This article is intended for fans of The Big Bang Theory TV Show. I assume you’ve all seen and loved the episodes, so here are my thoughts about Sheldon Cooper’s “strange manners”.

Although the show producers deny the possibility that they targeted Sheldon’s behaviour to match the one of an Asperger, I found many similarities with the autistic spectrum in his way of living, reacting, speaking.

7 signs that make me wonder if Sheldon has autistic traits

1. Aspergers can have difficulty understanding what people around them think and feel.
   Sheldon usually dishes his thoughts to the persons around him without sugar-coating unpleasant things. “Please don’t tell me that your hopeless infatuation isn’t evolving into pointless jealousy.” (S01E03).
2. Aspergers generally prefer sameness.
   Sheldon needs to do certain things a particular day of the week (laundry night, comic book night, Halo night, etc) or in a particular way (he asks that his delivery food be prepared with lots of details and ingredients diverging from the actual restaurant recipe, and makes a fuss if it is not just the way he wants it).
3. Aspergers have difficulties with transitions or changes.
   Sheldon does not want to sit elsewhere than his prefered spot on the couch (S01E01). He does not want to change restaurants, what he eats there, or who is serving him his meal.
4. Aspergers can be preoccupied with a particular subject of interest.
   Sheldon has very precise points of view about physics, technology or comic books. For example, he shares with Penny his thoughts about Superman and his method of flight (S01E02). He also explains his friend that, should he succeed in inventing a time machine in the future, he would have already came back in time to give himself the solution.
5. Some Aspergers have obsessive compulsive disorders.
   When noticing that her new neighbourg Penny has a very messy appartment, Sheldon cannot resist to break in her flat during the night in order to clean it up (S01E02).
6. Aspergers have difficulties with understanding sarcasm or other kinds of nonliteral language (humour, irony, teasing).
   Sheldon does not understand sarcasm. When Leonard says that he should show a sarcasm sign when he jokes, Sheldon seriously replies: “You have a sarcasm sign?!” (S01E02).
7. Aspergers have an atypical use of language such as “verbosity, abrupt transitions, literal interpretations and miscomprehension of nuance, use of metaphor meaningful only to the speaker, auditory perception deficits, unusually pedantic, formal or idiosyncratic speech, and oddities in loudness, pitch, intonation, prosody, and rhythm“.
   Sheldon’s speech is quite pedantic. He refers to a lot of scientific information and is usually very concerned about precision or formalism.

I have of course not been the only one to wonder about Sheldon’s position on the autistic spectrum. As the creators of the show admitted taking some people they knew as models for Sheldon (I don’t remember where I read that, darn!), perhaps those persons also had Asperger – a high-functioning form of ASD (Autistic Spectrum Disorder).

Even if it was not their intent, I am glad that the creators of this show unwillingly gave us such a lovable – and widely loved – character as Sheldon, thus opening a wider door to autism in pop culture.