(If this is off-topic, please move)
What makes no sense to me is what everything I have read is that left brain processing looks at things from parts to the whole giving the indication that it's more detail-oriented processing and the right brain processing looks at things from whole to the parts giving indication of processing the 'big picture', the whole test makes little sense to me as they said
The "cliche" Donna Williams has created is that Auties are more right-brained and Aspies more left-brained but to be honest the human brain is far more complex than that, I really don't think it can be simplified to left or right.
Personally, I believe that it is more the co-ordination of the two halves that influences whether or not someone is autistic, more than whether you tend to be more left- or more right-brained (with regards to which hemisphere is dominant, not with regards to specific traits). This might explain why there seem to be so many different types of brain wiring or damage that can cause very similar ways of thinking. Only processing some of the input consciously might well lead to some of the possible manifestations, like "unconscious knowledge" or focus on objects or details rather than people (as they are smaller and/or more predictable, so can be understood and studied more easily).
Olga Bogdashina has made some very interesting points with regards to Detail vs. Gestalt processing in one of her books, and it was one of those big "Aha" moments for me because I had always been confused by this "only focus on details" thing that is supposedly the case in autism, and has led me to great confusion about my own diagnosis because I definitely do not *just* focus on the details, but I do not focus on the big picture either.
It's always been more of an either/or state for me. I either get lost in the details when trying to draw up a plan and lose sight of the overall idea, or perhaps I notice details in the environment or in an object or situations (like I notice a red button but don't register what the whole object is supposed to be), OR I get nothing but a vague, foggy spatial "Imprint" of something with little or no detail.
Especially visually, I have always had the problem of NOT being able to focus on anything, but more being hit with the whole scene, being overwhelmed. This may be the reason for my hyperlexic reading style, but in many other areas where actually taking in individual, non-connected aspects (like individual numbers from a blackboard) this has always been very difficult.
Autistic people may experience gestalt perception in any sensory modality. A person who experiences visual gestalthas a great difficulty focusing on a single detail of the scene and finds it almost impossible to separate it from the whole picture. People with auditory gestalt perception have a great difficulty to concentrating [sic!] on one auditory stimulus, for example, someone's voice as it goes as a package with all the environmental noises: fans working, doors opening, someone coughing, cars passing, etc.
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As there is too much information coming in, it is hard to know which stimuli to attend to. As the stock of knowledge accumulated by autistic individuals is different, then their attention would also be different.
Here arises the question: Does the explanation of 'gestalt perception' contradict the 'weak central coherence theory' (Frith 1989) in autism? No, it does not. The theory of weak central coherence 'starts working' at the next stage of the process of perception when gestalt perception inevitably leads to distortions and fragmentation, in order to limit the amount of information to be processed.
Different stages (and styles) of perception can account for the controversial findings of studies investigating weak central coherence and global processing in autism. On the one hand, Embedded Figures Tests have been considered as the strongest area where autistic individuals perform better than non-autistic ones (Joliffe and Baron-Cohen 1997; Shah and Frith 1993) and the results have been interpreted as an illustration of weak central coherence in autism.
On the other hand, the recent study (Garner and Hamilton 2001) has challenged this idea and shown that autistic individuals can see optical illusions i.e. have the ability to cohere.
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Whether it is a cognitive style or a perceptual style, we cannot talk about a continuum here, as one and the same person seems to be able to display both styles at different times. Thus the overflow of sensory information that cannot be filtered and/or processed simultaneously may cause distortions in perception.
Gestalt perception may result in different sensory experiences and compensatory strategies (voluntary or involuntary) the person acquires in order to cope with sensory information overload.
The bipolar thing is also interesting, because I have read theories that a certain aspect of bipolar may be linked with autism, that a rapid-cycling form of bipolar may cause part of the developmental characteristics of autism in some individuals.
