I have been watching a few superheroes movies lately which got me thinking… Let’s imagine a planet called Communication. The planed is protected by two powerful superheroes: Gestures and Words. Let’s try and figure out which one is more powerful :)

Each superhero has specific powers and can accomplish different things in different situations. For example, there are several gestures that are worth a thousand words in social situations: thumbs up, thumbs down, and other finger gestures that I do not have to spell out for you :). On the other hand, there are other situations, such as business meetings, professional talks, etc when the spoken language, Words, has a lot more power. Most of the time Gestures and Words work together to create a message – when they put their powers together they can accomplish great things!! There is nothing more powerful than a verbal message that is accompanied by appropriate body language. Granted, there are situations in which Gestures has more power and situations in which Words has the upper hand.

That being said, when Gestures and Words are working together and acknowledge each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and delegate accordingly, there is nothing but harmony on the planet.

The planet’s harmony is often disrupted by the Miss-Communicator – he is the bad guy who is trying to steal our superheroes’ powers. He has a multiple personality disorder and his 3 personalities are: Mismatch, NoTalk and TalkALot.

Mismatch’s goal is to make Gestures and Words send different messages. For example, Words may be saying: “I’m OK honey” while Gestures may be showing tears. Now, in this case, the people on the planet who are aware of Miss-Communicator’s goal are able to sort through the message. They are able to fight Mismatch by looking beyond the Words and giving Gestures the power he deserves. I would like to point out that not everyone is able to do this. There are some people on the planet who listen more to Words and ignore or don’t know how to read Gestures – needless to say that these people find themselves in hard situations and the only way to help them is by giving Gestures more power.

NoTalk is the one who is trying to steal the powers from Words. Words has a lot of power when it comes to communicating needs, wants, or frustration. If NoWords succeeds we will have people who will need a way to communicate their wants and needs and frustrations. At this point Gestures gains so much more power as it can give all these individuals a way to communicate. Often time we see individuals who throw tantrums to communicate frustration or individuals who use signs to communicate their needs. Either way, it looks like Gestures is the one who can fight NoTalk.

TalkALot’s goal is to make Gestures weaker by stealing his powers. If he accomplishes this the people on the planet will not be able to use or read Gestures which will lead to a lot of confusion in social situations. Imagine a world in which we did not have or we could not understand thumbs up, thumbs down, some other fun finger gestures, smiles, hugs, eye gaze or tears. These are all so powerful!! I think we would end up with a lot of messages with no emotional meaning – definitely not a planet I would like to live on. Again, it looks like Gesture rules :)

From where I stand it looks like one way to maintain harmony on planet Communication is by giving Gestures more power.

Now, I can’t help it – I have to put this in the context of the autism world. Sometimes it looks like we are enabling Miss-Communicator by ignoring the need for Gesture’s powers and wisdom.

Our goal should be to help our children fight Miss-Communicator by teaching them about Gestures and the incredible powers he is holding.