How We Experience


After seeing a Tweet about Battlestar Galactica earlier today, I've been wondering a lot about how people with Tourette's Syndrome experience different forms of entertainment. I know I've read a bunch of tweets/blogs/articles in which Tourette's patients describe having tics that are highly susceptible to suggestion. Bad actors nearby may repeatedly say a bad word, knowing that the person with Tourette's might not be able to control whether or not he repeats it. I know a kid in the fifth grade who recognized my arm-flinging tics would start doing it, understanding that I'd have a hard time controlling myself. I wonder too if that same susceptibility to external stimuli also influences how we react to tv shows, movies, and video games (I'm leaving books off that list because even though we don't control the content, we surely control the pace at which that content enters our brains when we read). My wife and I watched "Ant-Man and the Wasp" last night (spoiler alert: they should have called it "The Wasp and Ant-Man"), and I noticed that I was ticcing pretty steadily during the action scenes and during the movie's climax. I wonder if that's just because the normal, baseline amount of stimulation causes me to tic, or because TS patients maybe experience these stimuli more intensely. If anyone asks you what I want for Christmas, tell them all I want is to swap places with a neurotypical person for like a day so I have a baseline for these questions!

I also wonder a lot about how our learned vocabulary restrains our ability to express the different ways a person with neurodiversions might experience the world around them. Like, there's no objective scale to measure how much joy a person feels when Will Smith punches that alien in "Independence Day" and yells "Welcome to Earth!", or how sad a person feels during that whole montage at the beginning of "Up" that just goes to show how well the sociopaths at Pixar have learned to weaponize our emotions. Are we, as Tourette's patients, maybe experiencing media a little differently than the people around us? I find myself wishing I could comprehend even the basics of statistics so I could enter a research field and just find these answers on my own. Alas, dear reader, I must leave it to you! How do you feel your Tourette's impacts the way you experience TV, movies, video games, and music? My inquiring mind wants to know!

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