Autism Vox

The Kosmos of Autism

by Kristina Chew, PhD on March 14th, 2007

I have never done a statistical analysis of this, but I suspect that were I to tally up the number of news stories, articles, books, etc. that describe autism as a “daily hell,” “devastating,” “tragedy,” etc. to those that present something a bit more optimistic, the former would outnumber the latter by a ratio of, say, 150 to 1. This post, then, will be in the latter “a bit more optimistic” category in its presentation of “what autism,” and will even evoke a few images of autism in connection with beauty.

First, though, a few numbers. 22, 514 numbers to be exact; more than a million, even.

Today, March 14, 2007 — 3-14-07 — is Pi Day, a day to celebrate the number that is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, or 3.1415926535897………… (go here to behold one million digits of pi). I have pi on my mind not only because I am a Classics professor and pi is the 16th letter of the Greek alphabet, but also because one of the reasons that Daniel Tammet has acquired the moniker of “Brainman” is because, on March 14, 2004, he recited 22,514 digits of pi in the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford, as a fundraiser for the National Society for Epilepsy. This recitation took him five hours and nine minutes (by way of comparison, a 1999 reading of the 24 books of Homer’s Odyssey at the University of Rochester took some eight hours).

In chapter 10 of Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant, Tammet describes his process for memorizing 22,514 digits of pi.

When I look at a sequence of numbers, my head begins to fill with colors, shapes and textures that knit together spontaneously to form a virtual landscape. These are very beautiful to me; as a child I often spent hours at a time exploring numerical landscapes in my mind. To recall each digit, I simply retrace the different shapes and textures in my head and read the numbers out of them. (p. 177)

As Tammet explains in prose that is clear and simple and clean, he remembers sequences of numbers by picturing them in a landscape though not, it seems, a landscape out of nature; a real landscape in the physical world. It seems that the number-landscape—the number-scape—of pi is a terra cognita very real, very visible, to Tammet in his mind:

There is a similarly beautiful sequence of digits comprising the 19,437th through 18,435rd decimal places of pi: “…99992128599999399…,” where the digit 9 repeats first four times in a row, then very shortly afterwards five times over and then twice more again; eleven times altogether in the space of 17 decimal places. It is my favorite sequence of pi’s digits in all the more than 22,500 that I learned. (p. 179)

In his account of his recitation of pi, Tammet describes himself as on a “numerical journey,” a walk in a world of numbers; this number-scape is evoked in his writing. The one moment during the recitation when his mind “went completely blank” and figuratively stumbles is a moment when (as he just approaches 16,600 digits) he sees no shapes, no colors, no textures, nothing”:

I hadn’t ever experienced anything like it before, as though I were looking into a black hole. (pp. 184-5)

Closing his eyes and taking “several deep breaths” restores a “tingling” to Tammet’s head and he is able to continue. Tammet’s evocation of the number-scape of pi recalls his lyrical description of the qualities of the numbers and of his synesthaesia in the first chapter of his book, “Blue Nines and Red Words“:

I have visual and sometimes emotional responses to every number up to 10,000, like having my own visual, numerical vocabulary. And just like a poet’s choice of words, I find some combinations of numbers more beautiful than others……. A telephone number with the sequence 189 is much more beautiful to me than one with a sequence like 116. (p. 5)

Tammet’s visualization of the numbers as a landscape recalls a mnemonic device—a trick to memorize–used by the Roman orator, Cicero: Cicero memorized his speeches by picturing himself as walking through a house, each room of which was furnished with the elements for a section of the speech (this is also known as the method of loci, a locus being the Latin word for “place”). The difference with Tammet’s number-scape is that he is not using it as a means to remember something else (a speech), but the landscape of numbers is exactly what he seeks to remember.

I suppose some, or more than a few, are reading Tammet’s book because of his description of his savant abilities. These abilities, and the media’s interest in them, led to one autism mother referring to them as stupid autism tricks back in January (other of these “tricks” being Jason McElwain’s scoring 20 points at the end of a high school basketball game and an argument for why there is no epidemic of autism). By this reckoning, Tammet’s abilities are idiosyncratic, sui generis to himself, and teach us little, or nothing at all, about autism, especially for those parents of us whose children do not have savant abilities and are (in contrast to Tammet), “low-functioning” and “severe.”

