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SteelMaiden
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10 May 2015, 2:47 pm

Did Einstein really show autistic traits? If so, what were they?

And was he highly intelligent at everything or were his skills in small areas?


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B19
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10 May 2015, 8:17 pm

Einstein is very well identified as a visual thinker. Visual thinkers are far more common on the spectrum:

he wrote to a colleague:

"The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be 'voluntarily' reproduced and combined. .... This combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought before there is any connection with logical construction in words or other kinds of signs which can be communicated to others". (Albert Einstein in a letter to Jacques Hadamard).

No-one has ever been good at everything. No-one would ever have the time to be good at everything, to some extent or another we all have to specialise. His thinking "outside of the square" and aptitude for science are also consistent with being on the spectrum, and his relatively weak social skills - the picture is relatively suggestive that he was HFA.