I know plenty about people on the autism spectrum. Communication and social skills present them with considerable challenges. They attach great importance to predictability and routine. They have highly specific tastes and preferences and become intractable when these are not met. They have difficulty understanding and processing human emotion, including their own. All of them are male, and all but one of them are young. And they have the ability to perform superhuman feats of memory and mathematics. I know all this, of course, only from popular culture. So maybe I don’t know as much as I think I do.
Given the current prevalence of autism in the real world it’s not surprising to see it reflected in current entertainment. In fact, one might go so far as to say that autism is “hot” right now. Last month, Fox previewed a new series, Touch, about a seemingly uncommunicative boy; the dramatis personae of SyFy’s Alphas include a character who self-identifies as autistic; and the title character of BBC’s popular series Sherlock displays the emotional detachment often associated with those on the spectrum. These characters have another trait in common: they are, effectively, superhuman. Sherlock Holmes of course possesses those famous powers of deduction; Alphas’s Gary can pull and interpret electromagnetic signals directly from the air; and Jake from Touch, while communicating solely in number clues, has a seemingly divine ability to trace and even manipulate the invisible patterns of causality that supposedly connect us all (the show’s utterly fanciful premise is beside the point).
Read more of Jeff Alexander's Time article HERE.
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