The Best Australian Science Writing 2013 (15 page)

When I suggested to my sister Megan that perhaps our father (who died before Ben was born) had a few mild autistic-like traits, she said, ‘No, he wasn't like that'.

‘Wasn't he?' I asked. ‘I always thought him a little unusual.'

‘Oh no,' she replied, quite upset, ‘I don't think of him that way at all'.

I changed the subject. I didn't say to her that the thought of something of my father travelling through me to my son was a comfort to me, a feeling that Ben is not such an outsider in the world after all.

* * * * *

Ben's love of numbers is both mystical and pedestrian. It is unrelenting and ever-present. Not a day goes by when he doesn't count or talk about or write down numbers. The American diagnostic bible on ‘mental disorders', the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
, or
DSM IV
, describes Ben's love of numbers as ‘a preoccupation with a stereotyped and restricted pattern of interest that is abnormal in intensity and focus'. Psychologists have described his behaviour as ‘obsessional', ‘compulsive' and ‘ritualised'. I prefer to call him passionate.

What can it mean to have a passion for numbers? Mainly, Ben just loves the physical shape and form of them. Whatever size or colour or font or material a number is made of or written in, he dotes on zero to nine, just as I adore every inch of his body, every expression of his face.

This is how Ben's passion started. Some time before he was two, I stuck on the wall a child's poster with the numbers one to twenty and illustrations to match. I put it up because it was colourful and the hallway was dingy. I read it to Ben once. He spent a long time looking at it that day, and the next day, and the day after. Then he wanted to ‘hold' the numbers. So I made some numbers out of coloured pipe cleaners. These became his most treasured possessions. He laid them down on the floor one after another, saying the numbers as he did, ‘one, two, three', and so on up to twenty. Then he started going beyond twenty. When he came to numbers requiring two of the same digit, like twenty two, he used his hand for the second number. How did he know how to count beyond twenty? This I don't know. It seemed to be innate. A two-year-old unable to eat with a spoon, uninterested in toys, and calling himself ‘you' instead of ‘I' was able to count to 100 and beyond. His face was rapt when he used the pipe cleaners for this purpose. He laid them down with such
reverence it was like a form of worship. He was so content I could have gazed at his counting face for hours.

After the pipe cleaners, Ben discovered the joys of birthdaycake candles shaped like numbers. But they broke too easily when he played with them, so we found plastic magnetic numbers in a toyshop. He collected handwritten numbers on paper, numbers cut from wrapping paper, golden cardboard numbers, a set of metal numbers from the hardware store intended to be used on letterboxes, numbers for use in the bath, numbers made of playdough, shells that ‘could be a six or upside down could be a nine'. And so it went, a cupboard full of sets of numbers, as if collecting the objects was the sole purpose of his life.

Over a period of months, Ben's interest developed. He began to love numbers in a second way, for what they represented, just as a mother will love best the photographs of her children that remind her of happy times. He loved that numbers on letterboxes tell us the number of the house, that the age we are tells who is older than whom, that numbers can represent so many different things – weight, height, currency, size. Clocks, calculators, thermometers and measuring tapes were all added to his collection.

‘He'll grow out of it,' my friends told me.

‘He's so intelligent,' my family said.

‘Your parents are mathematicians,' people reminded me. ‘What did you expect?'

What did I expect? We expect many things of our children. Most of the time we are only aware of these expectations when something happens to make it impossible for them to be fulfilled.

Just as Robert and I were thinking that we should start to teach Ben arithmetic, he found it for himself. He discovered a third way to enjoy numbers: the way they work. That one plus one equals two and then two plus one equals three made sense to him. He began to do strange feats of simple arithmetic. He spent hours adding numbers in his head. ‘Two plus two is four; four
plus four is eight; forty-four plus forty-four is eighty-eight.'

Soon after that, I would hear him reciting the times tables to himself in bed at six in the morning, starting with ‘one two is two' and ending with ‘twelve twelves are one hundred and forty-four', complete with the intonation and accent from Don Spencer's musical times-tables CD, which I had foolishly played to him. This may have led him to a fourth way of loving numbers – as an ordering principle. Numbers are predictable and controllable and they never end. He realises you can count forever.

* * * * *

Robert and I finally agreed to ‘quarantine' Ben's numbers. But instead of limiting him to using them once a day, we did the reverse: he was not allowed to talk about numbers at dinner.

‘Why can I not talk about numbers at dinner?' Ben asked yet again.

‘Remember we talked about it. Not everyone finds numbers as interesting as you do.'

‘Why not?'

I didn't really know how to answer that one.

‘Let's talk about our day,' suggested Robert. ‘What did you two do after kindy this afternoon?'

‘We went to the park, didn't we, Ben?' I said.

‘Yes. First we passed number forty-one, then we passed number thirty-nine …'

‘Stop!' I said, rather loudly, holding up the palm of my hand. ‘No numbers.'

Robert put his hand over his mouth.

‘I know what else happened,' I added hurriedly. ‘Auntie Liv rang, didn't she, Ben?'

‘Yes.'

‘Ben talked to her for a bit, didn't you?'

‘How old is Auntie Liv?' asked Ben.

‘Ben, you know she's thirty-nine,' I replied.

‘Mum is forty-one. Daddy is fifty-five. Auntie Liv is thirty-nine. Granny is …'

‘Ben – enough! No numbers at dinner.'

Ben put on his hurt face. ‘I don't want any more.'

‘Finish your dinner, please.'

