Turing & Asperger's

So having read a bit on Asperger's I rewatched The Imitation Game today. I really liked it when I first saw it in theaters and it still feels to me like Cumberbatch's portrayal Alan Turing is one of the truest portrayals of a person who makes sense. Yes, you read that right. There is a persistant idea in the community of those of us on the spectrum being anthropologists encountering aliens in the humans around them. This is because until you study them extensively the majority of people make no sense whatsoever.

I studied psychology in middle school. Read some college textbooks and experimented on my peers. That was my path to understanding their (your) inscrutability.

Alan Turing had his friend Christopher as young child - the kindly boy who explained the other people to Alan. I had my mother. And my cousin Kate. And Brooke. And Michelle. And all the girls and women who've served as my social crutch these long years. It's no wonder then that I like girls and Turing, well, favored the other flavor. At least not to me. It's always seemed to me an arbitrary choice and I get irritated when people assert that they're all "born this way" and have no control over it. Perhaps this is true for some, but certainly some of us have a choice or are subconciously driven by experiences.

Not having a live Turing to experiment on, the question of him falling on the autism spectrum will likely remain forever controversial. Nevertheless, Cumberbatch plays it so. And so history will be forever colored by that portrayal.