I hate this fucking show. The fact that it’s run by the same dude who made House is mindboggling.
What I didn’t like about this show is that they act like being a doctor and having autism is so contradictory whereas historically doctors probably where mostly on the autistic side:
They didn’t participate in the normal social activities outside their work but instead tried to classify and understand every or certain diseases obsessively
They did weird things no one else wanted to do or was even forbidden by society, eg autopsies or examining body liquids, excrements etc.
Also they kind of needed some lack of empathy to do the early treatments which often consists of hurting or doing something bad to patients because rationally it was better for them in the end - I think this part is shown quite well in the show eg when he is in the collapsed building and has to amputate the woman’s leg.
I think it’s only a kind of recent development that doctors are expected to be overly empathetic to patients and talk to them a lot and even explain them everything. In my experience, how the “normal” doctors in the show act is still rather the exception than the norm.
Wait, you guys don’t see a hud everywhere?
I’m not sure how I feel about this.
I only have a HUD for words. Like, my brain has to put big block letter labels on everything in my mind. I see words more than images.
A steamer was saying something like that, like her internal dialog is a bunch of visual text flying through her brain. I have mostly complete aphantasia, so I hear everything instead.
I have neither. It’s just a lonely dark carve with a chittering monkey that can’t focus long enough for me to understand what it’s trying to say.
The “autsists have super powers” trope is ridiculous I agree but I will say that I can and do think this way occasionally. I notice it especially when I’m planning a route through the city that its like I’m rapidly flying above the streets with images of buildings flashing across my mind
I agree. Nothing to do with autism. More like how our braincells connected together during development. My wife can visualise like crazy and memorise things by what colour they feel like, but doesn’t have an inner monologue at all, and has trouble thinking about sound/voice/reading without saying things out loud. Meanwhile, my brain is pretty much an MP3 player loaded up with every song I’ve ever heard and set to shuffle, with my thoughts MC-ing over it. Neither one of us has any form of diagnosed disability. Brains are just weird.
That’s just a thing people in general do
That trope comes from the occasional comorbidity of autism with savant syndrome.
Co…morbidity?
co·mor·bid·i·ty
/ˌkōmôrˈbidədē/
nounMedicine
the simultaneous presence of two or more diseases or medical conditions in a patient. “age and comorbidity may be risk factors for poor outcome”
That’s fair… I guess I associate comorbidity with (extremely) negative conditions, not just a couple of things that happen to exist in the same person at the same time.
Is that not how everyone sees their routes? Genuinely asking.
I can do this in fictional videogame worlds but I can’t navigate my own home county without Google maps lmao.
(Not diagnosed with anything but I have my suspicions, so ig take that fwiw)
I know you weren’t asking for advice, but a good first step is to set your map navigation to always show North up (not route up). This helps mental map pieces align and fall into place.
Spatial reasoning is one of my strong suits, and I’ve been called neurotypical. For me, it’s more like I automatically build up a rough map in my head as I travel. Or if I see a printed map, it’s like I take a blurry snapshot (definitely not eidetic) that I can follow later if I make a little effort to remember it.
It’s not exactly that I imagine flying over the landscape, but more that the mental map is a standalone structure. I can easily rotate it in 3D space, zoom in or out on a spot, or place myself anywhere relative to it. The level of detail depends how much time and effort went into the mapping.
My partner has very little sense of direction in most places. She has mild ASD, can’t make a mental map at all, and mostly goes by landmarks I think.
I played with a lot of Legos and Transformers toys as a kid, and had fun playing Descent 2 as a young teen, so all that probably contributed for me.
That is exactly my experience, albeit described much better than I’ve ever attempted. Do you also visualize math problems in similar ways? I found the ability extremely useful in calc and other higher maths.
I think it helps with math that’s already mostly visual or spatial, yeah. I crushed geometry in high school with like 110%. It helps somewhat with calculus, but not much at all for basic algebra. It can help with other subjects like physics or o-chem reaction mechanisms. It might’ve even helped with my art history classes, at least the portions on sculpture and architecture.
Same. I killed geometry. I though it was also very helpful in calc for visualizing derivatives and integrals. I also visualize equations moving around, so it was helpful with algebra. Kinda like a mental chalkboard.
I don’t approach math the same way most people I’ve encountered do, and I’ve always assumed it was due to this visualization.
I also share such an experience. My spatial reasoning helps me a lot with linear algebra. However considering that it goes still down in 3D space, it’s very similar.
As a person without much of a visual element to my thoughts, and with a pretty good natural sense of direction, I plan my routes by imaging/“feeling” the turns I will make.
I plan my routes by looking at a map and tracing my finger on it. In the rare times I’m not using google maps
Just gonna save this into my mind palace
My mind palace is my own personal Google Earth of every place I’ve ever been to over the last forty odd years.
Oh, and a best-of selection of my erotic daydreaming since I hit puberty.
Go figure.
Stuff related to my job? Meh, I flush everything every time I change job, it seems. Sometimes faster, when the job itself changes. It fits with how fast IT evolves, so it’s worked for me over the last twenty years or so of my career.On the other hand my wife seems to happily throw away any memory that’s not related to medical knowledge. I believe having aphantasia also contributes to her lack of any visual memory but still. It’s kinda weird how completely different our brains function, haha!
My mind palace is overrun with goblins.
You know about mind goblins?
What are mind golbi-
Which distro is this?
Unfortunately I have aphantasia, so all I get is this dumb dialogue wheel with 3 skill check options I can’t pass and one really dumb option.
