Sherlock Holmes was NSAutistic?

Not a new proposition but maybe a new way of considering it?

Okay, so he’s autistic, he’s bi-polar, he’s depressed, he’s Asperger’s, he’s social anxiety; he’s a lot of things.

Okay, so he notices everything.  That’s a given, he’ll notice the mud on your shoes and the boogers in your nose and the texture of your hair.  But that’s not all, in order to find out everything about you he has to observe and deduce everything about you and everyone else in the room and everything in the room – always and everywhere.  There is so much information pouring into his senses constantly that he would literally lose his mind and go insane.

Let’s say he doesn’t, let’s say he’s a high-functioning autistic who can actually absorb and process all of this.

The problem becomes one of signal-to-noise ratios.

They say with the CIA and the NSA that all it takes is one attack getting through.  They can win 999 times but if even 1 gets through then it is catastrophic failure.  Problem is that how are they to know which threats are real, which are just words, and what bits of intel are pertinent and what is the time window for their relevance.  People like Holmes because he’s smart and they think he never loses and is never wrong.  This is patently untrue but let’s say he’s aiming for that 99.9%.  How the fuck is he supposed to determine what is a clue (signal) out of everything that happens ever (noise)?  How could he ever possibly know that the length of that man’s nose is predicative of a potential genetic connection to that woman he saw 6 weeks ago who was at that party where the waiter was serving White Russians which was the clue he needed to find the missing jewels?  How does he provide enough evidence that would satisfy the lawyers in the FBI that it was worth trying the case?

So there are some fairly common connections between Holmes and the 3-letter abbreviations.  It’s fun at first because he’s not a cop, he’s better than a cop and can do things police can’t, follow leads they can’t, but how at the end of the day can he overcome the pitfalls facing the feds?  In the end, he’s got similar strengths and weaknesses, a lot of the same moral/ethical questions, and suddenly becomes much more complicated than 1 really clever detective.

Just something to think about…

-Kryptosfan