Do Intelligent People Automatically Fall on the Spectrum?

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Snowy Owl
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26 Nov 2011, 2:46 pm

According to the doctor who diagnosed me, AS has nothing to do with high intelligence.



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26 Nov 2011, 2:53 pm

CosmicRush wrote:
I actually lately have been theorizing this! I made a post about some of this somewhere on here. I am in 99th Percentile and I have a lot of autistic traits. My teacher who is very very similar to me also thinks so! I try to make other people get interested in what I am but I can't and they care about idiotic social things. I wish we could socially theorize with other people or research or experiment. Not go to some boring movie. To me I do wish I could relate to others because it is terribly lonely. I feel like no one can even understand the concepts I talk about. I have even been correcting my teachers errors lately. I believe you can be average intelligence and fall into autism category but I also believe that being of higher intelligence will put you on the spectrum, you see most of the problems that Aspies and Autistics have seem to be how a normal human being would react to being completely alone and seperated. Now imagine if the whole world was like us? Having deep interests in real things rather than celebrities. I am POSITIVE that Neurotypical would be a diagnosis. You would be terribly looked down upon. But in this world stupid is majority. I also believe autistic people's lives get messed up early on because of their thinking differences. Think about it, your being forced into a broken school system that is made especially for stupid people to learn by means of rote memory rather than understanding. Then the teachers dont even understand their topics now. Its terrible!



Being gifted is associated with social difficulties but that does not make all gifted people autistic.

Also not all NTs are interested in celebrities instead of academic interests. Its not at all that simple. Plenty of NTs are above average intellectually and against the current school system.

Really from your posts I've thought you might be just gifted.



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26 Nov 2011, 3:08 pm

No, most intelligent people are social climbers; their normal to heightened empathy and ability to understand the complex components of others' motivations make them extremely good at it, and their inclinations are toward it.

Intellectuals might tend a bit more Aspie, but most 'intellectuals' are just social climbers. Almost every 'soft' subject in colleges and universities are filled with these babbling social climbers, who are adept at rationalization and half-truths.



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26 Nov 2011, 3:45 pm

The answer is no. Asperger and giftedness (Aka high intelligence) look similar but are completly different things. The asperger interests tend to be more restrictive that those of gifteds. (Even though gifted aspergers may have the broader interests of gifteds without asperger.) Gifteds also don't have the difficulty of aspergers to decode social situations, they may not share the same interests as most peoples, but still they much more naturally understand social cues.

More so, the asperger stereotype do tend toward having some interests generally see among the gifteds, but it's a stereotype.


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26 Nov 2011, 3:53 pm

I am "gifted" so I am interested in knowing whether I have Asperger's too or just ADHD+gifted (or possibly who knows what else).



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26 Nov 2011, 3:55 pm

I know some NTs with high IQ and got all A's in their exams and were good at focusing on their studying and were good with concentrating taking in a lot of facts and information. But these NTs don't have traits of Autism, but they all seem to have a shyness to them, or they seem like really nice people. My uncle is a very intelligent NT. When I was a small child I used to think he made the world, because he knew everything about it, and I have learnt a lot from him. But he is a very nice person, and is very trusting. You just know he has got a really sweet-natured trait in him. So people who I've met in my life who is more intelligent than average seem like really nice people, and are studious and serious, and they go for other nice people, not popularity.

I am an Aspie, but I believe I am just under average with intelligence, no kidding. I feel on the level of most people, or I even feel that most people know more than I do. Like if I'm stuck on trying to add something up, I usually ask someone and they usually give me the answer just like that, or they would work it out on a piece of paper - what I can't even do, not even when I was at school. I seem to know more about social knowledge than I do intellectual knowledge.


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26 Nov 2011, 4:06 pm

How can you tell the difference between Asperger's and Gifted? I have traits that could fit either lol. I don't know my official IQ as it varies depending on my mood and if I get bored half way through taking the test lol. Also staring at tests that use a lot of visual patterns or 3D shapes hurts my eyes due to convergence problems, in a similar way to 3D movies or those magic posters (cannot see either as they rely on binocular vision and my binocular vision does not work properly). I go boggle eyed staring at them and it gives me a headache. However I was an A average at University and I have never revised for an exam in my life for example, so I would not consider my intelligence to be low. It might suggest gifted given that I tend to be good at other things as well.

But I cannot socialise well at all which suggests Asperger's. Either that or I am a highly introverted NT with underdeveloped social skills because socialising for the sake of it bores me. I do, however, love spending time with people I share a bond with. I just can't stand pointless chitty chat with strangers (in the form of small talk or gossip anyway...a good interesting conversation about a subject of interest is a different matter) lol.

I have physical sensitivities and am overloaded by too much stimuli. I am also emotionally sensitive. I also become obsessive about my hobbies, often to the exclusion of everything else.

I can only conclude I am weird at this moment in time as I don't know what, if anything, I have lol.



