Ideas of Order (and thoughts on Thanksgiving)
November 28, 2008 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
Patternicity.
It’s a term that refers to “the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise,” as noted by Michael Shermer in the November Scientific American:
Traditionally, scientists have treated patternicity as an error in cognition. A type I error, or a false positive, is believing something is real when it is not (finding a nonexistent pattern). A type II error, or a false negative, is not believing something is real when it is (not recognizing a real pattern—call it “apatternicity”).
However, as Shermer notes, we don’t have a “Baloney Detection Network in the brain to distinguish between true and false patterns”—-patternicity does seem to be at work when it comes to theories of autism causation. There’s no doubt that some believe that a vaccine really caused their child to be come autistic (a “type I error, or a false positive”), and, too, there seem to be many who don’t believe that there really is evidence refuting a vaccine-autism link (and who do not recognize a real pattern—who are exhibiting “appatternicity”). Shermer cites a paper in the the October Proceedings of the Royal Society B “The Evolution of Superstitious and Superstition-like Behaviour,” by Harvard University biologist Kevin R. Foster and University of Helsinki biologist Hanna Kokko. They draw on evolutionary biology to demonstrate that
whenever the cost of believing a false pattern is real is less than the cost of not believing a real pattern, natural selection will favor patternicity.
Belief in the false pattern of “vaccines cause autism” persists because the “cost” of believing this is more readily grasped, you might say, requires less of certain efforts, than the alternative. There’s a deep-set tendency in us to find, to have meaning, in whatever the world presents to us; to be superstitious (if not a bit paranoid); to see causal associations just because something happens after something else; to assign cause to effect incorrectly.
Lest this seem merely to be yet another “vaccines don’t cause autism” post, I’m tacking on an account of our Thanksgiving and, yes, patternicity.
Patternicity seems another way to explain Charlie’s need to create order, in placing his shoes with the socks inside them perfectly lined up together; in packing his lunch box with a Capri Sun, 4 small plastic containers, and bags of carrots and grapes when he gets home from school; in arranging his CDs on the floor of his room just so. When Charlie was younger, if we so much as moved one shoe or colored block, his agitation was broadcast far, wide, and loudly. These days he’s easy-going if anything gets moved and sometimes leaves it askew, sometimes restores his order.
Charlie having some extra days off from school, I’ve figured that his need for order—for ways to mark and structure the days—increases. He spent a lot of Thursday (aside from loafing on the couch and going on an hour-long bike ride with Jim on a cold afternoon) in his room, trying to stick all the CDs into his old paper pumpkin trick-or-treat bag. There are way too many CDs to fit into the bag and Charlie did not let this deter him from trying to cram them all in with the result that that bag kept splitting and, in the midst of pumpkin pie baking and general Thanksgiving food preparations, I heard the cry of “I need help!” a couple of times.
The pumpkin bag was literally bursting at its seams when I went into Charlie’s room. With three kinds of tape—Scotch, masking, and duct—I tried to patch together the ripped side and the jagged places where CD corners had poked through the candy corn design. Charlie watched me intently and occasionally offered very long pieces of Scotch tape that he’d cut with scissors. At one point, I tried to tape a piece of a brown paper shopping bag onto the pumpkin bag, to make it bigger so all the CDs would actually fit.
“No, no,” was Charlie’s immediate response at my attempt to graft a piece of one bag onto another. Well, of course: What does a piece of brown paper bag have to do with an increasingly dilapidated paper pumpkin trick or treat bag? To tape one onto the other would be to disrupt the order of things—to upset the pattern—-and the cost was too high.
After I’d taped the bag together, I returned to Thanksgiving dinner preparations (now why is it that Americans feel a need to eat a specific menu of turkey, potatoes, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie?) and Charlie returned to his CD-ordering-and-reordering. When we called Charlie to eat the turkey, we heard “help, fix”: When I went into his room, I beheld the pumpkin bag, so recently, carefully, taped back to wholeness, packed full of CDs with one side ripped open and flapping around.
Apparently there’s a new order to understand here.
That is so cute. I love it! Does Charlie have an MP3 player? He might really like one of those. Maizie has one that is made for kids. Joe puts all her favorite music on it.
Thanks Kristina–pattern-recognition is one of my own strong suits and Tom is extremely good at puzzles and such. The need to impose an order that simply isn’t there is just an extension of this. In Tom’s case, it involves stuffing a whole lot of his ball collection under his shirt to make him look like a super hero. (Yes, it’s a sensory exercise as well!) Now, having room for the balls is one of the criteria for shirt shopping; however, some shirts are more suited for this exercise than others. My guy doesn’t get that: it’s his shirt, his ball collection, and it should all fit all the time. It is a bit a work to redirect him when the wrong shirt is being used . . . but he is, as Charlie is, a lot more likely to say “Need help” than meltdown. Hallelujah~
it reminds me of the yogurt cups, the way he put them in the fridge based on their shape.
it also emphasizes something you point out from time to time: that the way he organizes, it provides a window into his thoughts….with or without words, the patternicity is a form of communication, “this is the way I am navigating the world”.
quite lovely.
Sounds like your son was doing his part for family angst and drama to make for a perfect Thanksgiving day.
It is not about the dinner but always about the child. “I need help” “Fix, please” insures your son’s place, front and center. Parental response to cries for help is always and unconditional.
Beautiful depiction of a lovely holiday.
Patternicity? I hadn’t heard that term, but I know something about it. In searching for a remedy for my problems getting to sleep and staying asleep, I tried a “white noise” machine for awhile. It started talking to me. It told stories, and it was very scary. I threw it away, and now I use a regular fan, which doesn’t seem to know any words.
I have often had an analogous experience with visual perceptions. The patterns in textured ceilings, sometimes there are very elaborate pictures there. Not so much these days, more when I was younger.
What Shermer calls “patternicity” sounds a lot like what used to be called “magical thinking”: it’s more about assigning (self-comforting) putative causes, than it is about detecting intrinsic structure in a stream of incoming sensory data.
The latter is, of course, something that lots of folks on the spectrum have an affinity for. I think it’s both a cognitive and sensory coping mechanism, and an aesthetic preference; in fact, I think the need for, and success with, the coping mechanisms greatly inform autistic aesthetic sensibilities.
Being able to recognize a pattern and thereby predict the rest of the input allows us to filter and titrate the onslaught of raw data, which allows us some degree of parsimony with the sometimes limited processing bandwidth we have. We can dispense quickly with recognized inputs and focus the attentional and processing bandwidth we do have on less predictable inputs that require more conscious real-time thought.
Recognition of patterns also allows us to mitigate sensory distress, through cognitive preparedness for sudden jarring discontinuities in the sensory input stream(s) that the recognized pattern predicts or can account for. If I am prepared for the photographic flash that will come a split-second after I see the first signs of motion in the photographer’s shutter finger, that flash is accounted for and I can let it wash over me without an adrenaline-surge of fear.
Patterns are so useful, so critical, in these regards, that I think they deeply inform our aesthetic sensibilities. They’re calming; they’re “known territory”; they don’t contain nasty surprises.
Complex patterns are cognitive playgrounds: we can “park” our minds in them and let our cognition romp in the complexity, without getting hurt or lost.
Certainly an unrealized love of patterns, and of diverging from them, was one reason I was drawn to memorize pages of paradigms of ancient Greek irregular verbs……….