An Ode to Autistic Hyper-focus

In which I info-dump about binging Limitless for the umpteenth time because I can

Limitless is a sci-fi show that only lasted one season on CBS, back in 2015. It was based on the Bradley Cooper movie of the same name from a few years before, which itself was adapted from the novel The Dark Fields by Alan Glynn. The premise centers around a street drug called NZT (MDT in the book) that drastically enhances cognition—perfect memory, heightened pattern recognition, intense focus—all the trope-y genius mind stuff. The movie follows Cooper’s character as he uses NZT to improve his life and [***SPOILER ALERT***] eventually become a senator.

The show picks up from there. Cooper appears in a few episodes (he also executive produced), but the main story follows a new character, Brian Finch, who is brought into the FBI as a consultant while using the drug.

On the surface, it plays like a fairly typical high-concept procedural. Brian helps solve cases using NZT, there’s a mystery arc running in the background, and the usual network-genre beats. But under all that, the show is doing something else—something far more structurally consistent than most shows of its kind even try for. It’s stylized, sure, a bit absurd and goofy, and sometimes predictable—but the characters are remarkably realistic in their depth of narrative and emotional integrity. The storylines build on themselves. There’s a deep kind of moral and cognitive continuity that makes everything feel grounded, even when the premise gets a little wobbly.

I’ve probably binged Limitless at least once a year since I first found it on Netflix some time before the pandemic. One of those times, it wasn’t on any streaming service I had—so I bought it. I didn’t really think about that at the time—just one of those decisions that makes sense when you know you’re not going to be able to let go of this thing—whatever it is—until you entertain it. If you’re reading this, chances are you know exactly what I’m talking about.

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Superman and the Death and Life of Moral Gravity

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Anyway, now I’m watching it again. And I still love it. It helps that I have the memory retention of a goldfish, but even when I do clearly remember what’s going to happen next, I still need to see it unfold—the relationships, the characters, the moral structures, the tensions. I’m realizing there’s something I’ve been recognizing in this show for years but didn’t have the language for until after I realized I was autistic. The way it’s written, the way the characters think and interact and struggle with alignment—it’s not just interesting to me. It feels familiar. And not just in a comfort show kind of way, but in a this is shaped remarkably like my own brain kind of way.

It’s the structure. The recursion. The emotional integrity beneath all the stylization. It’s the fact that I see myself in this show—in Brian, in Rebecca, in Naz, in Brian’s father—not in some metaphorical or exaggerated sense, but in the demonstrable shape of their minds.

There’s something deeply relatable for me happening here. Brian Finch doesn’t read like a neurotypical character navigating extraordinary circumstances. He reads like someone whose cognition was already monotropic—focused, recursive, patterned through emotional and moral structure—and NZT doesn’t fundamentally change that. It amplifies it. It doesn’t give him a new personality. It simply clears the bottleneck. And what emerges isn’t a tactical genius or manipulative strategist but someone who still cares, deeply and relentlessly, and who processes complexity by pulling every thread until it holds together.

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The Shape of Misalignment

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That’s what I love about him. Not that he’s quirky or smart or relatable in the usual ways, but because he’s inherently recursive. Because his internal moral system doesn’t pivot with external expectations. Because when others say “we solved the case,” he says, “then why does it still feel wrong?” Because even on NZT, he doesn’t try to overpower people. He tries to understand them. His intelligence doesn’t outpace his empathy—it runs through it. When he lies, it’s not to win. It’s because he’s been placed in a recursive bind, a structural dilemma where every available action carries moral weight. And when he breaks rules, it’s not out of disregard—it’s because rules, to him, are not final. They’re data. And sometimes, they’re wrong.

There’s an episode early on where he solves the case, or at least everyone thinks he has. But something doesn’t add up. The pattern’s not complete. So even after the “win,” even when everyone else is ready to move on, he can’t. And not in a dramatic, obsessive way. It’s just clear—he literally can’t disengage while the recursion loop is still open. That is exactly what it feels like to be in a monotropic state. To not be able to let something go when your internal model hasn’t settled into alignment. It’s not stubbornness. It’s not compulsion. It’s the felt experience of cognitive dissonance, and it won’t leave until the structure resolves.

