Any unintelligent aspies here?

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The topic is descriptive of a defeatist, those people who rate themselves with IQ or term themselves as intelligent or unintelligent.

Oh yes I bloody hate having to rush, it can stress me out and ruin my focus. And they don't factor stress into IQ test results. Even when a deadline is perfectly doable or obviously soft, I often can't get it out of my head. Give me an infinite amount of time, and I could achieve near miracles. With maths it's complicated, I have a love-hate relationship with numbers. It came up when I did the AQ test for my diagnosis, they said "You've got something funny going on with numbers but otherwise you look like an Aspie to us, so we'd better do the full assessment." I've not read many books, they're physically cumbersome and the length of them bothers me, and unless I'm in the right mental state I keep forgetting to translate the words into thoughts.

No special ed for me. How I am at processing speed: 1% compared. Verbal was average and almost 100; my highest. My IQ score was barely above borderline and inconclusive. My psychiatrist at the time predicted it would be borderline, I guess told as a precaution. I wanted to prove him wrong! (This is my 1st adult one).

A few years later, I was given a patterned black/white test after several continuous hours of vocational rehab testing (I was very drained by then). My reading college-level comprehension potential stumped the test examiner and I appeared "not very smart" to her.

Pretty much me, at least I think. My IQ was pretty high, varying from top 4 to top 1%. I guess that's good. But when I can't learn basic skills with this "intelligence" such as social communication, word pronunciation, all types math, almost all sports, and others, it really makes me think about what intelligence truly is. If I was "smart" I could pick up those skills. All it is is signals in a person's appearance and behavior, so what makes it so difficult for me? I have a craving for knowledge but I'm still stupid because I have a bunch of useless information that does nothing. Maybe it could make money at least. But who cares about that when I will be forever lonely? I want to be human, not wealthy. My curiosity drives me and internal processes which motivate the world are my primary motivation, but none of this information does anything for me from a physical perspective. I just feel perpetually lonely. I have severe anxiety which is constant and pervasive, yet an intelligent person would know how to come up with therapies for themselves. I struggle with all these internal emotions constantly from even the slightest things such as a weird door not closing. An intelligent person would understand that it wasn't measured or cut properly, and that the doorknob isn't working, but I just get angry at the damn door.

Sorry for so much randomly being vented out. I don't care what you think of this, I just want to type it because it feels good to complain to a bunch of anonymous people.

Like Scorpius14 and ToughDiamond, I too hate time limits. They are very stressing.

Why not to defeat btw.

I have always scored in the low 90's or low 100's online but I was told in real life I was very smart and above average but I have never seen those testing results so I do not believe it. The highest I have ever seen was 99 and before that I always scored below normal. But I have troubles believing I am that smart because people who are very smart do college and get degrees and have real jobs. I work uneducated job so I appear stupid.

Other aspies seem to score above average on online tests so that always made me feel bad and my therapist told me maybe I really am just average and it was a hard realization about how parents can exaggerate their kids intelligence and their abilities and give them more credit. Sometimes parents don't even see their own kids problems and view them as their personality traits or just as who they are because they love them so much so to them their kid is perfect. My mom even told me how gifted I was but I learned being gifted just means having a very high IQ and being in advanced classes, that wasn't me. Also parents will say their kid is gifted just because they are a little head or advanced in reading or math so they call them gifted. I can't believe everything parents say about their kids anymore and I always love it when they talk how bad their kid is and how sociopath they are regarding their behavior problem and saying what a bully their child is and how abusive they are and then they backpeddle saying how wonderful their kids is. I just roll my eyes at that and think "hey you say bad things about your kid saying how bad they are, that is the first thing I take so don;t even try and tell me how good they are."

I failed years 8, 9 and 12 in high school. I didn't really graduate either. I was told to get a job because university would be too difficult for me.

Fast forward to when I was 34 and I went to uni and got a Bachelor of Psychology. Statistics was the hardest, I barely passed that.

Now I'm doing Java programming and I think I will need extra help because I'm finding it too hard.

There's far to much emphasis on IQ tests.

