The Lag

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Do you notice a lag between seeing something and knowing what it is?

Like if you see the wood grains on a table, do you know that the wood grains are wood grains and that they belong to the surface of the table, or are they just a visual pattern for some noticeable amount of time before you come to recognize, complete with the feeling of recognition like recognizing a person, that what you are seeing is wood grains on the surface of a table?

I often experience a noticeable lag between seeing something and knowing what it is. During this lag, my mind often associates the thing with something unrelated to what it is, e.g. water pooling on a metal faucet = treebark. Maybe this lag has something to do with parts vs. whole processing. Do others have this? Is it related to autism?

That sounds like a perception issue. You're taking in the wood grain stimulus through your senses, but you have trouble making sense of it. People on the autism spectrum often have trouble with sensation and perception.

Something similar happens to me with knowing answers to something. It feels like one part of my brain just knows, while another part is lagging behind and can't yet formulate why/how I know what I do.

This sometimes happens to me, especially when I'm seeing something for the first time. It can occur at any distance. I also experience the lag tropicalcows describes where I know something and there's a delay in how well I can substantiate it. This has been happening since childhood.

Another thing I noticed is the more repetitive or regular the pattern, the longer the lag. Wood grains, carpet fibers, plaid clothing, hairbrush bristles, mini-blinds, radiator ribs, grass - these are the things that generate the greatest lag. If I see a banana, I know that it's a banana right away. If I see a bowl of grapes, lag.

A third thing I noticed about the lag was that I don't even try to figure out what the visual pattern is during the lag. I'm not asking myself trying to recall what it is. I just accept it for what it is - that pattern.

That's really interesting. I've seen people talking about that (Amanda Baggs has on her blog, and Donna Williams I think has also written about it). I thought I didn't experience it because I can, like you say, look at a banana or my computer mouse and instantly tell what it is. But if I look at my patterned shirt that's hung over the chair next to me it does just look like a free-floating pattern for a bit. In fact, it even seems to take a tiny mental push to see it as a shirt.

I know that when I look at blinds or other arrays of parallel lines I see illusory lines that dance across them, and that that tends to cause me to zone-out. I wonder if these things are a matter of visual complexity causing the interpretation part of the brain to overload.

I've also noticed that I tend to like photos and art that are visually simple -- silhouettes and/or washed-out areas (and animation). Ansel Adam's photos always gave me headaches (way too much detail).