Last edited by bumble on 26 Nov 2011, 4:18 pm, edited 3 times in total.

donnie_darko
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26 Nov 2011, 4:07 pm

No, that's ridiculous. (no offense)



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26 Nov 2011, 4:49 pm

CosmicRush wrote:
I actually lately have been theorizing this! I made a post about some of this somewhere on here. I am in 99th Percentile and I have a lot of autistic traits. My teacher who is very very similar to me also thinks so! I try to make other people get interested in what I am but I can't and they care about idiotic social things. I wish we could socially theorize with other people or research or experiment. Not go to some boring movie. To me I do wish I could relate to others because it is terribly lonely. I feel like no one can even understand the concepts I talk about. I have even been correcting my teachers errors lately. I believe you can be average intelligence and fall into autism category but I also believe that being of higher intelligence will put you on the spectrum, you see most of the problems that Aspies and Autistics have seem to be how a normal human being would react to being completely alone and seperated. Now imagine if the whole world was like us? Having deep interests in real things rather than celebrities. I am POSITIVE that Neurotypical would be a diagnosis. You would be terribly looked down upon. But in this world stupid is majority. I also believe autistic people's lives get messed up early on because of their thinking differences. Think about it, your being forced into a broken school system that is made especially for stupid people to learn by means of rote memory rather than understanding. Then the teachers dont even understand their topics now. Its terrible!


I'm 99th percentile too.

Anyway, giftness and AS are different things, but they do occur together frequently. That does not mean that all aspies are gifted or savants, neither does it mean all gifted people are autistic. Some are, most probably aren't.


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26 Nov 2011, 4:56 pm

Bunk. Most of the people I work with are geniuses, and I know maybe one or two people in my faculty that may be aspies or HFA, the most notable other than myself is not a genius. Any social isolation I would associate with intellectuals is not due to social impairment as much as lack of common interests with "normal" people.



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26 Nov 2011, 4:58 pm

idlewild wrote:
I'm trying to decide if I want a diagnosis and I spoke to a friend in who's worked in HR for many years for advice. Apart from the professional input she gave me, she told me she has a sister that works in special education who told her that almost anyone with higher than average intelligence falls on the autistic spectrum. Do you think this is true?

There is no reason to believe such hearsay - unsubstantiated claims by a sister of a friend are no better than apocryphal rumors or outright "bunk".

However, in the interest of determining the truth of the matter, would you be able to have your sister's friend explain (1) why there seems to be many not-so-intelligent people on the spectrum; (2) what her degree is in; and (3) what references she cites to support her claim.

Maybe your sister (or her friend) was just trying to make you feel better by telling you something that only seems to be true.

Maybe your sister's friend "works in special education" as an aid or orderly, and not as a teacher or therapist. Someone who only prepares meals for Special-Ed students may have little or no understanding of Autistic Spectrum Disorders in the first place, and is therefore unqualified to make the claim that all intelligent people are on the spectrum.


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26 Nov 2011, 5:03 pm

donnie_darko wrote:
No, that's ridiculous. (no offense)


This ^^

And it's not a reflection on you. It is a ridiculous claim on the part of the HR person. Whoever it was ought to read a lot more about things before they make statements like that.

You can confidently file that piece of info in your circular file. It's garbage.


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26 Nov 2011, 5:04 pm

StonedMoonie wrote:
No, most intelligent people are social climbers; their normal to heightened empathy and ability to understand the complex components of others' motivations make them extremely good at it, and their inclinations are toward it.

Intellectuals might tend a bit more Aspie, but most 'intellectuals' are just social climbers. Almost every 'soft' subject in colleges and universities are filled with these babbling social climbers, who are adept at rationalization and half-truths.


True. Social climbing is one of the things that gifted NTs do well. Years ago, when I started my IT career, I understood that I couldn't do social climbing.The company that hired me employs only gifted graduates and most of them are gifted NTs. I was socially "dumb" and I was perfectly aware of this, instead I found technology solutions more easily than others. I decided to give up with social strategies and competition because I was too stressed and I focused on my tecnical skills. It worked.



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26 Nov 2011, 5:44 pm

Some people like to say "everyone is on the spectrum somewhere". This "all intelligent people fall on the spectrum somewhere" is simply a variation on this.

I think this is a denial of the difficulties faced by people who are indeed on the spectrum. Or a misguided effort to make someone on the spectrum "feel better" about having "something wrong with them".


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26 Nov 2011, 7:47 pm

No. I met a lot of extremely intelligent people when I was a university student in physics (at a U in the top 10 in terms of # of nobel laureates), and few of the students, grad students or profs struck me as being on the spectrum. There were nerdier, more cerebral, and less loutish than average but otherwise seemed normal.



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26 Nov 2011, 8:28 pm

bumble wrote:
How can you tell the difference between Asperger's and Gifted? I have traits that could fit either lol. I don't know my official IQ as it varies depending on my mood and if I get bored half way through taking the test lol. Also staring at tests that use a lot of visual patterns or 3D shapes hurts my eyes due to convergence problems, in a similar way to 3D movies or those magic posters (cannot see either as they rely on binocular vision and my binocular vision does not work properly). I go boggle eyed staring at them and it gives me a headache. However I was an A average at University and I have never revised for an exam in my life for example, so I would not consider my intelligence to be low. It might suggest gifted given that I tend to be good at other things as well.

But I cannot socialise well at all which suggests Asperger's. Either that or I am a highly introverted NT with underdeveloped social skills because socialising for the sake of it bores me. I do, however, love spending time with people I share a bond with. I just can't stand pointless chitty chat with strangers (in the form of small talk or gossip anyway...a good interesting conversation about a subject of interest is a different matter) lol.

I have physical sensitivities and am overloaded by too much stimuli. I am also emotionally sensitive. I also become obsessive about my hobbies, often to the exclusion of everything else.

I can only conclude I am weird at this moment in time as I don't know what, if anything, I have lol.



Gifted vs Asperger's vs 2e (twice exceptional, gifted + disabled in a manner that intergeres with normal schooling) can be a really hard distinction to make. There are a noticable number of things findable on the topoc on google.