Why both geniuses & retardates seem autistic

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Actually I may have misunderstood you wogaboo, as you didn't mention a lack of subconscious. Do you believe those with autism have more consciousness and less subconsciousness, or only more consciousness?

In it's simplest form: The conscious sub-conscious....


TheSunAlsoRises

I think they have less subconsciousness because they have more consciousness. Thought processes that might be largely subconscious in neurotypicals such as social interactions and physical coordination, become conscious in the autistic and this slows them down and causes mistakes and awkwardness.

I believe the evolution of consciousness was crucial in making humans so intelligent, but some problems are still best solved through subs-conscious processes and the outsourcing of these problems to the conscious mind typically results in social and physical awkwardness, and in extreme cases, global retardation.

So I believe more consciousness makes humans smarter until it starts impeding subconsciousness, and then it starts making people dumber, first just in social and motor behaviors, and eventually in all areas.

So that's why both geniuses and retardates are often autistic; both have elevated consciousness, however the former are only elevated to the OPTIMUM amount, while the latter are so elevated they can not function.

Just my opinion, of course.

I also suspect schizophrenia might be caused by too much subconsciousness. Most people only have hallucinations when we dream (a subconscious state), but in schizophrenics, this subconscious state seems to invade the conscious mind.

Since high IQ people are presumably more conscious than low IQ people, I hypothesize that high IQ parents are more likely to have autistic kids while low IQ parents are more likely to have schizophrenic kids. In other words, autism is a disease caused by high IQ genes and schizophrenia is a disease caused by low IQ genes.

Just my opinion of course; I could be completely wrong, since I'm not even remotely an expert

No to discredit you but there's a Nobel prize mathematician & scientist that's schizophrenic. His name is John Nash.
I agree more with your autism conciousness theory and I'd like to see more postings when you find more about it

I am aware of John Nash; I am even watched the movie about him. However the existence of a few brilliant schizophrenics doesn't debunk the possibility that schizophrenia more commonly strikes in families at that lower end of the IQ scale.

However both of my theories are just wild speculation at this point.

Einstein has a schizophrenic son.

Well perhaps the secret to einstein's creativity was that he was the rare high IQ person who came from a subconscious family. If most high IQ people are very conscious, the occasional high IQ subconscious person will have insights his even brighter colleagues miss because creativity might originate in the subconscious mind.

Because schizophrenia must be caused by Freudian processes, not the fact that their brain chemistry is abnormal. Dreaming/REM sleep is an unusual biochemical state. So is schizophrenia. It has nothing to do with the "subconscious." There isn't really such a thing as the "subconscious." Rather, "consciousness" is merely what your brain sends to the higher-level reasoning areas, like the PFC, making you become "aware" of something. Just because we might not process something "consciously" doesn't mean that more primitive parts of our brain aren't creating the response or action.

And as for schizophrenics having a low IQ, that is just insulting. Not only is there the aforementioned example of John Nash, but IQ has absolutely nothing to do with schizophrenia or its symptoms. On the contrary, lots of people with higher IQs are left-handed and/or have a neuropsych disorder. All three seem to be correlated. Keep in mind the phrase "there's no great genius without some sort of madness." As neuroscience expands, we are finding that to be more and more true.

On the other hand, the reason true creative genius might be so rare is that it's very rare to find high IQ and madness in the same individual, so in the astonishingly rare moments these 2 conditions exist in the same mind, we get Einstein level insights.

Creative genius and madness are rare? Look up research by Jamison and others that show how many writers, artists, musicians, and other "creative" individuals have some form of mood disorder, particularly bipolar disorder. And just think of how many geniuses of the past are nowadays suspected of having had Asperger's. The fact is that the line between "giftedness" and "disorder" is a very thin one, and often, the two are interlinked. High IQ and neuropsychiatric disorder occurring together is not a rare event whatsoever.

You're lumping a lot if different thinks together.

Some studies find that schizophrenia more commonly strikes low IQ people:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9403903


HOWEVER, I think when the rare high IQ schizophrenish person comes along, he or she will be especially creative, because the bizarre thoughts that cause delusions in low IQ schizophrenics, will cause original insights in a high IQ schizophrenic.

Here's a study making this very point:


http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/200 ... ivity.html

You can't go by studies that test the IQs of schizophrenics. Lots of neuropsych disorders cause lowering of IQ scores during active phase of illness due to executive functioning problems and such. The IQ of a schizophrenic post-illness onset will undoubtedly be lower than it would if that individual never became ill. And IQ is an important factor in the prognosis of someone with a neuropsych disorder in general. And I'm reading abstracts of recent studies of schizophrenia and IQ on PubMed, and of the results that find lower IQ, it tends to be either in early-onset or more severe cases or what I said above (normal IQ in prodromal state but lowering after neurocognitive changes during acute illness).

Last edited by OddDuckNash99 on 24 Aug 2012, 11:18 pm, edited 3 times in total.

I think if you are going to look at how many creative individuals have some form of mood disorder, you also need to look at how many people with some form of mood disorder are creative individuals (I don't know the answer, by the way).

Names of famous people have been brought up to argue against this idea. However, that ignores the (potentially) vast numbers of non-famous people who might follow the theory's trend better than these examples. They are famous because they are outliers, so you would expect they wouldn't necessarily fit the mold of a generalising theory.

Good article on intelligence : http://216.224.180.96/~prom/oldsite/art ... iders.html

Many studies have investigated both sides of this coin to find that creativity and mood disorders are correlated in many ways. I'm not saying that all creative geniuses are mentally ill, nor am I saying that all people with neuropsychiatric disorders are geniuses. What I am saying is that the fact that the two often are linked cannot be denied.