Part 18
10 August 1997
Help a Young Child to Flower
With all our references to
and even columns instructing on, how to Image-Stream...
--That powerfully
brain-integrative process 50 hours of whose easy, entertaining practice
builds 40 points' improvement in both "I.Q." and in more meaningful forms
of intelligence, according to independently conducted state university
studies--
--That simple, pleasantly
entertaining practice which absolutely no one out of thousands has been
unable to learn and do and thus to start benefiting therefrom--
...some of you must have
wondered what you might be able to do for your own young children. Of many
things, two are given you today in this column, freely. Use them with your
children, aged 2 to 11 years, and please share with us your resultant joy
in the results.
As cited above, we know
some of the rate of gain in adults. For young children it appears to be
far more helpful and powerful even than for adults. And only takes a few
minutes to teach.
The impact of Image
Streaming in a young child, upon language, brain, perception,
understanding, thoughtfulness and apparent intelligence is so great and so
immediate, that to see those immediate effects has been, time and again,
this writer's most rewarding experience ever!
Each time you have a young
child Image Stream, in the days ensuing you will find extraordinary
improvements in that child's general joy of life, not "merely" that
child's quality of perceptiveness and insightfulness, from then on! What
is now known about the brain in relation to such processes makes it appear
that such improvements always will result from a young child's
Image-Streaming.
For another good look at
why, and to teach yourself Image-Streaming well enough to model it for
your child in the manner shown you below, you might want to take a look at
the following sources: a concise summary of the technique of Image-Streaming, and the online book, You Are Brighter Than You Think. It contains excellent
instructions on how to Image-Stream.
Become, then, at least a
little smooth at Image-Streaming and you not only build your own
intelligence, but you are able then to model the procedure for your own
child in the way shown you just below. Following that, a brief set of
instructions how to make your slightly older child (age 6-12 years) not
only able to sustain such a practice but to become far better at solving
problems and difficulties. First, and for as young as the child is able to
use language, is basic Image-Streaming--
Teaching Image-Streaming
to a Young Child:
1. Be fairly smooth
and/or practiced with your own Image-Streaming so the following
example is a real one and from you, and not just a script. Say
something like this to your child:
2. "John (or Mary), I
think that even when we are awake, we still have dreams going on
somewhere inside of us - let's see - when I close my eyes and look to
see what's going on there, I see.....
(such as the
following, only your own Image-Stream segment: "Two green bushes, must
be springtime because most of the leaves are dark green but some
leaves are smaller and almost golden toward the tips of the branches.
two entirely different sets of leaves on the same bush. The grass is
just starting to turn green, still a lot of grey and brown there. I
see a moss-covered brick sidewalk in front of the
bushes....")
3. "O.K., for fun -
John (or Mary), when you close your eyes, tell me what you see
there....."
If need be, "play the
game" with another adult or older child to model the process, then the
young child joins in. Because of shorter interest span, a young child
responds to this approach far better than to the lengthier steps used in
Project Renaissance's adult instructions, not only to the simpler
vocabulary.
Often, a very young child
will just name objects instead of describing them. Although this is an
important start, you want to get the child into describing things -
whether things actually visualized, things just made up, or things present
in the here and now and objectively looked-at. The more word-picture
sensory evocative adjective-rich the details described, the sooner and
stronger the resulting brain and language development. If this is
performed with eyes closed, building up the visual feedback effects, the
sooner and stronger will the child's own innate visual thinking abilities,
originally his prime mode of thinking and learning, will come back on line
and develop and enrich.
The tradeoffs-- its easier
with older children with better-developed vocabularies; it's effects are
more powerful and immediately visible in younger children. The benefits do
appear to be permanent, and to view these and to know you had something to
do with that child's richer, higher and more wonderful development, is
truly one of the most profound joys an adult can know.
If need be to encourage
actual descriptions instead of mere namings of things envisioned, model
this describing aspect as a separate game, with another adult or older
child until the young child joins in. If need be, for starters go around
the house seeing how colorfully you can make richly detailed descriptions
of even the most familiar, ordinary, objects and situations. Even without
the visualizing, this is an invaluable way to develop the left brain of
the child, together with the child's entire perceiving and reasoning
apparatus and intelligence. The child is still a child - but far more
richly so, fully as himself or herself, than would have been the case
otherwise.
Until recently, the
strongest known method for integrating left and right brains in young
children was to teach them to sight-read and play music. That is still a
very effective way, especially if done early enough to make much
difference in the maturing of the corpus callosum, entirely aside
from the high value of the music as such. Now it appears that to describe
from ongoing spontaneous mental visual imagery is far more powerful even
than that, and far easier and quicker to accomplish. --Still better,
though, if you did both.... (If you go back to Winsights Part
14, though, we
outline there a pleasant game-like way to teach even 2-year-olds to
sight-read and play music, instead of the harshly driven methods familiar
to some of you - and with some effects even more remarkable than any cited
here thus far!!!)
Extending Inner-Image
Response into Practical Problem-Solving:
With somewhat older
children, ages 6-12, here is a simple way to extend Image-Streaming and
equip the child to cope effectively with many things which other children
are helpless before. Once some problem, question or difficulty has been
identified, tell the child:
1. "Imagine a door.
Something like a dream is on the far side of that door. That dream may
tell you an ingeniously clever wonderful effective solution to this
problem - or at least a way that works.
2. "Dreams being what
they are, that answer may not be in words, but somehow in what is
shown you. Maybe some of what is shown you will surprise you, or seem
to have nothing to do with answering the problem but when we look at
it closely, maybe we'll find somehow that the answer is in there
somehow.
3. "Let's see if you
can tell me everything in this dream-behind-the-door, or in what you
imagine on the far side of the door, tell me everything about it while
you're looking at it....
4. "--So when you're
ready, open your door suddenly and start telling me what you see there
on the other side of it...."
If the child has had some
Image-Streaming experience, he should be ready to get intelligible answers
from beyond the door. If not, he may or may not. You might need to just
make a game of seeing what you can see-and-tell about what's beyond the
door, without regard to any problem or difficulty, a round or so before
using this on problem-solving.
If the actual answer is
not fairly readily apparent in the content of what's beyond the door, have
the child go through another door in answer to the same problem, but with
an entirely different scene behind it which somehow is nonetheless the
same answer. If you have enough descriptive detail from both scenes, some
detail or adjective or aspect will overlap. What's the same when all else
is different, is core to the actual answer. Looking for same and
different, in this inductive inference solution-finding, may well be
better for the child's mental development and for the child
himself/herself than any particular answer might be. Please refrain from
interpreting for your child and getting between him/her and access to
those inner resources. You can ask slightly leading questions, but not
heavily leading: let the child discover, even if it takes awhile. You'll
be so very, VERY glad you did.
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