The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum (19 page)

I stopped looking at the pictures and started reading. I focused especially hard on anything that might give me a clue about Jessy’s thinking. On page 71, I read that Jessy liked to search out regularities in words. “She thought about them, talked about them, wrote them down. Elf, elves; self, selves; shelf, shelves; half, halves”—et cetera. In the margin next to this paragraph I wrote
word patterns.

On the following page, Jessy’s mother, Clara, described a book that Jessy made shortly after her fourteenth birthday. It was, she wrote, “a celebration of the transformations of words. The book was a thing of beauty, a theme and variations, four words in three colors: SING, SANG, SUNG, and SONG.”

At the bottom of the page, I wrote
word patterns.

“Clocks became fascinating,” Clara wrote about Jessy in the following chapter,

when she learned that the French numbered time not in twelve hours but in twenty-four. She drew a ten-hour clock, a twelve-hour clock, a fourteen-hour clock, sixteen-, eighteen-, twenty-four-, and thirty-six-hour clocks. She converted hours to minutes, minutes to seconds; surviving sheets record that 3600 seconds = 60 minutes = 1 hour. Carefully she drew in each second. Time was now something to play with. Fractional conversions became so rapid as to seem intuitive: 49 hours = 2 1/24 days. Soon she was mapping space as well as time: 7½ inches = ⅝ foot.

Finds all the patterns,
I scribbled in the margin.

Wait a second.

Patterns.

Three times I had used the word in the span of just a few pages.

I thought about the Raven’s Progressive Matrices test. The subject is shown a pattern or matrix from which a piece is missing and then has to choose the piece that completes the puzzle. I knew from
Exiting Nirvana
that at the age of twenty-three, Jessy had scored in the ninety-fifth percentile on that test. Then she took the
Advanced
Progressive Matrices. Again she scored in the ninety-fifth percentile.

I also thought about a work of origami—the Japanese form of art that comes from the words for “folding” and “paper”—that a boy presented to me after one of my talks. It was unlike any work of origami art I’d ever seen. I had made origami figures myself, but I used just one sheet of paper for each and followed simple instructions that produced the most common origami designs, such as a crane. But this boy’s origami was full of colors, each color belonging to a separate sheet, and the design was the shape of a star. I was so impressed that when I returned home from that trip, I gave the origami star a place of honor on a windowsill where I could see it every day. Sometimes I would take it down from the windowsill and study it.

The star was about three inches by three inches by three inches. It had eight points. Each point had three colors, and no two points had the same combination of colors. I tried to count the colors, but because of my poor working memory, I had to write them down in order to be sure I had counted them all. Pink, purple, red, light green, dark green, blue, yellow, orange. Eight colors, meaning eight sheets of paper. All of the sheets of paper were interlocking, and the base of each triangular point intersected with the bases of the other triangular points.

After the boy had presented me with his gift, he hurried away, but I noticed that his parents were still standing nearby. I asked them about their son, and they said he was gifted in math. Which made sense. It certainly took a mathematical mind to engineer such a complicated structure. But didn’t such a subtle and beautiful work of art have to be the product of a visual mind too?
Maybe,
I thought one day, putting the origami back on the windowsill,
people who are really good at math think in patterns.

Once I realized that thinking in patterns might be a third category, alongside thinking in pictures and thinking in words, I started seeing examples everywhere.

After I gave a talk at one high-tech firm in Silicon Valley, I asked some of the folks there how they wrote code. They said they actually visualized the whole programming tree, and then they just typed in the code on each branch in their minds. And I thought,
Pattern thinkers.

I recalled my autistic friend Sara R. S. Miller, a computer programmer, telling me that she could look at a coding pattern and spot an irregularity in the pattern. Then I called my friend Jennifer McIlwee Myers,
another computer programmer who is autistic. I asked her if she saw programming branches. No, she said, she was not visual in that way; when she started studying computer science, she got a C in graphic design. If someone gave her a verbal description, she said, she couldn’t “see” it. When she read the Harry Potter books, she couldn’t make sense of the Quidditch competitions; she didn’t understand what was happening until she saw the movies. But, she said, she did think in patterns. “Writing code is like crossword puzzles, or sudoku,” she said.

Crossword puzzles involve words, of course, while sudoku involves numbers. But what they have in common is pattern thinking. In the 2006 documentary
Wordplay,
a movie about crossword puzzles, the people who created the best puzzles were mathematicians and musicians. And improving your sudoku-solving skills requires a greater and greater awareness of the patterns in the grid.

