As printed in Simply The Best – South Florida + life + style
March/April 2013 Issue
By Cheri L. Florance, Ph.D, Brain Scientist


Are you confused about how your child’s brain is developing? Confused about how to best help your child succeed at school? Distraught about your child’s future?

The Visual Thinker and School

About 20 percent of the population is born with a dominant visual thinking system that can cause problems with processing language. More MIT alumni have children with learning disabilities than other universities. Why is that? Because school is a verbal game. Those who have strong verbal brains succeed. But visual children may not pay attention-remember — or process as expected. The visual brain can process data as much as 30,000 times faster than the verbal, which can lead to disengagement at school. As a result, withdrawal, which leads to depression, misbehavior leading to getting in trouble or becoming the class clown which can alienate others.

Brain Re-engineering

But the brain can be re-engineered to use both the visual and the verbal systems fluently. Exciting brain discoveries have lead us to understand how to use the strong visual brain to train the weak verbal brain so that they work in harmony. Children who are highly visual are often thought to have a learning disability, oppositional-defiant or attention deficit disorder or even autism. Examples of highly visual thinkers with subsequent processing problems are Albert Einstein, Bruce Willis, Leonardo Di Vinci, Winston Churchill, Thomas Edison, Charles Schwab and James Earle Jones.

Autism and The Maverick Mind

Whitney was thought to be born deaf and could not utter a word till he was six. Experts declared him mentally retarded and suffering from autism.

Words had no meaning for him. “He didn’t know we were people. His problems were so severe that doctors and educators felt that prognosis was poor.

He started taking college classes at age 14 and had 2 years of college completed while in high school. He lettered in football and wresting, won speech contests and danced in 42nd street. Today he is a chemical engineer.

Whitney was not autistic. He is a Maverick Mind. A highly visual thinker with a communication disorder.

How Do You Know If You Have A Maverick In Your Family?

What distinguishes a Maverick from others is:

  1. Highly visually thinkers in the family tree: doctors, engineers, computer experts, architects, pilots, artists
  2. 50 very specific attention-memoryprocessing symptoms
  3. Top 3 goals for improvement

If your child has great attention playing videos games, but inconsistent attention at school, good at puzzles but trouble with friendships, studies but does poorly on tests, you may have a maverick mind.

With the correct diagnosis and proper intervention, a Maverick child can show improvement quickly often in the first week of training and nearly always in the first month.

To download our complimentary e-Book, The 5 Steps of Brain Engineering or to observe clients in my Video Viewing Studio, go to www.cheriflorance.com.

—Cheri L. Florance, Ph.D., a World-renowned brain scientist trained through the National Institutes of Health is a problem solver for highly visual children and adults who are misdiagnosed with autism ADD or Asperger’s Disease. Contact her at braindr@cheriflorance.com or 866-865-9820.

To view magazine article PDF, click here.