this post about fragmented perception is beautiful

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I like your way of understanding things but it seems that my view of the world is not the same. I never said that I liked detail, just that I see it first and then have to work out what's going on.

I also love to look at maps. I have memorised some in the past but I can't use maps very well. I have difficulty using the 2D map and using it in the 3D world. Think that might just be me though!

I just read on another thread (can't remember which one) where someone said "his type of autism" made him more right-brained. So, maybe different "types" of autism, some more left-brained, some more right-brained? Hmmm. I don't know. I'm definitely not the authority on it.

No such distinction exists in the Medical literature.
People with ASD are on a spectrum but the 'right/left type' idea is not used by Medicine.
No types, just differing degrees of impact on function.

does that help?

I can only speak from an educator point of view, not a psychology point of view.

No, it appears that different types of autism do not exist. However, it makes sense that ASD is not limited to one or the other "side of the brain" when it comes to learning styles. That would explain some of the other threads I have seen about some people being better at maths and some people being better at languages.

The right/left hemisphere preferences affect that kind of stuff. ASD, then, must be separate. That is my guess. And only a guess!

Given what some have posted earlier today about the brain scans of ASD people being singularly unique, this is all very interesting.

Very. Your thinking style (in terms of this detail / big picture thing) seems more like the "most people" style described here than the self-description of an autistic person that follows it, though I'm not trying to say that you try to make data fit, or that you're not autistic:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2677580/
"Most people have to have a theory first, and then they try to make the data conform to it. My mind works the opposite way. I put lots of little pieces of data together to form a new theory. I read lots of journal papers and I take little pieces of information and put them together as if completing a jigsaw puzzle. Imagine if you had a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle in a paper bag and you had no idea what the picture on the box is. When you start to put the puzzle together, you will be able to see what the picture is when it is approximately one-third or one-quarter of the way completed. When I solve the problem, it is not top-down and theory driven. Instead, I look at how all the little pieces fit together to form a bigger picture.

When I was in college, I called this finding the basic principle. On everything in life, I was overwhelmed with a mass of details and I realized that I had to group them together and try to figure out unifying principles for masses of data."

I was wondering how anybody can start with a theory and expect the data to fit, but the terms have slipped, we were originally talking about "overview" and "detail," and I suppose "theory" and "data" are a specific "research" form of overview and detail. I suspect that things are discovered data-first, but once discovered they are taught and normally learned overview-first. Perhaps that's what gave me so much trouble in my education. I could never take on board the overview they gave us. If I read a book, the table of contents and introduction were meaningless to me, I'd just go straight for the first page that seemed to "get on with it," and then try to read sequentially to the end. In a way, every lesson was like a research project to me. I kept trying to create my own theories to explain the data. One thing that still makes me reluctant to read non-fiction is that I can't adopt the author's way of thinking, the author's overview of the material. I have to make my own.

I've noticed since my youth that even for everyday problems, my brain mainly works in "research" mode like that. I was a research technician for many years, and before diagnosis I thought I was merely being intelligent and using a superior, educated way of thinking to solve everyday life problems. As time went by I realised that although that can work very well, it can also be extremely slow.

I remember at work they gave us a presentation to explain a new responsibility they'd added to our burden, and the guy started off with a couple of diagrams of the way the university was organised. I couldn't see the relevence, and my attention collapsed after a few minutes or trying to fathom what he was on about, the diagrams may as well have been in Greek. All I wanted was to know what they wanted me to do, how to do it, and when to do it.

I certainly can find maps useful, though it's often hard for me to relate the map to what things look like on the ground. When I look at a map, I can't retain the information for very long, and when I look at the map again to remind myself, it takes me a long time to find the part I was looking at before, unless I've judiciously marked a point or two with a boldly-coloured pen. My mind doesn't register any of the usual landmarks, and the map just looks like a random arrangement of interconnecting lines. Even before Google Maps, I used to photocopy the map, zooming it in until it had the starting point in one corner and destination in the opposite corner, to screen out all the unnecessary, distracting data and to make the important data as large as possible, then I'd mark the route with a red pen. I'm still amazed, and a little daunted, by how different to the map representation the real streets look.

