It’s 5 or so in the morning right now, and Alex has gotten me up with the sound of soft clattering in the living room. He’s digging through a box of plastic animals. Sometimes he wants to set them all up in rows, but often he just wants to dump them out on the floor to know they’re there. It works out good for me, too, as nothing wakes you up like driving the snout of a hard plastic big into the bottom of your foot at 5 in the morning.

Three lions ranging in length from two inches to six; an elephant and a turtle about the same size; three pigs, including one that oinks and whose eyes flash bright blue when you press the button on his belly; an inch-eye chicken; a two-inch-tall tabby cat; two cows; and the five-inch plastic Charlie Brown (probably what I’d play with if I got down there, and though I realize Charlie Brown isn’t an animal, he sounds the same hitting a hardwood floor).

Alex dumps these out at the north end of our coffee table. Sometimes he sets them up in rows, sorted by type and never ever just by color. Sometimes he walks around with them and trembles on the edge of real imaginative play. Mostly, however, he dumps them across the floor just to know they’re there. I get as keyed up as the next guy over material security and God knows I woke up many a morning a lifetime ago excited to mess around with some enticing new hunk of plastic. But I never needed my crap right in the center of the family’s living room.

We make him pick them up, of course, and he’s actually pretty okay about it, once you get him primed like a pump. A pointer works well, too, a little tap and point on the toy itself, and on his shoulder if he seems to be sitting and drifting (concentration is a thing with Alex these days, his teacher has noted). Once you get Alex going, clatter clatter clatter, into the box they go. And the second our backs are turned, out they come again. I know having everything out and often lined up is how autistic process information. I also know what a plastic snout feels like on the bottom of my bare foot.

“We need to trim the toys,” says Jill.

***

Tips for organizing your autistic child’s toys.

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.