She has a very strong listening vocabulary, (meaning words she understands when hearing them) so she had choices of words she’d heard to match with the mix of letters that made up that word.  When seeing printed words she has a choice/guess about which to say. When she matches the word with the meaning, pronunciation, and spelling, (all 3 parts of the word) the word becomes part of her reading vocabulary.  

The stronger the word thinker, the more apt to respond memorizing the look and sound of spelling words thus using word lists may work for the stronger word thinkers. However, word lists, containing only two parts of the words, sound and look, leave out the meaning/picture which then leaves behind those stronger in picture thinking.  Utilize the meaning of words to provide ALL learners the opportunity for certainty. Without activating the third part of language – meaning – the student may be memorizing only two parts of language – spelling, and pronunciation.   To include all thinkers to participate in the job of language remember to include all three parts to create certainty.

Even before reading the words in this book, the illustrations may seem familiar. This is true because illustrator Jim Durk continues to make use of the artist facet of his strong non-verbal intelligence as he did when he created Clifford of Clifford the Big Red Dog and Thomas in Thomas and Friends.    Likewise, the author, Andrew Jordan Nance, utilizes his great imagination to portray the surplus of attention that often accompanies the strong non-verbal thinkers for whom the Davis program makes all the difference in the world. 

As shown on our Thinking Style page, 80% of us possess the capacity to think about things in a creative way.  Our Characteristics page and AD(H)D page show that sometimes that roaming creativity can be like a Puppy Mind.

Too often this free-range attention spread throughout the environment is deemed a negative, a dis-ability, something to be corrected.  In fact, when strong nonverbal thinkers realize this distractibility is an indicator of what is right with them, not what is wrong with them, they can take pride in their 'puppy mind' and use it to their advantage.    
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Contact Elsie to investigate how behaviors considered Attention DEFICIT can be more accurately described as Attention SURPLUS.  By learning how to take advantage of a natural way of thinking, pride and responsibility replaces shame often associated with Puppy Mind.