"My brain is like a channel"

Last night as I was tucking Camryn into bed she said "I don't know what to dream about tonight". I'll admit that I was just eager to have her go to sleep. It had been a bit of a tear filled evening and it was now late. I started by giving her a few suggestions such as "Why don't you dream about your birthday party?" or "Try thinking about your favourite animals". Nope. She wasn't buying it. She said "I need to know what channel in my brain to turn on". This comment greatly sparked my interest as someone living and working in the field of Autism. I've read Temple Grandin's book Thinking in Pictures in which she describes being able to hear a word like "dog" and be able to access thousands of pictures of dogs inside her brain. Every new dog that she sees becomes a picture stored in her brain of what "dog" means and she can go back and access all the pictures or just one specific dog at anytime. Then if 10 years down the road she needs to access that image she can pull it up in her brain and tell you with remarkable detail about that exact dog for instance. She also has the ability to kind of replay scenes in her head as if she were rewatching something that happened long ago and she can also run through various scenarios with mechanical systems to see which ones will have the desired outcomes. This has led to quite the career working with livestock and developing better chute systems for slaughter houses. Not the most glamorous of jobs but for her this ability to see pictures and video inside her head has been tremendously helpful. So when Camryn said her brain is like a channel that she can switch I was intrigued.

I have long suspected that Camryn may have this ability too. For starters she loves to quote dialogue from commercials or shows she has seen. Of course she does not have an Autism diagnosis to date however I have met many children who are on the spectrum who also repeat dialogue. For those new to the wonderful world of Autism this is called echolalia. Not all kids on the spectrum have this feature but many do it to some degree. Sometimes it leads to cute moments where they may say something in the exact tone they heard it and end up sounding like a cartoon character. Other times the kids may repeat the same catch phrases over and over again.....which after you've heard it for the 4037th time starts getting old as you can imagine.

Luckily for my mental health, Camryn tends to repeat bits of dialogue from TV that were funny. So it might be the punch line that made us all laugh in the latest kids movie or the silly expression of a character that brings back the memory of that moment in the show. When she was about 3 she would sometimes do things like repeat the entire infomercial for Shamwow as we walked down the cleaning aisle of our local grocery store. You should have seen the looks on people's faces. I might as well have poured beer into her sippy cup because they all thought I was Mother of the Year for letting my toddler watch all the educational programs on TV.

There have also been times when I was blown away with the details that Camryn can remember about something. She can often tell you specific details about a character in a show that most people would ignore such as the setting of the stones in a necklace that was worn by one of the dogs in the movie Beverly Hills Chihuahua. Most kids might remember that the dog had a fancy necklace but Camryn can tell you what it looked like down to the smallest details. This has led to some frustration for her when she's trying to get other people to help her with something. If she asked me to draw the dog with the necklace on I'd probably do it all wrong because what she sees in her mind is not what I would have remembered.

This skill does come in handy. I've learned that whenever anything gets lost at our house the go-to person is Camryn. If she's come across it in the last 2 days she can tell you exactly where it is. It could be a specific pen or piece of paper with something written on it. She's even found a lost book piled in a stack of 30 others for us just because she knew exactly where it was. She even knew which book was sitting on top of it in the pile. Sometimes it feels like we are playing a huge game of Where's Waldo and she's the only one who can find him. How Cam stores this much information I'll never know. Her memory isn't perfect but it has certainly bettered the odds that we'll find the item we are looking for quickly. Now if only I had the remote control for my own brain......