Details vs. Big Picture: Who Gets What?

Some neuropsychologists and special educators are forever talking about those who can’t see the forest for the trees. Freud might have a field day with that. Those with NLD are, for example, supposed to be tree viewers and forest-blind, but is that true?

One classic measure of the forest/tree dichotomy is a gigantic letter H that is composed of little T’s. Like this:

  T           T

  T           T

  T           T

  T  T  T  T  T

  T           T

  T           T
  
  T           T

Susan would say H. She is a big picture person (see right brain vs. left brain discussion). But she would see only the H because she would move far, far away from it, so as to be able to ignore all the pieces, all the busy-ness, all the horrid little Ts. Why? Because looking at all those T’s (all the little pieces and trying to process them) hurts Susan’s head. She would do everything she could to blur them away, block them out. She craves the whole picture always and cannot find it by trying to juggle pieces or fit them together. She needs to grasp the whole, whole.

If she was forced to stand up close to all those little Ts, to avoid the feeling that her head was spinning round and round she would try to block out all the busy-ness and focus on just one T. She would force herself to see one T as her “whole,” her forest. So a child who did not know the strategy of standing back far enough to blur the pieces together to form a whole might take a different route, constructing a whole from one T and blurring out all the rest. The processing problem, you see, may have nothing to do with not knowing or craving the “whole.” It may instead be that some get to the whole by constructing it from pieces and others cannot do that; they need to grasp the whole, whole. The pieces just get in the way.

As Susan experiences this problem, it is the “pieces” that get in the way. It is the “pieces” she does not understand. It is the whole that she can grasp, but NOT if the pieces are too obvious, too intrusive–not if the pieces do not lend themselves to blurring out, so that the whole can emerge.
Is it helpful or accurate to describe someone who is always searching for the big picture, who hates the trees (the pieces) and is forever lost in them, as one who has trouble with the big picture.

No, it is harmful and inaccurate. Harmful because it suggests that one is not “smart.” (See also discussion of abstract vs. concrete thinking.) And inaccurate because it is the pieces that are the source of confusion, not the big picture. The mistake here is beginning with the assumption that the “normal” brain is the brain that gets to the big picture by compiling pieces. But another way of processing is possible: skipping the pieces, blurring them out and grasping quickly and accurately, the whole. The forest people do it that way.