3:06am May 15, 2014

➸ Big Picture? What Big Picture?

clatterbane:

scattered-minutiae:

The first time I encountered the word gestalt was in a 300-level philosophy of sociology class that I probably had no right taking. Mostly what I remember is that it’s somehow related to verstehen (another word I couldn’t make heads nor tails of) and that heavy dudes like Weber and Simmel had a lot to say about it. So it was with some trepidation that I decided to write a blog post in which I’d have to explain gestalt versus detail-oriented thinking.

Fortunately, I found some online resources that make far more sense that my sociology textbook. The simplest meaning of gestalt is “unified whole.” As a theory of psychology, it refers to the mind’s tendency to organize a group of individual parts into a whole and to perceive that whole first or alongside the recognition of the individual parts. For example, when the brain sees a person, it recognizes “face” or “person” before it recognizes “blue eyes” and “hook nose” and “tall” or any of the other hundreds of individual details that make up the conceptual rendering of person or face.

Are you having a lightbulb moment here? Because I did. As I wrote that example, chosen seemingly at random, I realized that our tendency to focus on details first may be why so many of us are moderately to severely faceblind. Where typical people see “Joe’s face” we see a collection of individual parts: Joe’s black-rimmed glasses, Joe’s spikey blond hair, Joe’s acne scars. If those parts never quite assemble into a single concept of face, we’re left trying to recognize the most obvious details when we next meet Joe.

The same is true of places. Think about what you notice first when you walk into a new store or restaurant. Do you register gestalt concepts like ordering counter, bar, clothing department and checkout lines. Or do you first see details like bin of Easter candy on sale, menu board, employee stocking shelf, and people standing around drinking. I’m much more prone to seeing places as a bunch of individual details that I need to manually collate into bigger picture concepts like “menu board = ordering counter” and “Easter candy on sale = seasonal items = not what I came here for.”

Rather than a gestalt recognition of the whole before (or simultaneously with) the details, I register details first and the whole comes later, if at all. Because, I’m not gonna lie, sometimes I miss the gestalt entirely. read more

I am exactly the same way with learning to get around places. Looking at maps alongside Street View helps some, but yeah. Trying to relate landmark navigation to how things actually fit together on a map can be a problem.

Though I am still a bit resistant to viewing it in the kind of terms some non-autistic experts use, because IME they go off on so many weird tangents trying to explain things they’re observing from their own perspective. It gripes me when similar ideas kinda-sorta fit, but coming at things from some very different directions. (It’s also been a hard day, so yeah.)

This makes some sense! But I also think it might be simplified (compared to reality). And vary between people.

Like, I’m not good with faces, but I’m very good at finding my way around places, whether familiar or never been there before.

Faces seem to be about subtleties of angles and distance and such. And I don’t see angles and such very well. I can never tell if a painting is actually horizontal/level or if something is actually square or just sort of “square-ish”. There’s a lot of super subtle stuff. I can recognize a friend’s nose, but I have *several* friends with hook noses just with slightly different angles. And when they turn their head, everything changes again! Fortunately there is more to people than the shape of their face! :)

Where as finding my way about a place is like a *conversation* with the place and all the parts of it. Which involves lots of kinds of seeing, and other senses. And the place tells me what it’s like and what I’m likely to find if I go in different directions.

Also, I think the “big picture vs. details” way of categorizing people also is a bit simplified. I think maybe some people see one OR the other, but not at once. I tend to see the big picture through the details. And there’s probably other ways to think about it too.

I think the big picture thinker vs detail thinker thing is not accurate as a way to look at people in general, either people in general or autistic people.

However, it does describe my visual perception very well, to say that I see elements and parts of objects rather than wholes, and respond to those parts before I respond to wholes. And I don’t respond to the identity of the object as readily as I respond to sensory aspects of the object.

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