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Light and number: Ordering principles in the world of an autistic child

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Abstract

This study describes part of a complex system of ideas in which a 12-year-old autistic girl unites concepts of number with elements of sunlight and weather, and seeks to explain some of her reasoning. Certain prime numbers are endowed with positive or negative affect, which persists even when they are multiplied to form composite numbers. The numbers are associated with 29 kinds of weather, real and fictitious, which also have strong affect attached to them. It is conjectured that the system is an ingenious and laborious attempt by the child to compensate for her failure to endow events and emotions with ordinary social and emotional meaning by the invention of an entirely personal kind of meaning in whose terms at least some elements of daily experience can be ordered and understood.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, Williams College, 01267, Williamstown, Massachusetts

    David Park

  2. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

    Philip Youderian

Authors
  1. David Park
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  2. Philip Youderian
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Park, D., Youderian, P. Light and number: Ordering principles in the world of an autistic child. J Autism Dev Disord 4, 313–323 (1974). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02105375

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02105375

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