But there is a bit more to Tammet’s Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant with its limpid, gentle author’s voice than meets the eye and ear. One reviewer, Amy Kroin, in the March 11th Boston Globe, finds the book “fascinating stuff” but somewhat reserved about Tammet’s ability to “[define] himself:

There are few other places in the book where the reader gets a full sense of who he is and how he evolved from a toddler prone to banging his head against the wall to an adult with a thriving career and committed romantic relationship.
……
A primary theme of the book is Tammet’s social isolation, yet the author never fully draws the reader into his experience. There are no real scenes depicting Tammet’s social disconnection; instead, there’s a heap of summary as the narrative jumps from point A to point B. As a result, a lot of crucial information gets lost in the shuffle.

Kroin notes that, while Tammet emphasizes the importance of his siblings to himself, he does not describe the process by which he becomes closer to them. I sensed this too when I read Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant—this lack of a sense of narrative, of story, in which a writer shows rather than tells how something comes to be. Rather, though, than say that Tammet is lacking in narrative ability, I would suggest that his not constructing his story in the narrative fashion that a reader expects is more a sign of the particular workings of his mind and brain. Tammet’s account of his recitation of pi is indeed constructed as a narrative of himself talking his way through that number-scape he can call to mind so readily.

Tammet notes that it is only numbers, not letters, that exert this pull and fascination on him. It is the same with my son Charlie: When he was 2 1/2, Charlie quickly learned the numbers from 1-9; the double digit numbers and the alphabet have taken him much more of an effort to learn. There is something about the bumps and curves and forms that the numbers create that has long and deeply appealed to him: Charlie used to take the E’s out of his alphabet magnets and turn them backwards so he would have more 3’s to look at.

Tammet refers often to the numbers as “beautiful,” whether singly or in certain combinations. I wonder if his emphasis on beauty—and on the beauty of things like the numbers that he is fascinated with and can be said to have “stimmed” on as a child—accounts for the gentle tone of his book. He does not exactly write that “autism is beautiful” but he certainly presents a reader with what, in his view, is beautiful: What is kalos kagathos, to use the classical Greek phrase for “beautiful and good.” I will offer another Greek word to describe what Tammet sees in his number-scape and perhaps what drew Charlie’s eye to those 3’s and backwards E’s. The numbers, and all the more when arrayed in combination are beautiful for the order that they are in: They are a kosmos, which is the ancient Greek word for the universe, the cosmos; the basic meaning of kosmos is a “beautiful order.”

We used to call Charlie, hovering and humming over his patterns of numbers, “stimming”—to say that he was engaging in self-stimulatory behavior, doing the kinds of things that lead to people saying that autistic children are withdrawn, in their own world, and anti-social. I wonder now if Charlie were not, as Tammet describes himself, wandering in some number-scape, in a kosmos only he could see and, Charlie not having Tammet’s language ability, not able to tell us about. Like Tammet, color and shape and texture have always been of interest to him: The first words that Charlie ever learned (in his ABA program) were for the colors and shapes; he has always been drawn to wooden toys and investigated the texture of his food (crispy French fries and apple slices, for instance). Even tonight, he called me, “Mom,” and tugged at one of his small fleece blankets: A few days ago, the Kenyan nurse who was substituting for my in-laws’ usual nurse (she was on vacation) had spread the blanket over Charlie’s bed and he had been delighted to lie on its soft surface (with his fleece blue blanket wrapped tightly around him).

“The grace of palsy in an afternoon dance” writes Beth Kephart at the end of A Slant of Sun: One Child’s Courage (1998). Dancing is her metaphor for her life and learning with her son Jeremy; “dancing” is the title of the first chapter:

They bring him to me just after dawn. I turn, and he is there. They show me how to bend my arms so that I can take him down toward my heart, and there is nothing else to say. The nurse leaves. I fall profoundly, madly into love, peel the aftermath of birth from my son’s black-haired crown…….” (p. 15)

Kephart describes a feeling I remember well, and a moment that began my own journey on the road with Charlie. A journey of beauty and of goodness; a journey in the kosmos of autism.

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