"I had always known that the world was fragmented. My mother was a smell and a texture, my father was a tone, and my older brother was something which was moving about" (Donna Williams)
Autism is often thought of as a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces. This is reflected in logos of many Autism Societies - an autistic child as a piece of a jigsaw we cannot assemble yet as some pieces are missing and others are jumbled. We still have no clear picture of the disorder and often research and focus on the 'piece' we believe is the most important for the final image. We are accumulating knowledge from all the fields studying autism to obtain a greater coherence to our understanding of it. However, at present the 'jigsaw pieces' of autism have not been assembled into a coherent picture yet, and our understanding of it is still fragmented.
For many autistic people, fragmentation of the world is not just a metaphor, it is real. However, their main problem is not in difficulty to put all the pieces together, but in difficulty to identify the 'right pieces' to 'complete the jigsaw'.
Because of gestalt perception (You can find the article about gestalt perception in autism here), when too much information needs to be processed simultaneously, very often people with autism are not able to 'break' the whole picture into meaningful units and to interpret objects, people, and surroundings as constituents of a whole situation. Instead, they process 'bits' that happen to get their attention. Where we may see a room, an autistic person sees a door handle, a leg of the table, a coin on the floor, etc. As fragmented perception can affect all the senses, these 'bits and pieces' may be visual, auditory, olfactory, etc. For example, they may hear 'bits' of sentences that cannot be combined into a meaningful message.
The perception of parts instead of wholes and utilizing only a limited amount of available information is known as stimulus overselectivity. It results in that autistic individuals often react upon parts of objects or people as being complete entities.
One of the theories attempting to explain this phenomenon is the weak central coherence theory formulated by Uta Frith and developed by Francesca Happe. According to this theory people with autism lack the 'built-in form of coherence' (Frith, 1989) and, as a result, they see the world as less integrated, i.e. analytically rather than holistically. They cannot process all relevant parts of a stimulus at once.
