High intelligence Vs low functioning capability

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I thought about putting this in the members forum, but might be more appropriate here.
Apologies for the post-flooding at the moment, but my autistic stuff has got about 10 times worse since I started my new job so I'm looking for feedback on it all.
Everyone who knows me describes me as "intelligent." Along with "cold" and "intense" it's one of the most common descriptors used with regard to my character. What I can't understand, but I believe other aspie/HFA folk experience too, is the contradiction of apparently high intelligence coupled with a complete inability to function effectively. What is this???
If I'm so intelligent, why aren't I succeeding in my job? Why am I forgetting how to do very simple things like drive and speak when at work? For all intents and purposes acting like a complete idiot? Why aren't the complexities of work (and admittedly it's a complex job) simple for me if I'm apparently more intelligent than most? It doesn't make sense to me. I associate intelligence with capability, with being able to do things that others would find difficult, to understand, retain and implement information. Right now, I'm acting as if I'm far from intelligent. I'm not noticing things right in front of me, or needing to be told the same information several times. I'm forgetting obvious things and have basically no short-term memory, am unable to multitask, etc. So much so that I may completely stuff up this job. I thought high intelligence translated to a greater ease of functioning. How can a person be apparently intelligent but unable to function so completely?

There's a point where you can be so extremely intelligent that you can't function. Having the knowledge and applying it are two different abilities. To have an extreme of one, you may lack in the other. It's why Neurotypicals function so well, they have an equal amount of both.

That's just what I think, and I could be wrong, but someone more knowledgable will probably give you a better answer.

Having the knowledge is a matter of intelligence. Applying the knowledge is a matter of executive function.

As Dr. Russell Barkley puts it (about ADHD): "You know what to do, but you can't do what you know."

This doesn't even get into shutdowns and losing skills, though.

just-lou, you should read this:

http://everything2.com/user/Zifendorf/writeups/shutdown

And these:

http://www.ironplanner.net/shutdownsand ... utism.html
http://www.autcom.org/articles/ShiftsAndShutdowns.html
http://soeweb.syr.edu/media/documents/2 ... lliams.pdf

My Mom gave me the following advice when going to Catholic Mass. Just do what everyone else does. Her basic point was that you do not need to know what is happening. You just need to imitate the crowd.

My NT son is great at imitating. Thus, he does great in social situations. He simply fakes it until he makes it. My son with autism rarely imitates anyone. As a result, he struggles with managing his behaviors in social situations.

Of course, I realize that my advice is overly simplistic.

Have you talked about autism with your employer?

High Intelligence has nothing to do with ability to reason or to function. ASD will take away my abilities pretty quickly in new situations. If I am scared and subsequently doing poorly with sensory processing, I can barely form a word or hear a word being spoken to me let alone perform a task.

External events, noise, people chatter, unfamiliar settings and/or routines, no new learned routine, crap lighting.
All reasons why a new job would be made or become more difficult for people on the spectrum.
Your abilities to apply what you know are getting buried while you're trying to cope with all this new stuff and you're just not functioning as well as you normally would.

I relate to this. My old man (term of endearment) used ask if I was so smart why I wasn't rich. I would say why, if I am so smart, my life seems to be one failure after another. I have ADD to go with Asperger's, although I'm not sure it should be separate. I think I am experiencing a sort of backlash to my year-old diagnosis. I feel like maybe I'm indulging my Asperger's and maybe wallowing in it. Just lately. I see things like tics that I never noticed before. I think the ADD aspect, the executive function deficit is the most problematic for me. My short term memory seems worse in the last year. I'm fifty-six.
Don't know if this would help, but I would get an IQ test, if you haven't already. I never realized my own high IQ until I was in the USAF and they sent me to language school and started telling me and the other students that we were the top two percent of the air force in intelligence. It helped my self-esteem to be told that, which was huge. When I got out of the air force, going back to school, working part-time, I took the MENSA test, a proctored exam, and scored 153, top one percent. It didn't make any difference to my family, but I am sure it boosted my self-esteem as well as bolstered my college efforts. I wish I had known about ADD and Asperger's in particular. It wasn't until very recently I put together the idea that I got A's in junior college, living at home and taking only two classes at a time, and classes that I was interested in. When I moved on to the four-year college and signed up for a class load enough to draw a GI bill payment, I was over-whelmed and failed. I still felt smart, but I also felt confused and like a failure. Now I think that if I had had a diagnosis and thereby had had help in the form of guidance counseling with regard to my diagnosis and or a mentor or maybe even a secretary, I would have been able to succeed more and fail less.
Now that I am over fifty and have been unemployed, again, for over four years, I have new hope with my diagnosis and the self knowlege that comes with it. I think I have a much better chance of doing well as a work-at-home artist than competing for the crummy jobs for which I am actually qualified.
So get help with the deficits, play to your strengths, and give your self-esteem a boost by owning your high IQ. You may be alone in the world (I mean as a statistical minority), but you are not alone in spirit.

Intelligence and functioning are completely different things. They are not unrelated, high intelligence can assist in functioning and low intelligence can be a detriment. High intelligence does assist in figuring out coping strategies. Ultimately, however, if there is a fundamental problem, there are limits to what intelligence can do. Nothing, no coping strategy, no rational process can completely replace that which is simply not there.

That is the basic problems that Aspies must face. We have a hard time understanding people because we are simply missing something that most people have. We have a hard time managing our time and priorities, because the part of our brains that is supposed to set priorities does not work well. Intelligence can overcome these deficits, to some extent, but these deficits will always be there, and no coping strategy can completely overcome them.

For me, it's about sensory processing, not what most people consider "intelligence" (which is an odd quality that at times I seem to possess a lot of and at times I seem to possess none of). I get most of my information about the world as pure sensory data, not as ideas. And that shapes everything about me, including my difficulty doing a lot of things that most people would find easy. It's a total myth that daily functioning in autism has anything to do with intellect. I don't personally like functioning level terms (because they're too simplistic among many other reasons), but that's why people sometimes call me "low functioning" despite whatever intellect I may have, it's because they see the way I look and interact with things or my ability to do things and they work off of that rather than any other trait. (I don't agree with them, but I can see where they get the idea.)

Yeah. Shutdown did occur to me, but I was avoiding thinking about it, because there's not much I can do about it and it makes me feel numb and stupid, and I end up hating myself for not being able to do things perfectly. I'm a massive perfectionist. Just seems to me that autistics can't do things normal people can do, which is depressing.



Most of the IQ tests I've discounted, as they seem to be 1 - timed which puts pressure on so I can't think properly or 2 - culturally specific. If you're like me and don't have much to do with pop culture (television, games, sayings, etc) then you have no idea about any of these cultural/pop references which are supposed to reflect your intelligence.