There’s another moment in that episode—where Brian’s dad immediately recognizes what’s happening. Not the crime or the plot. The pattern of the FBI using Brian without him realizing it. His dad doesn’t need the details. He just knows how his son’s mind works. He sees how eager Brian is, how morally driven, how unlikely he is to question the power structure if the task itself feels meaningful. His dad sees the manipulation coming long before Brian does—not because he’s more suspicious, but because he knows the shape of his son’s integrity. He knows Brian is vulnerable to being used precisely because his moral alignment runs so deep. That’s the kind of emotional pattern recognition that’s rarely portrayed with this kind of structural clarity.

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Why Integrity Sometimes Hurts

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And that’s what I keep coming back to. The characters in this show aren’t written as “normal people with interesting jobs.” They’re written like people who operate on internal structure. Rebecca Harris, Brian’s FBI handler, is navigating a moral collapse she doesn’t fully understand. Her father, a cop, died under circumstances that forced her to start questioning the very system she built her life around. And you can feel her reorienting in real time. Her moral compass isn’t broken—it’s mid-restructuring, tangled up in trauma and institutional betrayal. She doesn’t shift or trust without a reason to. But once she starts to see the shape of something? She follows it with just as much recursive precision as Brian does. Their relationship works not because they’re opposites, but because their cognition harmonizes in a way neither of them has the language to name.

Even the humor in the show feels like it came from a monotropic brain. The absurd fantasy sequences—similar to those Scrubs was known for—aren’t just jokes. They’re recursive elaborations. They take a single thought and follow it all the way down a logically reverberant rabbit hole, no matter how ridiculous it gets. That kind of humor doesn’t sprawl—it focuses. It exaggerates—expands—from the inside. It’s what it looks like when you think so hard about something that it turns into a visual metaphor before you realize you’re doing it. It’s not performative. It’s just how the brain processes.

There’s an episode later in the series that explores synesthesia, and while it’s stylized, it still handles the concept with surprising structural realism. Brian effectively teaches himself to experience synesthesia by intentionally reinforcing cross-modal associations on NZT. It’s not magic. It’s not treated like a superpower. It’s treated like something structurally plausible—an extension of how his mind already works. That kind of modeling—where an altered cognitive experience is treated as real and embodied, not mystical—is wonderfully relatable. And when you’ve lived with a brain that forms connections like that naturally, seeing it portrayed with integrity is affirming in a way that is so deeply relatable I feel compelled to info-dump about it in a Substack post.

Of course, there are other shows and movies that do this. Scrubs, again. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Prison Break. Napoleon Dynamite, in its own awkward way. None of these actually name autism. None of them perform or even imply representation. But they build characters around internal structure—often strange, often rigid, but always coherent. They let those characters be real, not in the sense of broad relatability and realism, but in that of cognitive, emotional, and moral continuity. Not flattening or stereotyping. Just building from the inside out.

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Empathy Is Action, Not Feeling

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So here I am, binging Limitless, again. I can feel myself getting hyper-focused on it—that oh-so-familiar inertial acceleration. Not just enjoying it—tracking it. Writing mental notes. Living within the resonance. Mapping out the recursion.

But I also noticed something else—something I honestly still don’t fully know what to do with. That familiar, reflexive question: Is this okay? Am I wasting time?

I’ve carried that question with me most of my life—because I never really learned how to just enjoy things. I’ve always had to frame it in terms of usefulness. What am I building? What am I learning? How does this connect to something that matters?

And granted, these days I am focused on writing. On making sense of my late autistic realization. On building structural models of cognition and sharing what I’ve learned in ways that can hopefully help others like me. So it makes sense that I’d want to turn this focus into something. But I also know that’s not the only reason I’m doing it. I’m doing it because I love this show. Because the shape of it feels like recognition. Because it feels like something that was never meant for me but somehow still managed to get me. Because I want to.

And maybe that’s the point. That I don’t need to justify it. That this—this depth of focus, this recursive joy, this alignment that loops on itself until it settles—isn’t a detour. It’s not a waste. It’s not something to apologize for. It’s mine. It’s autistic. And frankly, it’s pretty amazing.

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The truth is we don’t need permission to love the things we love. We don’t need to package joy in productivity to make it acceptable. We’re allowed to fall in deep. To loop and revisit and stay as long as it speaks to us. We’re allowed to find resonance in canceled network dramas. We’re allowed to listen to the same song over and over on a four-hour road trip. We’re allowed to follow threads without knowing where they lead. We’re allowed to love things with all the intensity and specificity and recursive tenderness our minds will allow.

And if that’s not useful—who cares? I’m reminding myself of that tonight, as I continue my current and certainly not last binge of Limitless. Because I want to. Because I can. Because it means something to me. ∞

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