Nobel Prize winners sketching their discoveries in crayon

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I just found out about it.

http://www.livescience.com/49397-nobel-prize-winners-drawings-photos.html

Kind of cute. One of them was actually my professor in Quantum Mechanics.

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I don't know about other families, but drawing/doodling is just part of my life and the lives of my children. My son only started to doodle about one month ago. Here is his recent design for a house (from last week). One could read some words such as BAT (for bathroom), ROOM, BED (for bedroom), HAW (for hallway), KC (for kitchen, my wife wrote that one), etc. However, on the lower left corner one also reads LONG TREE. Why would there be a LONG TREE inside the house? I scratched my head, until I figured out that it was the LAUNDRY room! We asked him: "Is there a machine inside the LONG TREE?" and my son said: "Yeah..." So cute.

Awesome drawing! You can see your son has great visual/ spatial skills because you can really see that the house is 3D, and the detail of the stairs wrapping around the structure is fantastic.

You are absolutely right about the 3D part. However, I would like to elaborate a bit on that aspect. It took me a while to understand the "misspellings" in the picture. After looking carefully again and again at the picture, and after interviewing my son and my wife repeatedly, I figured out that there was one single misspelling: ROM instead of ROOM. All other letters were present. Here is the picture again, where I highlighted the words.

Now one can see more clearly the words BATHROM (bathroom), BEDROM (bedroom), HALLWAY, LONG TREE (laundry), KC (kitchen), CL (closet). My wife wrote KC and CL, my son wrote the rest. Notice how the letters of BEDROM and HALLWAY are scattered in unusual order. One would think that there might be something wrong with these kids when they do that. That is until you see the next picture that my son drew. The smiling face is himself riding the elevator (really cute!). One set of arrows are the "indicators", another set of arrows are the elevator buttons.

Notice the mirror-image spelling of the word ELEVATOR!

How does one interpret the unusual way how my son writes out the words? It's easy to dismiss his unusual style as problematic, until you understand how his brain works. In my jargon, he is a pro-video child. That means he does not store static concepts or images. The natural storage units in his brain are processes or video clips. That is, despite that he is drawing static pictures, inside his brain things are always in motion. He is able to look at objects from all angles, and move these objects inside his brain and even rotate them at will! (I remember Temple Grandin has described in one of her books a similar ability.) My son has been able to flip the letters inside his brain and look at the letters from their backside!

So, pro-video children not only have a 3D understanding of objects, but they actually view objects in motion. Their memory is process-based, not concept-based.

I'll post another message on my son playing with 3D building blocks, and you will understand even better the way how his memory works. Once you understand the characteristics of these children, you can use building blocks to teach them a lot of skills. Building blocks and elevators were crucial in helping my son become verbal. (Another crucial component is reading. Both my son and my daughter learned to read before they learned to talk.)

Eikonabridge, I actually had no idea that everybody didn't see objects in motion. They don't? I also had no idea everybody wasn't able to rotate images in their head at will.

I wrote mirror image a lot too as a kid. One of my sons also transposes a lot of his letters still at age 9. He is Dyslexic. However, rather than viewing it as a learning disability, I realize that he is just a very visual thinker. They tested his visual/ spatial skills at school and it was off the charts. I have had a hard time, though, figuring out how to help him with certain areas in school, though. Some things, when presented in written form rather than images, he can not grasp- like multi step math word problems. He cannot spell.

We tend to assume other people are like us. But they are not. Two examples. One, recently talking to some family friends with a child on the spectrum, and they told me that their therapist insisted on the child finish certain tasks before letting the child go, even though the child is clearly suffering and protesting. The rationale given by the therapist is that if you let the child go earlier, they will pick up the bad habit of protesting to get whatever they want. I was so dismayed at hearing that: the therapist is treating an autistic child as if he were a neurotypical child! People tend to assume everyone else is just like themselves. Autistic people are selfless, not in the sense of altruism, but in the sense of a diminished capability of a sense of self. They do not have the instinct of personal gain/profit/greed at the expense of others. No wonder these kids are driven to the point of insanity, because neurotypical people around them tend to assume the worst about these kids.

The second example is about myself. In high school, my classmates asked me: "You speak three languages, so in what language do you think?" I was totally lost at their question. Why in the world would anybody need a language to think? I spoke three languages, but I never needed to use a language to think. My thinking process just did not use any language. It was all in pictures: it was 100% visual. There was no voice inside my head (back then.) Only after I became an adult, did I start to use verbal thinking, and only then I understood where my high school friends were coming from.

Coming back to your comment: no, not everybody can rotate object inside their brains. I cannot. I have never been good at it. There are clearly two types of autism to me: pro-picture, and pro-video. I and my daughter are on the pro-picture side. My son is on the pro-video side. There are clear differences between the two groups. We the pro-picture people view things in two dimensions, as static images. Pro-video people are much better at 3D objects.


Word math problem is an issue, and I will be handling that part soon with my son. I know that very well from observing other pro-video children. It's a common issue. My idea is to prepare video clips and teach them multiple representations of the same thing. E.g., the number 17 can be represented in numerals, or in 17 cookies, or with the word "seventeen," or with a ten dollar bill plus a five dollar bill and two singles. I think making a video showing an equation like 10 + 7 = 17 and then re-show it in various representation, all in one single frame (but each representation popping up one by one), would help these kids to make the connection. To me, usage of video clips will solve this problem.

I just asked my husband and my kids, and we are all pro-video here. Although, only one of my sons is suspected to have ASD (although my husband and I suspect my husband is on the spectrum as well). I and my other son are not exactly neurotypical either, though. However, we are all very artistic. Actually, I know quite a few artists and I would say most of them had a lot of issues in school due to being primarily visual thinkers.

I am going to see how I can help my son with math word problems with a video somehow. Great info, thanks.

Great. In the meantime between yesterday and today, I already made another video clip for my son, for the purpose that you have mentioned.


I showed the video to my son this morning, then went out to visit a friend's family. When I came back home, I ask my son with my fingers: "Ivan, what's two cows plus three cows?" Then he told me: "Ivan has three cows, Mindy has two cows." I asked him: "and together?" and he said "I have five cows." Very heartwarming.

It's not that he has mastered addition. But I am excited because I have succeeded in planting the seed for him to master word-based addition problems. From the moment he saw the video to his answering my question, it only took about 6 hours for him to digest.

To me, PERSONALIZED video clips are still the expressway to communicating with these children.

My elevator video http://youtu.be/jnEnhS5OBYw was such a success with my son that it became his new stim. So I decided to make the cows go into the elevator, and teach my son about "word problems" (in math) that way. Here it is. This video is fancier, I had to use layers in creating the images in GIMP. People might find it surreal about my way of communicating with my children. Ha. What can I say? I always think that autistic children are children from the 22nd century, they came too early for our technology's sake. Or as the name of the forum suggests: they are born into the wrong planet! Soon enough other parents will start to make video clips for their children, too. I hope. As I have mentioned, most of the video/sound/image editing tools are free and available online. I just found out about "ezvid" as well, quite a decent tool. Still, my Pinnacle Studio Ultimate has some more features.