Lack of visualization?

They could be related I can’t picture things in a visual way. You would never want me to design your living room or decorate your house or even organize your closet. I have to look at myself in the mirror before leaving for work to know if what I chose for that day works.

But I spell well and most spelling issues stem from a different underlying cause.If your daughter is a senior and doing well in school, it sounds like she’s doing fine.Fortunately these days we have good spellcheckers and the inability to see her dreams doesn’t mean she won’t fulfill them.

Hi Phoenix,

About two years ago I met a gentleman who claimed that he has never been able to recall visually. The way he described it to me was that if he looked at a clock, he had to say the time to himself to remember it, for if he glanced at it and looked away, the visual image was not retrievable….out of sight, out of mind, I guess.

In any case, he considered it a true physical deficit and told me that it was revealed during testing for entering the military…..I believe he was ineligible for service because of the condition.

This is the only case I’ve ever heard like this, but it sounds like something that can be tested, if I understood his situation. As I said, that was two years ago, and I would never be able to find him, as it was at a public gathering, but maybe this will give you something to go on…….Rod

Possibly NLD?? My NLD daughter cannot remember things visually, she remembers them verbally. I had always noticed since preschool that she did not talk or look anywhere when she tied her shoes. I recently learned it is because she is silently, verbally repeating the steps that we used to teach her to tie her shoes. She does not “see” it, she “hears” it.

There is a lot of information on this website in NLD indepth and also on NLDline and NLDweb.

Since it sounds as though she is a reasonably successful young lady, I certainly don’t think I would call it a disorder or a deficiency. Than implies that there is something wrong and I don’t have that impression from you.

I think we are all a unique “soup” of different strengths and abilities. I can relate to your daughter because all my strengths are auditory also- I can spell but I had a heck of a time with math in school. Just couldn’t see how things fit together and what the patterns were. I am somewhat more adept now, but it still fills me with panic…

My guess is that your daughter has received the sort of instruction that has allowed her figure most things out and that she was motivated to do so. Her strengths as a learner are the sort that help to make you successful in school. What she hasn’t learned to do as well- and I don’t know how bad her spelling is- is to use what she knows about decoding to encode. This is not a big deal unless it bothers her, and it may be related to the visualization piece. It is hard to tell. If it were, then I would expect that her punctuation/capitalization skills are also off- because as a package we acquire those skills as much from the visual models we are exposed to as we read as from grammar and spelling lessons.

She sounds like a great kid!

Robin

Mine does spell well, because I taught her to read phonetically so she never had the word-appearance guessing problem. But she also does not visualize at all, can’t picture things in her mind, but hears them just great. She can follow four simultaneous themes in a piece of music and speaks three languages AND she’s also pretty good at math and sciences (although she doesn’t picture the graphs or the physics experiments — I have no idea how she thinks them out, being a visualizer myself). We run into weirdnesses when trying to give and receive directions — I’m picturing the blue house, and she’s verbalizing the street names and geographical descriptions. She does well with some professors, who explain things, and terribly with others, who expect you to osmose by just looking.
A point on ability/disability — it’s all part of the continuum of human abilities, durnit. Everybody has a mixture of strengths and weaknesses. Run with the strengths, and try to find a way to improve on the weaknesses. Don’t spend years picking on the weaknesses and making the disabilities a focus of life any more than they absolutely have to be.

In learning about my son’s problems, I’ve discovered that many of his weaknesses are genetic in some form or another. He seems to have received a particularly bad combination which have been made worse by undiagnosed ear infections. Since his problems have prevented him from learning to read, spell, and write, they are worth the energy, time, and money to address. But the rest of us have survived just fine and have graduate degrees in areas that do not utilize our weaknesses. (well, I couldn’t learn to speak a second language, my husband couldn’t learn calculus…but those are other stories).

I never visualize when I give directions. I always think street names and geographical directions. Most women I have found think house with the yellow curtains, then left at Pizza Hut, turn right at the big park etc. I cannot follow those kind of directions and the first thing I get out is a map. I don’t want pictures I want words. Go 1 mile north on Spruce Street, turn left at Pine, and so on.

I am not convinced visualizing is a such an important skill to comprehend a story. I focus on concepts and not all concepts can be visualized. When I read technical material such as how use a piece of software I think concepts and words and not pictures. I am not sure why we educators spend so much time on reading fiction stories and techniques for comprehension of this kind of reading when lots of reading in HS and college and most importantly our jobs is technical.