My child couldn't talk. We thought he was deaf. He couldn't hold a cup. We couldn't communicate with him on any level. It was like having an alien in the house.
 
This was my third child, Whitney, who I have written about in Maverick Mind and elsewhere.  I had already done 15 years of work and research in the brain science of language and communication disorders when Whitney came along and was diagnosed with severe autism, mental retardation, and sensory integration problems.  As I was to discover, the real problem was that the visual side of Whitney's brain was over-riding the language-processing side of his brain, imitating autism.
 
Personally, I know what it feels like to be a "stranger in a strange land."  I grew up and went to school in the American Midwest.  I spent a year in Paris while in college, as part of the French Honors program, and stayed in a house where no English was spoken.  When I went to the American South (Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas) as part of a pre-doctoral fellowship program, the way people talked and the differences in culture, and being called "the Yankee" made me feel as if I didn't quite fit in.
 
In those situations, however, I could at least use language to communicate with other people, whether it was a new language (French) or a variation of my native tongue ("Southern" English).
 
For Whitney, the very idea of using language to communicate was an alien idea, until I found a way to create a bridge between the strong visual and weak verbal regions of his brain through specialized training. Today, Whitney is a college graduate, working as an engineer, and symptom-free.
 
If you have been feeling that your child is like an "alien" or a "stranger in a strange land," I strongly urge you to sign up for a free screening, or attend one of our webinars or workshops (see below for details).

 

If your child's symptoms are caused by a highly visual brain interfering with the development of language and communication, there's a strong prognosis for improvement or even becoming symptom-free.