Sometimes I'm smart and sometimes I completely miss the point if what's going on.

I wouldn't like to call myself unintelligent but other people might.x

. Sounds similar to myself. I'm bordering on imbecile in some facets of education, and in some ways when it comes to life skills. Spent several minutes trying to figure out how to turn my girlfriends kettle on at hers because it was different to mine. :0/ Many things I'm staggeringly docile. At school I was at the bottom for maths, history top class. Huge Scatter pattern between certain skills. Constantly asking for help from friends for things that people can work out easily when it comes to to tech etc Then I have friends who have attained high educational standards asking advice about various subjects. I'm like a broken computer that's buffering most of the time but when it's not buffering and being a pain it comes up with some decent useful information.

I can relate extremely closely. I am skilled in different areas and it's really sporadic. I am horrible at things I know little about while it seems like most people can just pick things up. Also, I am a terrible student. I have to teach myself everything I've ever known, things like certain knots, economics, swimming, and cooking. Can't even start with math. I sit there in a restaurant sometimes spending like 30 minutes trying to figure out how to do a tip, and then I went to a gas station twice wondering why no gas would come out. It's because the nozzle has to be firmly in the tank. But I was so nervous that people behind me were wondering why I was taking so long. I don't do well under pressure, and I don't do well with people in general, but I get lonely at the same time. I am constantly asking people for help but they seem to just naturally be able to figure it out. Other areas I know so much more than others. I don't even know if an "IQ" test can really measure our specific intelligence, because we're all so varied and extreme in our areas of experience.

http://mensa-romania.ro/testari-mensa/test-online/


Looks like I wouldn't be a genius in Romania.

Translation: Conform testului, IQ-ul dvs. este estimat la 75.
According to the test, your IQ is estimated at 75.

Rezultatul corespunde unui scor procentual de 5, adică 5% din populație are un IQ mai mic de 75.
The result corresponds to a percentage score of 5, ie 5% of the population has an IQ of less than 75.




Of course spiky profiles (high/very high verbal and low/very low non-verbal)and valid total IQ scores don't go together well.


It's a fairly typical non-verbal result for me .

I've generally scored above average on IQ tests, but I don't put a lot of stock in them. Not everyone tests in the same way and so two people who'd be equal otherwise can get wildly different results.

I wasn't in special-ed per se, but I was in an "alternative" school for those who had difficulties with regular high school. Students who weren't necessarily stupid, but who didn't really fit in the cookie-cutter method of education or had other reasons why high school wasn't the place to be. It was self-driven learning. There were teachers, but there were no real structured classes. It definitely helped.

When I was in 'regular' school there wasn't really any modified lessons. It was one lesson for 20 or 30+ students. If you didn't learn well in the manner it was being taught it was 'tough luck'.

If the subject wasn't something I was absolutely interested in the entire year was a struggle just to get passing grades.

You may feel you are unintelligent, however having enough self insight to be aware of your short comings is a gift that not many people have, and gives you the potential to improve on those short comings. You can look back and think "Oh, I could have done this," or "I should have thought of this,". There are people in the world who don't even have the capacity for that kind of self insight, and thus, can never really improve themselves.

It may be that the root of your issue is that you are just not quick with pragmatism. You can consider multiple options but just don't do it quickly.

If you wish, you can have a learning assessment (formal IQ test) done. This can show you your strengths and weaknesses and identify things like learning disabilities...though personally, I like to call them "learning differences" because most people are not unable to learn something, they just need it taught to them a little differently.

In my field, I constantly have to learn. Looking back, I picked up things much quicker as a child, however as an adult who is theoretically past their intellectual prime, I am able to think of things in more different, yet equally correct ways than I was able to when I was a child.

IQ tests have a sub section where one is presented with a sequence of numbers and must find the next number in the sequence. I used to do horribly on this subsection but I caught a glimpse of one such sequence not very long ago and I suddenly saw the pattern in it almost instantly. My younger, very literal self, was not pragmatic enough to see the sequence any other way that a linear sequence of numbers, and tried to find the next number in the sequence arithmetically, by comparing two successive numbers, and would try different combinations of adding, subtracting, dividing and multiplying...things I was not particularly good at, until it made sense, and it often never did.