OK, I read a bit of the link. I am not a linear thinker, either.

I am also a pattern thinker, according to his three groups. Music and math = me. For sure. That doesn't mean that I am not good at writing (though I am better at writing than talking.) My thoughts can be very jumbled up. When I wrote papers in school, I would write out all my thoughts, and then go back and put my paragraphs in order or rearrange sentences within paragraphs. But I can find a pattern in most anything.

I also think visually first. If I am thinking of a thing, I see the picture of it and then have to hunt down the words in my head. One time, I couldn't think of the word "pen", though I could see what I was looking for just fine.

I have taught music to kids diagnosed with ASD, ADHD, and dyslexia, quite successfully. These kids are the ones whose parents come back to me and say "My kid really enjoys you as a teacher. You really get through to him/her." These are the parents who also give me the most recommendations. So, I'm doing something right teaching kids that aren't typical.

The thing about the mass of details and research is that one has to have a goal in mind in order to begin processing them. Same with the map. You have to know where you're going first before planning how to get there. You don't start researching before you know what you want to find out. The people who make discoveries see the patterns at large and then see that "something is missing" in the explanation and then go find out what it is by digging through the details that other people miss. When there is a goal in mind, being able to focus in and identify minute details is a great strength because other people skip over them. But, if there is no goal in mind, one can get lost in the details, seeing all of them as equally important.

I learned about 10 years ago that I had to learn how to structure my life my own way because the
"standard" ways of organizing do not work. I cannot use a day-planner to save my life. I can't do it. But day-planners are sold the way they are because they work for *most* people.

Now, what this has to do with ASD or not, I don't know. All I know is that I don't learn the standard way, and I don't teach the standard way. (I also got an award for that in college.)

Indeed, if you're teaching ASD kids successfully, that would suggest that your idea of how they learn must be working.


Well, there's also this serendipity thing in research, which is important, though it's hard to know how much successful research is planned and how much is down to a good opportunist's eye finding "bridges where others see holes" in data. I heard it suggested at work that a good researcher is somebody who can think of the kind of questions that can be clearly answered by practical experiments.


If you mean the kind that allows you to plan the day hour by hour, I don't find those useful at all. It seems too restrictive, and often impossible to know what times to actually put on the thing, because I don't know how long the previous item is going to take. I've found month planners quite useful, showing me at a glance anything I'm supposed to be doing in the near future, but for some reason they fall out of use. The paper ones get messy when I have to alter them (an untidy map feels as though it's giving me an untidy mind), and the electronic ones aren't quite so convenient to glance at if my computer isn't powered up, and I have times where I have no plans that have dates assigned to them, so I lose the habit of looking at the planner.

Yes, the hour-by-hour ones. I used to get so stressed out trying to plan my day, then have something cause it to go off schedule by 15 minutes. I gave up.

I also like to look at the whole month (again, whole-to-part here - it is easier to see the larger picture then "zoom in" on the details, rather than look only at the details of a hour-by-hour planner.) Anyways, I have made that kind of structure for other things to, like To Do lists, grocery lists, etc.

I don't do well writing things down, but my smart phone has helped a lot. I have gotten into the habit of scheduling with that. As long as my "normal" week-to-week routine doesn't change too much, I'm good. But I still get confused when there's a change.

I see many things at once, but I don't consider my perception fragmented, because the details are perceived and held together, so no sense of fragmentation. There is just a lot of detail, and I enjoy it that way, in fact I often feel that I have run out of things to look at, so I am often bored after having perceived eberrything quickly since there is nothing left to see that I can resolve with my eyes, so boredom is a huge problem for me.

I didn't even realize I did this until reading that.
I don't always do this in rooms. If a room has lots of colors I become focus on that. The less color in a room the more I see lines and that sort.
I almost always use fragmented perception to help me figure out how I feel. Looking into my past. Sometimes I end up in states of major depression. I just got out of one that lasted over a week because of this.