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.

After being so very tired on Tuesday, Charlie got himself out of bed on Wednesday morning, got dressed and zoomed out the door sans sweatshirt and bookbag before either Jim or I could shove on our shoes. After a tough couple of days at school, Wednesday was very good.

Jim had suggested that keeping Charlie in motion (especially out of doors) might help. Last year Charlie had Adapted Physical Education at 11am, just around the time he was getting sluggish and his energy was ebbing. This year, he has gym at 8.37, right after he gets to school. That means he’s active first thing in the morning, perhaps gets a bit tired from the workout, and then has a long day of working at his desk, learning pre-vocational and life skills (his class has the use of a home-ec room’s kitchen and also a washer and dryer).

Charlie’s teacher and the consultant followed up on Jim’s suggestion and had Charlie go out for walks periodically on Wednesday and this helped a lot. I can sit for hours in a chair and work and read. Charlie (like Jim) needs to get up at regular intervals—half hour, twenty minutes. I’m sure the crisp cool air also helped to wake him up; no doubt the heater has been turned on for his school. Charlie’s classroom has windows that open onto a hallway, but no source of direct fresh air. As I know from watching my students as I taught them the third declension of Latin nouns yesterday, cold day, warm classroom, something difficult to attend to—-these can all be the ingredients for dozing off.

Charlie’s alertness and his spontaneous language continued for the rest of the day. He got off the bus and, after running a card through the Language Master, told me “I had a great day.” He told me “carrots” and then “I need help, bag” and I got out a plastic Ziploc and handed it to him; Charlie packed it full of baby carrots. He said “grapes, please” and asked for “help” and I got him another Ziploc and he packed that one really full with purple grapes, carefully pulling many off the stems. There was a final request for help to seal the bags and he put them his lunchbox, zipped it shut, and placed it on the top shelf of the refrigerator.

Then he asked to play cello. As I brought the cello into his room, he asked for the bow.

We usually go bowling with some other families with autistic kids his age on Wednesday. Charlie said no to this and requested a walk which, under a brilliant blue autumn sky and with loads of leaves to crunch in, made for a very nice time together. Then we made our way through Jersey commute traffic to pick up Jim at the train.

I know I don’t, can’t, know what’s really going on in Charlie’s mind. The words Charlie says (so far) don’t readily explain how he might be feeling. Over the years, in unspoken recognition that language is not the easiest mode of communication for Charlie, I’ve become a serious student of the educated guess. I still write every night about Charlie’s day in a journal as I’ve done since he was a baby and this exercise has been a way to note patterns of occurrences. I try to write down, as much as I can, only what Charlie did, what we did; what I saw.

Jim, further, has a good instinctual sense for what Charlie might be feeling, whether nighttime hyper bouts or anxiety so intense that it makes you freeze up. So we continually guestimate what might be the reason for an afternoon of intermittent shrieks, for a sudden need to run run run run run.

Those things happened on Tuesday afternoon; I suspected unusual stomach trouble, and this proved to be the case. I’ve heard it said more than a few times that, isn’t it something awful that a child can’t explain in words that he or she has terrible pains in their stomach or head. Charlie can’t tell us those things in words, yet, but that’s meant it completely behooves us to understand him on his terms. Sometimes we’re so wrong you’d wonder why we bother; other times, we kind of figure it out.

Yesterday after getting home, Jim proposed a father-and-son dinner. I handed Charlie a new dark blue hooded sweatshirt, as the one he’s worn for the past year needed a good washing. He’d said an adamant “no” to the new sweatshirt when I first showed it to him. Yesterday night, after I had explained that we had to wash the other sweatshirt, Charlie pulled on the new one. He adjusted the hood—far bigger, and lined in soft, new fleece—on his head and shoved one hand at a time in the big front pocket. It’s an adult size small so he has some room to grow into it and the hood didn’t hide so much of Charlie’s face that I couldn’t see him smile happily.

After he and Jim went out and came back and Charlie was asleep, I took out some of the carrots and grapes from the bags Charlie had packed. Even a boy growing and growing up pretty fast can only eat so many carrots.