However there was an entirely different way to approach the sequence, which my adult mind saw. Rather than leave it in it's linear form, I could organize them in two columns , and the pattern arose in numbers diagonal to each other in that configuration.

Example: Given the sequence 1,2, 3, 4, 5, 5, 8, 9, 14, 13, what two numbers come after 13?

Younger me had no idea.
Older me saw that if I rearranged them....

1 2
3 4
5 5
8 9
14 13

The 1 plus the 4 makes the 5 in the left column and the 2 plus the 3 is the 5 in the right column.
The 3 plus the 5 in the right column is the 8, the 4 plus the 5 in the left column is the 9.
The 5 in the left column plus the 9 is the 14. The 5 in the right column plus the 8 is the 13.

So for the next two numbers...

8+13 = 21 and it goes in the left column, and 9+14 = 23 and it goes in the right column.

The full sequence is 1,2, 3, 4, 5, 5, 8, 9, 14, 13, 21, 23

I wouldn’t go as far as saying IQ is everything. Look up studies on grit and the growth mindset and you’ll see hardwork goes farther in life. There are geniuses out there who get stuck with things like a drug addiction and unemployment because of their laziness and lack of life skills.

When I was a kid, my IQ got officially tested along with a whole list of other psychological assessments after my teachers said they noticed something weird about me. My IQ was around 110. About every major area I got was average except my nonverbal intelligence was to the level of genius. As an 11 year old at that time, I was told my nonverbal intelligence was around an 18 year old. Though, my processing speed was almost below average with a little note below saying it likely might be because of my anxiety problems. Then the therapist diagnosed me with Aspergers on which I didn’t really take it seriously until a month ago now in present day.

I got the choice to choose a specialty in Senior High School. I chose Science and Math. In all honesty, I was terrible at it and I still am now. But I picked it because I enjoyed it. I anxiously kept thinking I should have chosen something else, something easier. But now I think I made the right decision. Obsession and interest would make up for it someday.

My teachers tell me I pick up things easily when I tutor alone with them though. It’s more that my noise sensitivity is strong enough that I’d often have to leave class or else I’ll get a shutdown or a meltdown soon. Eh. Maybe. Though, a more honest friend who helps me with lessons often facepalms at my mistakes so who knows how reliable these teachers are. Though, I’m also pretty sure that my teachers are much more patient than my friend. Haha.

Heh. Well, at least it’s fun. I’ll give it that.

I don’t need to be better than everyone to enjoy it, do I?

Hmmm.....for me, hard work is futile without due diligence, and it's interesting how many politicians, employers etc. sing the praises of hard work without including this caveat. I'm also rather fond of the adage "don't work harder, work smarter." I agree that hard work tends to be an essential part of the recipe for getting things done, but I don't think the human race has put enough effort into solving that sad state of affairs. Who wants their working lives always to be hard? Considering the advances in technology that we've had over the centuries, why aren't we all living the leisured life of Riley by now? Why do we always allow work to expand into the time available to it?

I think Chronos' IQ-test number puzzle may point to something........even at my age I immediately floundered on that one, and would never have solved it without the explanation. What interests me is that once I saw the explanation, I felt that if only I'd known that a scheme of that form was a common feature of these IQ tests, I could have done better. I was assuming the sequence of numbers followed some straightforward mathematical progression like the ones I was taught at school, such as 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 etc. So it seems a person could learn to do better at IQ tests by studying the form of the questions - rather like cryptic crosswords, where the uninitiated might never guess what the heck they were about, but once they'd seen a few worked examples, they might get the point and be able to solve some of them. Thing is, last time I looked, IQ tests were supposed to measure the absolute ability of the brain to find patterns and solve problems - practice and being privy to "inside information" wasn't supposed to affect the results. In other words, IQ is supposed to be independent of education. Still, I suppose it's understandable that if one insists that a thing is real when it's only a hypothetical construct, and designs a test for it, one will end up with a flawed mess that can be discredited pretty easily.