Oh fuck can we share? I have like…. Hyperphantasia where I close my eyes to take a lil break from work and watch horrifying and sometimes kinda neat movies in my brain. I want half of what I have.
A buddy of mine had that. Said one of the options was always COOL BUGS.
Better then one button labeled cringe
Technically there is the 5th option, letting the dialogue “time out” aka just remaining quiet. That’s what I’ve leaned on the most. Because yeah, those moments of cringe stay with you.
So the guy from house made a show about a doctor who heals people using autism in the same way house used substance abuse and sarcasm? Please tell me it’s called something insane like Doctism or Medical on the Spectrum or some shit.
Based on a Korean show, it’s called The Good Doctor.
Oh yeah. The trope of shows portraying autistic people as savants with superpowers is hilarious to me, because every autistic person is just like “this is ridiculously not what it’s like to be autistic” and they’re always written by the most ignorant non-autistic people ever.
Shhhh don’t tell them we aren’t all super savants bro. Let us have our moment.
can you name a tv program with a good authistic protagonist? I just want to compare
Abed from Community
As We See It. The three main characters are played by actors on the spectrum. It’s really good
Oh! Also, I love Extraordinary Attorney Woo Young Woo, though it is a Idiot Savant trope, it’s just so good.
Movies, The Accountant. It’s just so good and avoids the savant trope.
Anything Star Trek. While a lot of these characters are not written to be autistic, they fucking are.
It always seemed obvious to me this show is written by people on the spectrum.
xddd
Will Graham from Hannibal, the TV show. I’ve always loved his subtle performance.
That’s a head canon, unfortunately.
Characters in the show, including Will Graham, all say he is on the spectrum.
Bryan Fuller, the creator, stated he isn’t. Characters speculating on a diagnosis aren’t a diagnosis, nor representation. Plus, Will’s original comment implies the spectrum he’s speaking of is the neurodivergent spectrum (though with a very big misunderstanding on what that even is). The full quote is:
“Where do you fall on the spectrum?”
“My horse is hitched to a post that is closer to Asperger’s and autistics than narcissists and sociopaths”
“But you can empathize with narcissists and sociopaths.”
“I can empathize with anybody. It’s less to do with a personality disorder than an active imagination.”
Which is Will denying that he has any of these conditions, but he’d be closest to autism if anything.
Atypical. While the protagonist’s actor isn’t autistic and the first season was criticised for a lack of autistic actors, the latter seasons did include autistic actors. Generally I think it did a decent portrayal of someone with ASD (which can be hard given the wide breadth of how neurodivergent people present).
I said this in another comment, but he commits several crimes over the course of the show and there are never consequences. It’s not a good portrayal.
The only good portrayal of autism in that show is the main character’s sister, but sadly that’s only head canon.
Big bang theory? Love on the Spectrum, I would say Mr Robot, but that goes way beyond ASD
Big Bang Theory has no autistic characters, despite Jim Parsons’ stereotypical portrayal. He’s written that way to make fun of people with ASD, but with plausible deniability.
Also, I love the people on Love on the Spectrum, but despise the editing. The cutesy music feeds into an infantilization that the edit then reinforces.
Honestly, enjoyed Alphas. Gary’s so much fun.
My kids enjoy Carl the Collector on PBS. Seems like a pretty authentic portrayal based on my (albeit limited) experience.
Okay, I am not autistic so take my opinion with a grain of salt. I think the protagonist of Atypical is a good example. I have heard autistic people say Drax from Guardians of the Galaxy. I have also heard them say Sonic The Hedgehog, but that may stem from hyper fixation with certain media or hobbies. I wanna say Forrest Gump but I haven’t seen that movie in a long time and I feel like there could be some problematic things in there I’m not remembering.
Atypical is… bad. The main character tends to be an absolute asshole and the show doesn’t call it out. It treats him with kid’s gloves, even when it’s absolutely not deserved.
He commits several crimes over the course of the show and there are no consequences. It portrays his parents as being destroyed by his condition, which is a very hurtful trope (one perpetuated by Autism Speaks)
Ironically, it does have a well written autistic character… in his sister. Her story is much more engaging as well. She is a head canon, though.
I AM A SURGEON
I remember there was a guy (maybe on youtube?) who always claimed he had pretended to have a hud for so long (it helped him overcome social anxiety and get out of the house, I think) that it was always in his mental imagery of things, and he said it was present in his actual vision. This was way back when though, before social media got big… maybe 2008-2010? I’ve always wondered if, like the people with their tulpas and such causing mental illness type symptoms, IF we could really change our perceptions that much.
I did that. It was with Terminator vision. It’s still kind of clicks into a certain extent, but considering I haven’t really actively focused on it in a very long time, that’s not a surprise. If I try, it comes back pretty easily. That being said, it’s not really useful. Like I’m not seeing actual calculations or useful data. But it is a weird thing that you can kind of trick your brain into seeing it if you imagine it for so long.
Probably why I think the idea of the HUD in this show is so fucking stupid. Like the only thing I’m seeing is a red overlay with some random crosshairs and a bunch of random strings of digits. About as useful as shit on Velcro.
There are people who don’t have this?
Isn’t it just an illustration of his photographic memory?
The same thing Mike Ross can do in Suits.
Oh, the completely made up thing autism is being used as a stand in for in the show? Yep.
I have AudHd, I can only see clips from various tv shows and I don’t get to choose what’s playing
Today we’re upset that baby Cumberbatch has Sherlock powers? /s
