Ideas of Order (and thoughts on Thanksgiving)

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.