Pattern-Read Errors and Superstition

by Dora Raymaker

Published February 03, 2009 @ 04:00PM PT

In his popular science book about complex adaptive systems, The Quark and the Jaguar, Nobel Prize winner Murray Gell-Mann writes about the remarkable patterns in the world around us--and how the human ability for pattern-making can sometimes lead to errors in thinking, both by making cohesive patterns out of apparent randomness and by making randomness out of actual cohesive patterns. From pages 276 - 277,

Contemplating patterns of human thought, we can, in a crude fashion, identify superstition with one kind of error and denial with the other. Superstitions typically involve seeing order where in fact there is none, and denial amounts to rejecting evidence of regularities, sometimes even ones that are staring us in the face. Through introspection and also by observation of other human beings, each of us can detect an association of both sorts of error with fear.

In the one case, people are scared by the unpredictability and especially the uncontrollability of much that we see around us...The resulting scarcity of rhyme and reason frightens us and so we impose on the world around us, even on random facts and chance phenomena, artificial order based on false principles of causation...

In the case of denial, we are able to detect genuine patterns but they scare us so much that we blind ourselves to their existence...Numerous beliefs, including some of the most tenaciously held, serve to alleviate anxiety over death. When specific beliefs of that kind are widely shared in a culture, their soothing effect on the individual is multiplied.

But such beliefs typically include invented regularities, so that denial is accompanied by superstition. Moreover, taking another look at superstitions such as those of sympathetic magic, we see that belief in them can be maintained only by denying their manifest defects, especially their frequent failure to work. The denial of real regularities and the imposition of false ones are thus seen as two sides of the same coin. Not only are human beings prone to both, but the two tend to accompany and support each other.

Often as I sift through news articles, web sites claiming "scientifically proven autism treatment," and sadly even some popular autism research, I am thinking of Gell-Mann's idea of pattern-read errors from fear. Autism can be a big scary unknown, and not just for non-autistics--for many years I thought my meltdowns were caused by ESP, that I was in "psychic overload" and that I could "cure" this by rubbing magic stones. This is a perfect example of pattern read errors turning into superstition--I wasn't psychic and the stones weren't magic; I was just relieving stress with a fairly "socially acceptable" stim.

But the ideas that bring certainty in the face of the unknown may not be reflective of reality. A series of anecdotal accounts does not causation make, and dismissing evidence that refutes such a conclusion doesn't change reality.

Gell-Mann's analysis provides a useful tool for filtering fact from fiction, not just in the broader world of science and culture, but in the more intimate world here of autism facts, fictions, fears, and genuine attempts at understanding.