Chapter 2

Train Your Child to Flex His “Mind’s Eye”

The first condition of success is to capture the critical period. The second is to create the correct learning environment. Remember, the human brain does not develop in isolation but in response to external demands.

Before Your Child Can Speak

What does it take to learn a language? Memorizing a ton of vocabulary and grammar rules, for sure. But is that enough? Before we can use any language, we need something much more basic. A skill we learned so early in life that we don’t remember learning it. It has to do with holding multiple objects in your mind’s eye and rearranging them at will.

Think of two phrases: “cat on a mat” and “mat on a cat.” Same vocabulary, same grammar. And yet, you and I can easily tell the difference, but a low-functioning autistic individual cannot. What’s going on?

Let’s get a hold of modern brain-imaging equipment and look “under the hood.” Nerve cells located in the back of the brain encode the meaning of the words “cat” and “mat,” as well as that of the spatial preposition “on.” The front of the brain activates each group of cells, determines their grammatical roles, and applies the preposition. To understand the entire phrase, the brain must activate the meaning of all three words and their grammatical attributes within milliseconds of one another. Only then does the difference between the two phrases become apparent.

The precise timing of the activation process is only possible when high-speed connections exist between the front and the back of the brain. You already know from Chapter 1 that these connections must form before the age of five in both typical and autistic children. However, a typical child needs only to be exposed to language, as it usually happens in the course of our daily lives, while your child needs extra motivation and structure. Helping your child build these connections is the focus of the games and exercises we introduce in this chapter.

Not Any Old Language Therapy

What would you do if you wanted to become an athlete? Would you spend your time practicing and conditioning your body? Or looking for a perfect pair of athletic shoes? The answer seems obvious. Shoes are a must, but they’re not a factor, until your skill and your physique rise to a competitive level. Now that you understand a little about how the brain processes language, you see that vocabulary training is not a factor in your child’s mastery of combinatorial language. Not until your child learns to combine objects into new and unfamiliar images in his mind’s eye.

Let’s call this skill voluntary imagination. It is voluntary imagination, rather than memorization, that relies on high-speed connections between the front and the back of the brain. It is, therefore, the specific component of combinatorial language we must acquire in early childhood.

Let’s go back to our example of “cat on the mat.” What happens in your mind’s eye when you read these words? You place the image of “cat” on top of the image of “mat.” If I said “big black cat on a tiny wet mat,” you would immediately adjust the mental picture to reflect the additional details. If I now said, “big black mat on a wet cat—” no problem! Your brain instantly disassembles and reassembles the images into a new picture, even though you have never encountered such a thing in your life.

Congratulations! Your voluntary imagination is in perfect working order, and that’s what we want for your child. Voluntary imagination allows a child to visualize something on demand in the same way as flexing your muscles at will allows you to command body movements. We need voluntary imagination to match a verbal description to an object: “Show me a big red ball.” To predict the outcome of an imaginary event: “The frog ate the dog. Who is alive?” Or to follow the curious words of a fairy tale, Here, for example, is The Adventures of Pinocchio: “…the Shark took a deep breath and, as he breathed, he drank in the Marionette as easily as he would have sucked an egg. Then he swallowed him so fast that Pinocchio, falling down into the body of the fish, lay stunned for a half hour...” The head-spinning drama of Carlo Collodi’s classic tale is only as good as our mind’s ability to produce an image of a wooden boy trapped inside the belly of a shark.

It’s important to understand the difference between voluntary and involuntary imagination. One is a purposeful activity fully under our control. The other arises spontaneously, like a dream or a passing thought. Children often rely on involuntary imagination when doodling or coloring. Both types of imagination contribute to our creativity and problem-solving, but only voluntary imagination connects the front and the back of the brain. Involuntary imagination resides entirely in the back of the brain. Voluntary imagination, on the other hand, depends on both the front and back of the brain, as well as the front-to-back connections.

My team and I reasoned that voluntary imagination exercises, like the ones I just described, could help autistic children learn combinatorial language—because they prompted the brain to use front-to-back connections. With daily practice, these connections would grow stronger, eliminating the main obstacle to combinatorial language.

To test our idea, we wrote a software application with voluntary imagination exercises disguised as games. We called it Mental Imagery Therapy for Autism or MITA. The games automatically adjust to each child’s ability, increasing in difficulty as the child gains skill. And none of the games repeat—ever! So, there’s no chance for a child to simply memorize the correct answer. Every minute is spent “flexing” the mind’s eye.

We made MITA available to parents free of charge on the condition that they complete an evaluation every three months to let us know how their child is doing. In 2015, we launched a three-year study of the language therapy embodied in the app. 6,454 children between the ages of two and twelve completed our study. It became the largest and the longest study of language intervention in autistic children. At the end of the three-year period, the children who regularly completed MITA exercises scored 120 percent higher on the language test than the children with matching initial scores who did not .

The study helped us formulate a simple winning strategy for acquiring language: Focus all your efforts on building voluntary imagination. Thousands of children who completed our study proved our approach to be more effective. That’s why I don’t want you to worry about your child’s vocabulary. If you employ a language therapist, find out what happens during sessions. Memorizing lots of words does nothing to train voluntary imagination. The most important thing is to connect the words. Be prepared to guide the therapist—or become one yourself.

If You Don’t Speak English at Home

Professional therapy is a wonderful resource. It can be a lifeline for busy parents, and many school districts offer it free of charge. However, there’s one case in which I strongly discourage it and advise parents to deliver therapy on their own. It’s when the therapist speaks a language your child does not yet recognize.

Combining therapy with learning a new language will not kill two birds with one stone. On the contrary, it will distract your child and divert his brain from developing voluntary imagination to memorizing English words—exactly what I want you to avoid during the critical period.

Not only does learning foreign words consume precious time, it is also stressful and exhausting. Many children leave the session restless and unable to focus for the rest of the day. That means very little voluntary imagination development until your child learns some English, and by then it may be too late. Learning a second language, on the other hand, is never too late. It will not be a problem once your child has mastered voluntary imagination.

Many immigrant families and ethnic minorities raise young children in their native language only. If this is your case, and your preschooler does not understand English, do not put him through English language therapy. Request a therapist that speaks your language. And if that’s not an option, go it alone. This wiki will teach you how to do it.

Games You Can Play with Your Child

Whether or not you use a professional therapist, your child spends more time at home than in therapy, and he learns from you first. You can help him develop voluntary imagination by simply asking him questions and giving him tasks. Being your child’s therapist-in-chief is no different than any other parent-child relationship, and consistency is the key. Make your playtime together a routine, and use every opportunity to exercise his brain. Here are twenty-nine games, starting with the simplest and building up to adult-level proficiency. These games make up a large part of MITA and work together as a course to develop your child’s voluntary imagination.

It will likely take your child several years to progress from the first game to the last. There’s no timeline for completing the course. Stay with each exercise as long as necessary to master it before moving on to the next level of difficulty. Be flexible and allow your child to learn in the way that is most natural for him. Set aside a specific time to play these games at least once a day and prompt your child to apply the lessons to different situations throughout the day.

Reference

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