‘No, I don't want to.'

‘You need to eat proper food. Just have four more spoonfuls of rice and then you can get down,' I said.

‘One, two, three, four,' he chanted, stuffing them all into his mouth at once and then looking like a cartoon character, cheeks so bunched up he couldn't chew.

‘That went well,' said Robert in his dry way. I started to laugh. Ben watched me for a bit and then opened his mouth so that all the rice came spurting out onto the tabletop. He jumped off his chair and ran into his bedroom shouting, ‘One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.'

Robert peered at the bits of rice in his red wine and then drank it. ‘He's a clever little fellow, isn't he?' he said proudly.

* * * * *

Overheard, Ben to his teacher:

‘Actually, you are wrong: today is the sixteenth, not the fifteenth.'

* * * * *

I wanted to understand why Ben was so obsessed with numbers. Our paediatrician said that obsessions like this were just part of the condition of autism and that it was probably a way for Ben to create order and structure in his life. This sounded a bit vague to
me, so I did some more of my (obsessive?) reading about autism. Several months and about twenty books later, I decided that the paediatrician had made a fairly good summary of the situation.

‘I should hope so,' said Robert. ‘That's why we pay so much to see him.'

But it seems to me that researchers don't really know why people with autism fixate on particular obsessions, only that they will have at least one area of obsessive repetition, whether this is flapping their hands, touching the corners of doors, learning all there is to know about trains or insects, memorising phone books or simply running sand through their hands all day. It is partly a retreat to the concrete because it is so difficult for someone with autism to understand other people and abstract ideas. Repetition is also a way of regulating sensory stimulation, of dealing with sensory overload and high anxiety. The repetition helps calm and regulate.

It has also been suggested that people with autism focus on small details because they lack the ability to see ‘the big picture', to integrate things and make sense of the world. Their ability to shift attention is also impaired – it's hard to move on from one thing to the next, hence the desire for sameness.

The most recent theory about autism is that it is an extreme form of the ‘male' or systematising brain. Our brains are made to understand systems and how physical objects work, but some people have an extreme ability to understand ‘folk physics'. This comes at a cost: their ability to understand people may be limited.

But why numbers? Numbers are a common interest for people with autism. I wanted to know if there was a reason for this.

‘Why do you need a reason?' asked Robert. ‘Why can't you accept Ben as he is?'

‘I do accept him. I just want to understand.'

‘What's to understand, Rachel? He likes numbers.'

* * * * *

Overheard, my mother talking to my brother:

‘Today is a very special day for me. Today, Olivia is exactly half my age.'

‘She has been all year, hasn't she? Or, do you mean half your age to the day?'

‘Of course! It wouldn't mean anything otherwise.'

* * * * *

Ben's world, like that of most people with autism, is full of confusion, uncertainty and unpredictability. This is partly because of his difficulty in understanding other people and partly because he experiences every object, every person, every thought as a separate unique event, with no necessary or logical connection to any other event. What is it like to see each tree as an individual as different from another tree as it is from a car, a dog or a man? In a way, it is a vision of total equality. All things are equal; no one, nothing, is elevated. All sense of meaning fails because how can we create meaning without metaphor, categories and hierarchies? Without taxonomy we have chaos, just unmediated, inexplicable experience. The world presses upon us. Our own bodies press upon us. There is no sense to be made of sensation. This is Ben's world – one of experience and perceptions without order, definition or explanation. Could this be anything other than frightening?

It is impossibly hard for a non-autistic person to see, hear and feel the world in the way an autistic person might. Even listening to someone with autism is not enough, because the shared language is always our language, the words and concepts and structures of the neurotypical world. Is there a ‘language' of autism, a language for undifferentiated experience?

How can one survive in such a world? You would have to escape, to shut down. Or you could create a structure to manage it all. For Ben, numbers are true to the etymology of the word integer: ‘whole, entire' and ‘marked by moral integrity'.

Did Ben choose numbers or is it simply that numbers (arithmetic and geometry) form one of the basic underpinning concepts of nature? Spiders spin webs in logarithmic progression. Shells grow in the same proportion. The structure of a snowflake is fractal. Many plants grow according to the Fibonacci sequence of numbers. Our bodies, our landscape, our architecture, our music are all structured according to mathematical principles. Evidence for the human capacity for counting goes back more than 30 000 years to signs of tallying on bone and on the walls of Upper Palaeolithic caves. In missing the big picture, Ben has perhaps been able to see and appreciate what psychologist Peter Szatmari calls ‘the intimate architecture of the world'.

Father and daughter

Counting

Higgs boson

Michael Lucy

‘Where do you want to sit for History?' one passing American asks another, before they settle on front row seats. It's 4 July 2012; the venue is a bland convention centre auditorium in Melbourne. We're waiting for scientists at the
Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire
in Switzerland, better known as CERN, to announce that they've found the Higgs boson. The Higgs, in the standard journalistic précis, is the particle that gives everything mass. It was proposed almost 50 years ago (by Peter Higgs and several others), and particle-hungry experimentalists have been after it ever since the less famous W and Z bosons were tracked down in 1983.

Earlier, the Melbourne conference's media liaison, standing on a chair in a cramped room upstairs, had briefed a group of physicists on talking to the press. Don't assume they're specialist science journalists, he said. In fact, don't assume they know anything about science. There were chuckles. Emphasise this is not the end, he went on. It's a historic milestone, but we're only at the beginning. A balding, pony-tailed German slurped loudly from his paper cup of coffee.