Our ability to understand the world around us relies on a central communication system that is visual and auditory. The brain has four pillars that help us connect our sense organs to the brain and result in our understanding and managing our everyday lives. These four pillars are visual attention, visual memory, auditory attention, and auditory memory.

Visual attention is a very powerful set of tools. These tools are used to connect our eyes to our working memory. Visual attention opens the door to our brain's visual processing pathway. We use it to open the portal to the brain's visual processing pathway and connect our eyes to our working memory. Visual attention is also the first step in forming a visual thought, which is one tool we use to make the world more comprehensible for ourselves.

Why visual children are misdiagnosed

Instead of negotiating the world with verbal reasoning, a visual person often negotiates with patterns. We refer to these visual learners as "Mavericks." Mavericks often think very rapidly - some say as much as 20,000 times faster than verbal thinkers. The format of visual thought and the speed of processing can become antagonistic to the speed of verbal communication. As a result, an erratic or unreliable system develops, which can lead to behavior problems, anxiety, frustration, or withdrawal. Thus, visual children are often diagnosed with a plethora of disorders, such as autism, attention deficit disorder, anxiety, depression, oppositional defiant disorder, and mental retardation. Labels such as these are often diagnosed based on presenting symptoms.

Visual thinkers can have as many as 50 presenting symptoms. If the cause of these symptoms is an overworking visual pathway, then the solution can be quite unique when compared to other treatment ideas.

Help for the Maverick

One way to help Mavericks is by reducing auditory distraction and teaching them to pay visual attention. Visual attention can be tightly formatted by training key skills sets. As you work through exercises that help train visual attention and self control you will help Maverick to successfully negotiate a verbal world.

Pictures and puzzles are key elements to working with Mavericks. You can use pictures and reward to help them identify hidden images or teach them to identify contrasting images. Exercises should focus on training visual attention skills and as such you should minimize your talking while training. You can find training ideas, podcasts and videos at the ebrainlabs website.

If you are the parent of a Maverick, there is help and hope for your child!