Brilliant … But Bouncy

What If We Play “What Moved?”

Shane and I have been playing visual memory games. We’ve played concentration and matching games. He does pretty well.

We’ve also played “how many things can you remember?” I put random items into a box, and Shane looked at each one for a few seconds. Then he listed as many items as he could remember. He got 16 out of 26 – not bad!

And we played some online computer games that are supposed to enhance memory. We played one in particular that matches faces – which is especially good for Shane, who spent the first nine years of his life unable to tell the difference between people who had the same color and style of hair. (This was especially a problem when it came to the color “brown,” which is a very popular hair color. All people with short brown hair looked exactly the same to Shane.)

I downloaded a bunch of these suggestions from the internet, so that I would be able to offer him the best visual memory enhancers. We’ve tried all of them – except one.

We have not played “what moved?” because I am afraid of the results.

“What moved?” is a game in which two people sit in a room. They look around and study their environment. Then one person closes his eyes, and the other person moves something. With eyes open, the first person subsequently identifies what moved. Hence, the name of the game.

But Shane doesn’t see things. He doesn’t know that they are there. His room is often a disaster – but not just a random disaster. Everything is organized – and then there will be a pair of socks right smack in the middle of the floor.

The socks will sit there for nine days.

Or there will be a jacket in a ball on the floor. Shane will step on the jacket, walk around the jacket, throw things on the jacket. The jacket will never again move, until a parental unit prompts him to hang up the jacket.

I am the only parental unit who will say anything, by the way, because Shane’s father’s jacket is never hung up.

Or the CDs will come out of Shane’s CD player and go … onto the floor. No matter how many times I mention that CDs are quite breakable, and that stepping on a CD will result in a broken CD, Shane will not put his CDs in their cases.

It’s like he just doesn’t see it at all.

I realize that this may have nothing to do with visual memory. It may just be the way he is, or the way boys are, or the way people are – in general.

I do not want to face this fact. I want it to be something fixable.

What if we play “what moved?” and Shane can’t figure out what moved? Then what do we do? Do we play until he figures it out? Do we play it for days and days and days until we know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Shane simply can’t observe the things in his environment?

Sigh.

I guess we will have to play it and see what happens.