The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum (20 page)

In 2011, participants in an online video puzzle game called Foldit solved the mystery of the crystal structure of a particular monomeric retroviral protease. The configuration of the enzyme had long eluded scientists, and the solution was so significant that it actually merited publication
in a scientific journal. What made the achievement especially remarkable, though, was that the players were not biochemists. But they sure were pattern thinkers.

Mathematicians distinguish subsets of thinkers: algebra thinkers and geometry thinkers. Algebra thinkers look at the world in terms of numbers and variables. Geometry thinkers look at the world in terms of shapes. Do you remember the Pythagorean theorem? It’s this: The sum of the squares of the lengths of the legs of a right triangle is equal to the square of the length of the hypotenuse.
¹⁰
If you’re an algebra thinker, you see a
²
+ b
²
= c
²
. But if you’re a geometry thinker, you see:

And then there’s chess. There’s always chess. For a century now, chess has been the petri dish of choice for cognitive scientists—researchers who think about thinking. Skill at chess can easily be measured, which is why rankings can be so precise, and it can be observed in an environment as controlled as any laboratory’s—the tournament hall.

What makes a chess master a chess master? Definitely not words. But not pictures, either, which is what you might think. When a chess master looks at the board, she doesn’t see every game she’s ever played and then find the move that matches the move from a game she played three or five or twenty years earlier. (That’s probably what I would try to do.) A chess master doesn’t “see” a board from a nineteenth-century chess match that she’s studied closely.

So what
does
a chess master see, if not pictures? By now you can probably guess: patterns.

The stereotype of a chess grand master is someone who can think many moves ahead. And certainly, many chess players do strategize that way. Magnus Carlsen,
a Norwegian prodigy who became a grand master in 2004 at the age of thirteen, calculates twenty moves ahead and routinely makes moves that other grand masters haven’t even contemplated. Most grand masters can see many moves ahead, even while playing dozens of games simultaneously, walking from board to board in an exhibition space.

But a clue to how they’re thinking comes from José Raúl Capablanca, a Cuban grand master. In 1909,
he participated in an exhibition in which he played twenty-eight games at once, and he won all twenty-eight. His strategy, though, was the opposite of Magnus Carlsen’s.

“I see only one move ahead,” Capablanca reportedly said, “but it is always the correct one.”

Cognitive scientists don’t see a contradiction between these two approaches. Whether a chess player immediately sees a move in the context of twenty moves ahead or immediately sees a move in the context of one move ahead, the point is that he sees the move
immediately.

The grand masters see it immediately not because they have better memories than regular players. They don’t, according to studies that tested their memories. Nor do masters and grand masters see the next move immediately because their memories carry more possibilities from which they can choose. Their memories
do
carry more possibilities, because top-tier players have played longer than other players. But they retrieve from their memories not
more
possibilities but
better
possibilities. It’s not just the quantity that grows over time. It’s the quality.

But even having access to higher-quality moves doesn’t explain why top players can see their next moves immediately. The reason is that they are better at recognizing and retaining
patterns
—or what cognitive scientists call
chunks.

A chunk is a collection of familiar information. The letter
b
is a chunk, as is the letter
e,
as is the letter
d.
The ordering of those letters as
bed
is also a chunk, as is the phrase
going to bed.
The average person’s short-term memory can retain only about four to six chunks. When superior chess players and novices were presented with pieces on nonsensical boards and then asked to re-create the positions of the pieces from memory, members of both groups were able to recall the locations of four to six pieces. When they were presented with pieces on actual chessboards, however, the superior chess players could recall the positions of the pieces across the board, while the novices were stuck at the four-to-six-pieces level. The real-life chessboards contained familiar patterns of pieces, and for a superior player, each pattern represented a chunk. To the expert eye at a glance, a board of twenty-five pieces might have four or six chunks—and the master or grand master knows upward of fifty thousand chunks, which is to say upward of fifty thousand patterns.

Michael Shermer, a psychologist, historian of science, and professional skeptic (he founded
Skeptic
magazine), called this property of the human mind
patternicity.
He defined
patternicity
as “the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless data.” Why would we need to find patterns even when they’re not there? “We can’t help it,” he wrote in his book
The Believing Brain.
“Our brains evolved to connect the dots of our world into meaningful patterns that explain why things happen.”

In fact, we might make bad decisions because our brains themselves feed us bad information. Our brains “want” to see patterns, and as a result, they might identify patterns that aren’t there. In one experiment, for instance, researchers found that when subjects were shown randomly pointing lines on a computer screen and were asked which way, on average, the lines were pointing, they consistently tended to think the lines were pointing in either a more horizontal or a more vertical way than they actually were. The researchers hypothesized that our brains “want” to see horizontal or vertical, because that’s what we need to see in nature. The horizon tells us where we’re headed; the vertical tells us there’s an upright person coming our way.

Even if the ability to identify patterns in nature isn’t foolproof, it
is
exquisitely calibrated, and without it we wouldn’t be here. It is as fundamental a part of our thinking as images and words. Patterns seem to be part of who we are.

Think of the golden ratio: Take a line and divide it into two unequal segments. If the ratio of the line’s total length to the length of the longer segment is the same as the ratio of the length of the longer segment to the length of the shorter segment, then the two segments are said to be in the golden ratio. That number, rounded, is 1.618, and for thousands of years, mathematicians have pondered its “ubiquity and appeal,” as the astrophysicist Mario Livio wrote in his book
The Golden Ratio.
“Biologists, artists, musicians, historians, architects, psychologists” have studied it, he wrote. “In fact, it is probably fair to say that the Golden Ratio has inspired thinkers of all disciplines like no other number in the history of mathematics.”

About a decade ago, a college dropout named Jason Padgett
survived a vicious mugging outside a karaoke bar in Tacoma, Washington. He was struck in the back of the head, just above the primary visual cortex, and he suffered a concussion. Then a day or two later, he began seeing the world as a mathematical formula. “I see bits and pieces of the Pythagorean theorem everywhere,” he said. “Every single little curve, every single spiral, every tree is part of that equation.” He found himself compelled to draw what he was seeing, over and over and over, year after year. All the resulting artwork turned out to be fractals that were mathematically precise—even though he had had no math training and previously had exhibited no talent for art. It’s as if the fractals were in his brain, just waiting to be freed.

And maybe they were. Way back in 1983, I clipped a
New Scientist
article
that considered this possibility. (I guess the subject of patterns was interesting to me even then, though I wouldn’t realize it for nearly two decades.) The article concerned the research of Jack Cowan, a mathematician then at the California Institute of Technology, into visual hallucinations induced by drugs, migraines, flickering lights, near-death experiences, or any other catalyst.