My youngest son entered first grade this year with great excitement. As a high-functioning autistic, his obsession from an early age has been numbers and letters. He memorizes license plates at a glance, can count to the millions (and break down the digits), and tell you how many minutes he has left until his bedtime at 18:00 (he prefers to use military time). However, after a couple months of first grade I noticed he was struggling to perform simple subtraction calculations that I know he is capable of. Baffled, I showed him how to easily visualize the numbers using his fingers, and that’s when he replied, “We aren’t allowed to use our fingers.”

Come again?

Counting on our fingers is a tried-and-true, almost instinctual, example of visualizing work. We have these 10 digits, and they can represent anything we want. I still use my fingers as “bookmarks” during mental tasks, representing everything from tens to simply having a visual reminder of a number that I need to recall while performing another task. That’s because I’m a visual learner, like my son, and like millions of others; we use visual tools to help us solve problems.

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