Then I read an article
on origami in
Discover
magazine that just about blew my mind. I learned that for hundreds of years, the most complex origami patterns needed only about twenty steps, but in recent years, competitors in extreme origami had used software programs to design patterns requiring one hundred steps. And I read this amazing passage:

The reigning champion of intricate origami is a 23-year-old Japanese savant named Satoshi Kamiya. Unaided by software, he recently produced what is considered the pinnacle of the field, an eight-inch-tall Eastern dragon with eyes, teeth, a curly tongue, sinuous whiskers, a barbed tail, and a thousand overlapping scales. The folding alone took 40 hours, spread out over several months.

How did he perform such a feat? “I see it finished,” he said. “And then I unfold it in my mind. One piece at a time.”
Patterns.

In 2004, Daniel Tammet came to my, and a lot of other people’s, attention when he set a European record for reciting the highest number of digits of pi ever: 22,514. And he did so in five hours. That’s an average of 75 digits a minute—more than one per second. Demonstrations of other abilities followed: He became fluent in Icelandic in only a week; he could tell you what day of the week a distant date would fall on. In interviews, he said that he had been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. When he published his book
Born on a Blue Day,
I naturally couldn’t wait to read it.

He explained the title on page 1: He was born on January 31, 1979, a Wednesday—and Wednesdays, in his mind, were always blue. As I read on, I learned that he thought of numbers as unique, each having its own personality. He said that he had an emotional response to every number up to 10,000. He described seeing numbers as shapes, colors, textures, and motions. He explained that he could instantly multiply two large numbers—53 × 131, for example—not by performing the math but by “seeing” how the shapes of the numbers merged into a new shape, which he recognized as the number 6,943.

Patterns.

I wanted to know more about his thinking, so I found an interview
in which he discussed how he learned languages. When teaching himself German, for instance, he noticed that “small, round things often start with ‘Kn’”—
Knoblauch
(garlic),
Knopf
(button) and
Knospe
(bud). Long, thin things often start with “Str,” like
Strand
(beach),
Strasse
(street), and
Strahlen
(rays). He was, he said, looking for
patterns.

Now, I’m certainly not the first person to notice that patterns are part of how humans think. Mathematicians, for instance, have studied
the patterns in music for thousands of years. They have found that geometry can describe chords, rhythms, scales, octave shifts, and other musical features. In recent studies, researchers have discovered that if they map out the relationships between these features, the resulting diagrams assume Möbius strip–like shapes.

The composers, of course, don’t think of their compositions in these terms. They’re not thinking about math. They’re thinking about music. But somehow, they are working their way toward a pattern that is mathematically sound, which is another way of saying that it’s universal. The math doesn’t even have to exist yet. When scholars study classical music,
they find that a composer such as Chopin wrote music that incorporated forms of higher-dimensional geometry that hadn’t yet been discovered. The same is true in visual arts. Vincent van Gogh’s later paintings had all sorts of swirling, churning patterns in the sky—clouds and stars that he painted as if they were whirlpools of air and light. And, it turns out, that’s what they were! In 2006, physicists compared
van Gogh’s patterns of turbulence with the mathematical formula for turbulence in liquids. The paintings date to the 1880s. The mathematical formula dates to the 1930s. Yet van Gogh’s turbulence in the sky provided an almost identical match for turbulence in liquid. “We expected some
resemblance with real turbulence,” one of the researchers said, “but we were amazed to find such a good relationship.”

Even the seemingly random splashes of paint that Jackson Pollock dripped onto his canvases show
that he had an intuitive sense of patterns in nature. In the 1990s, an Australian physicist, Richard Taylor, found that the paintings followed the mathematics of fractal geometry—a series of identical patterns at different scales, like nesting Russian dolls. The paintings date from the 1940s and 1950s. Fractal geometry dates from the 1970s. That same physicist discovered that he could even tell the difference between a genuine Pollock and a forgery by examining the work for fractal patterns.

“Art sometimes precedes scientific analysis,” one of the van Gogh researchers said. Chopin wrote the music he wrote, and van Gogh and Pollock painted the images they painted, because something just felt right. And it just felt right because, in a sense, it
was
right. On some deep, intuitive level, these geniuses understood the patterns in nature.

And the relationship between art and science can go the other way too; scientists can use art to understand math. The physicist Richard Feynman revolutionized his field in the 1940s when he devised a simple way to diagram quantum effects: A straight, solid line represented particles of matter or antimatter, which traveled through space and time. Wavy or dashed lines represented force-carrying particles. When an electron moving in a straight line emitted a photon in a wavy line, the straight line recoiled to the right. Equations that took months to calculate could suddenly be understood, through diagrams, in a matter of hours.