News Articles

Mother’s research has potential to help many others

Monday, January 19, 2004
Dennis Fiely
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

Helping her son would have been enough. But the personal quest of Cheri Florance evolved into a research project that may aid countless kids and adults with learning disorders. Through understanding and educating her mentally retarded and autistic son, Florance, a speechlanguage pathologist, identified the ‘‘maverick mind," the title of her book and an informal definition for the Florance Maverick Syndrome. The syndrome describes people with a high visual thought process and a low verbal one. ‘‘The majority of the population have a balance between the two," said Dr. John Stang, a dean in the Ohio State University College of Medicine. ‘‘But there is a small subset who are extraordinarily overdeveloped to the genius level in one, while the other fundamentally does not exist."

Visual learners play movies in their heads.

They struggle so mightily with speech and language that they often are misdiagnosed with disabilities.

Florance considers them ‘‘eccentric, innovative, fascinating and different." The visual processing system is more powerful than the auditory one. Maverick minds, she said, ‘‘think a thousand times faster than their mouths can go."

Stang encouraged Florance to document her discovery in a book and academic papers. Her work, he said, ‘‘implies that autism is really something different than we thought."

Through her experience with her son, who is preparing to graduate from Bishop Watterson High School and enter college, Florance devised interventions that take advantage of visual strengths to enhance verbal abilities.

‘‘I think she is a genius," Stang said.

Florance has discussed her findings with scientists in the United States and Europe.

With a grant from the Ohio Developmental Disabilities Council, she established a ‘‘brain clinic" at Ohio State, where she is testing 210 first-year medical-school students for disparities between their visual and verbal processing in order to prevent dropouts.

‘‘The amazing part of this story," Florance said, ‘‘is that we learned it all from my son."

• Cheri Florance will talk about Maverick Mind (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, $23.95) and the communication disorder her book describes at 7 p.m. Saturday at Barnes & Noble Booksellers, 1739 Olentangy River Rd. Call 614-298-9516. Florance will appear at 1 p.m. Feb. 1 at the Delaware Cultural Arts Center (the Arts Castle), 190 W. Winter St., Delaware. Call 740-369-2787. She will lead a workshop March 26-28 at Ohio State University. Visit www.cheriflorance.com for more details.