TEMPLE GRANDIN THINKS IN PICTURES. She's a visual thinker. Doctor of Animal Science, and professor at Colorado State University, as well as bestselling author. Dr. Grandin was the subject of an HBO movie where viewers learned how her special gifts led to breakthroughs in the study of animal behavior. It turns out that animals think in pictures, too. And probing the implications of this led Grandin to become a renowned professional designer of humane facilities for livestock.

But since she was a child, Grandin has battled autism, as it's medically termed. Which in Grandin's case means she doesn't think in language. And the HBO movie shows that while material medicine hasn't found a cure for Grandin's affliction, throughout her life she has refused to be defeated—or limited. Grandin eventually learned that to be a scientist and accepted—even celebrated—by society, she didn't need to think in language, as most people do. She found that thinking in pictures gives her the ability to see, discover, and invent things that other people might find out of reach.

In an inspiring talk recently, Grandin made the case that "the world needs all kinds of minds." And she lists some of them: photo-realistic visual thinkers (architects, artists, and scientists like her), verbal thinkers (writers and scholars), and pattern thinkers (people who tend to excel in music and math, including software engineers, computer programmers, and all kinds of geeks).

Grandin and other scientists attribute this pie-chart distribution of thinker-types to various combinations or miscombinations of matter going on in people's heads. As one infers from Grandin's talk, scientists basically subscribe to a theory, even a law, of imbalance. Unless you're physical anomaly, the theory goes, you can't have the whole pie, can't be the full expression of all types of thinking—just good in one area. For example, it's considered "natural" that people might excel in music or math, but find themselves underdeveloped in people skills or relational competence; or "normal" that someone might either be a spreadsheet wiz or artistic, but not both. These either/or notions of how different faculties, gifts, and talents get distributed paint a discouraging picture of Earthlings doomed to limited minds.

Is there some alternative model, wherein a narrow-bandwidth notion of intelligence gives way to a wide-bandwidth concept? A bandwidth of mental faculties unlimited?

Mary Baker Eddy, the discoverer of Christian Science, thought so. During her life-long research, she plumbed the depths of Jesus' works in the Bible, leading her to comprehend the full import of the Apostle Paul's instruction: "Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus" (Phil. 2:5). Paul wasn't referring to Jesus' physical brain (how could we have that be in us?). The writer, as Mrs. Eddy saw, was referring to the one, universally available, immortal Mind—God!—that Jesus lived in tune with. A metaphysical Mind—a Mind beyond physicality—and therefore the omniscient, eternal power and substance of our being. A Mind with which we enjoy scientific unity and therefore express as a ray of starlight expresses a star. This understanding led her to the breakthrough perception that matter and Mind can no more coexist than, say, the noonday sun with midnight.

Which means nobody needs to feel limited or pigeonholed. Just the opposite: Everyone has the innate potential to experience a well-developed, balanced mind—to express the boundless capacities of our divine Mind, which Mrs. Eddy described in her book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures as our "one intelligent source" (p. 276).And holding to this truth in consciousness can help anyone break through the mist of limitations and lead a life in which this potential becomes fully apparent. When we align with Mind, sparks fly. Our individual, un-siloed expression of visual, verbal, and pattern thinking, all rolled into one, becomes possible, springboarding us to innovation and insight.

Ultimately, Mind manifests its true power not only by liberating human mental capacities but also through its healing effects on human bodies, as Jesus and other Bible healers, as well as Mary Baker Eddy, show us. And the short history of Christian Science documents that nothing lies beyond the reach of divine Mind's harmonizing influence. Even autism. Turn, for example, to the November 18, 1991, Sentinel (page 36), and read a verified account of the healing of a three-year-old child of medically diagnosed autism, dyslexia, severe language disorder, and aphasia.

Healings like that one hint at Mind's limitless power. No one needs to suffer from limitation of any kind. Not a single person lives beyond the range of divine Mind's health-giving action. Lots can happen when we see how Mind really works. When we get the true picture. css