Are you smarter than the average nt?
My IQ was tested during a full psychological assessment at a private psychology practice, (luckily the municipality covered the cost!) through an autism services agency. I had an IQ of 133 and my spacial reasoning is in the 99th percentile according to the test. I had average marks in elementary school. Frankly I wish I had an average IQ sometimes because society where I live is about 35 points lower than my IQ.
Dear_one
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Housewives complain about having only children to deal with all day. NTs seem similarly limited to me. I think I'd need serious sedation to stay in a hospital.
It depends what you mean by smart.
As far as school goes, I was a valedictorian once. I don't really know how to study because I've never had to. I still basically don't have to make much of an effort and end up with the highest grades in the class.
But I can't do math after a certain level. It's like starting all over every day.
And I'm socially incompetent.
Have no idea what my iq is.
In school I was always told how I am really intelligent, and would do great if only I tried a little harder. I don't know about that. I thought I tried really hard, and still failed most subjects.
I often find myself judging NT's for doing "unintelligent" things. It seems like they do a lot of circle-walking when it comes to problem solving. With that I mean that if you imagine a parking lot, and you're going to your car, I would just walk straight up to it, while the NT's will walk back and forth and in circles until they finally (if ever) get up to the car.
That is a very rough example, but maybe it makes sense. Anyway, I often feel like saying "But just do [whatever is an extremely simple solution to a problem they can't seem to solve]".
Other times I feel really stupid compared to them. In social settings it's the standard "what is it that they understand that I don't?".
That in itself is a fairly stupid remark.
agreed.
probably a good time to remind everyone that NTs form a small but important portion of the userbase here and it's likely not a very good idea to alienate them by saying they're stupid and inferior.
it's also plain incorrect....
That is a very rough example, but maybe it makes sense. Anyway, I often feel like saying "But just do [whatever is an extremely simple solution to a problem they can't seem to solve]".
i tend to do this as well, but only because i'm interested in cars and i like looking at the various makes and models parked to see if i can find anything rare or interesting. for this reason i'm drawn to big outdoor parking lots and will walk straight through them.
i saw a mint condition lexus sc300 earlier today and i was ogling it for what seemed to be a straight minute, i tend to do that especially with cars i have an interest in (realistically) buying.
if i'm feeling particularly bold i'll look inside and check out the interior, but quite understandably many people take this the wrong way, think i want to break in or something, and i'd have to bottle up my curiosity.
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As far as school goes, I was a valedictorian once. I don't really know how to study because I've never had to. I still basically don't have to make much of an effort and end up with the highest grades in the class.
But I can't do math after a certain level. It's like starting all over every day.
And I'm socially incompetent.
Have no idea what my iq is.
I am the same with not being able to study, if I am not interested in something then I cannot learn it.
I was the encyclopedia kid as well. I didn't like testing so I did poorly when recommended for the gifted program. If we aren't aware of what's going on, we won't try.
There are A$$e's in both camps...NT and ASD. I don't like to generalize. Besides no empirical evidence supports the idea that one side is smarter than the other.
I think that the point about those of us on the spectrum is that we tend to be light-years ahead of most NT's in some ways and waaay behind in others. For example, I am have a huge vocabulary and love words but am practically innumerate. I can clear a prodigious amount of work, but can't relax. They can do a mediocre amount of work, but can chill out. We are extreme; they (NTs) are average (for the most part).
ScarletIbis
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That happened to me too, I have felt for years that I got dumber with age because when I was younger I didn’t miss anything. I figured out long division after pondering over how it was done in 1st grade in a eureka moment in the lunch line one day. No one would teach me “you’re to young” so I figured it out myself after a few weeks. When I was 10, I was teaching myself complex (maybe high school level) genetics in chickens. Studying the phenotypes in my own chickens and watching which ones get passed on, drawing plummet squares to decide what colors the chicks might be. I even included behavioral phenotypes. Yet nowadays, I struggle to keep up with myself, I set the bar so high as a child, I now feel dumb. This is after depression that had me almost catatonic.
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Please understand that everything I write should be read with a grain of salt because I frequently adjust my views based on new information (just read a description of INTP that should explain better than I)
I, for one, am not trying to make a blanket generalization. Or establish a superiority/ inferiority thing.
And I don't think you're pointing a finger at me, or making it personal.
I basically agree, that it isn't really productive or beneficial to establish a mood of "better than because..." and it seems like anything that follows that could easily become something not so different than establishing a superiority complex based on things like color, gender, religion, etc.
It is interesting, though, that there seem to be a lot of incredibly intelligent aspies. And that it's really not an ego thing, it's just the truth sometimes. For me, it's one of the defining characteristics, it's one of the things that I deal with, without which most of my other "symptoms" could be coming from anywhere. Sociopath, ADHD, depression, anxiety... All of those things lack something, they all miss something. Some of them are really far off the mark (I AM NOT a sociopath). Even if you combine all of them, they still don't make sense, and they don't account for a high iq.
Asperger's does, or seems to rather often. I'm certainly not an authority, I'm not even very experienced at thinking of myself this way. And we're all different, we're all dealing with different things...
My iq is weird. If it's tested without including numbers math it can start to look ridiculously high, if you include math it drops down well below average. So it's almost irrelevant, other than as an example that I really can't do math.
But smart, as far as grades go, is something positive for me. I have to remind myself of it sometimes just to feel a bit better about myself, but I can't even take any pride from it because I didn't have to work at it at all. As long as I do the work (and it's not math), my grades are the highest in the class. Consistently. I don't even have to try. It's not challenging, and it never has been, and that has caused problems, including getting me put on an extreme amount of Ritalin because I was so far ahead of the class that I really didn't know what was going on in the class anymore.
It almost feels like, every time I take a class, it's the same class again. Over and over. There isn't any new information. I just keep having to study the Greeks and the Romans over and over again. And I keep failing the same math class over and over again.
That's excessively negative, and too broad of a generalization to be true, but it's a lot like that. And it's been really, really frustrating.
But, being smart has been a fact of life. Often being the smartest person in the room. That's just the way it is, usually. It's one of the few really positive aspects of my life. It's why I was able to soak up ten years of music theory in about six months, but it's also why I can't talk to anyone about music theory.
One of my favorite things to do is read, but I can't afford to buy books because I can read over a thousand pages in a day, on a good day.
So it's another part of it that really isn't fun. It can be torture. And that's a part of the reality for me. It's a part of why I identified with Asperger's. It's a thing that none of the other (rather ugly and painful) labels I've been given actually account for. And I know that it's different for everybody, but it's a part of how it is for me. A part of being an aspie is being the smartest guy in the room, and being unable to communicate. Unable to function on some really basic levels, and unable to explain why that is, or convince anyone that I'm having a problem. Sometimes it's like my tongue is nailed to the roof of my mouth, or I stutter because I have eighteen different thoughts I'm trying to get out at the same time.
Sorry for that big long rant. I hope that makes some kind of sense.
I haven't even had coffee yet this morning.
My grandmother keeps telling me I must have been a child prodigy in some way (very advanced for my age with numbers and language, when I was around 4). And that would be why I was bored as hell at school.
Turned out I was just an Aspie with ADHD.
Oh yeah, at work I'm better than most at solving problems, and memorising long numbers. Still no one (that I know of) has ever suspected I was autistic.
Some people who saw only that side of me told me they were jealous of my skills. But they really shouldn't.