king for a mental disorder

That doesn't sound like any disorder I'm aware of. Perhaps someone will come along and know one for you.

It sounds like simply how someone thinks - maybe an autistic-type thing, but it doesn't read as disordered the way I'm reading it. I could also be reading it incorrectly and missing something.

Cirnflake is right. Some autists present similar problems, like a famius one who will see two dogs but won't think of them as the same kind of animal because too many details are not the same. He sees the details but not the feneral oicture of the dog. If you want to google, he us the one who draws scenes he has just glimpsed with an incredible amount of details.

"Normal" people aren't that good at grasping the whole picture either. What actually happens is we pick up a few significant details, and the rest of the scene is largely *reconstructed* in our head, rather than actually perceived and memorised.

Traumatic obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) might work for you. Some people with OCD have a compulsive need to put items in order by means of certain narrow criteria, called symmetry or exactness obsessions. There's some question whether it's that the brain actually only sees the criteria first (the cloth material) or whether the brain notices the whole shirt. But it can be argued that the person experiencing the event won't know what was noticed first. They have no choice but to make the arrangement by the criteria.

Just one option. Think the TV character "Monk" for some elements of symmetry disorder caused by traumatic OCD.

Thuro said:

Details popping out instead of forming a whole picture.

Click to expand...

Watch this video.

A guy who’s had the connection between his hemispheres severed is presented with a portrait constructed from fruit (some wacky renaissance ‘modernism’!). He can only see the bigger picture (a face) when it’s presented to one eye; he can only see the detail (fruit) when it’s presented to the other (a bi-product of the split is that each eye’s visual input is processed by only one hemisphere).

The above example only works if your protagonist looks at stuff through only one eye at a time. Pinker’s Language Instinct talks about this weirdness more; people who’ve had strokes/brain injuries can ‘lose’ a field of vision even though the eye still works, or be able to process certain information in only one field. Keep in mind the brain is pretty plastic; most of these effects are seen as the result of something traumatic. Folks who’re born with structural abnormality or get injured young often rewire and function normally.