Can NT's be geniuses?

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I was just wondering. With all the material out there about how all great geniuses likely had mild autism, I was wondering if the opposite is also true? From what I gather NT's can be Doctors,Lawyers, in other words very intelligent people. But Can they really reach the 160 and beyond IQs , Can they ever reach a level akin to Mozart or Stephen Hawkins or Einstein? Is Aspergers THE Genius gene, or is it merely A genius gene?

Sure, why not? I'd probably be smarter as an NT. However, I'd probably be better at hiding my intelligence and have more activity in areas that are not stereotypical of high intelligence.

I have to say I don't really agree that all Aspies are geniuses. I think that, like with everything else, it is a spectrum. I am a Aspie and my intellegence is pretty much normal. I also know some people who are not Aspies and are pretty darn smart. It all depends on a whole bunch of factors.

to be a genius, you have to be completely obsessed in your special interest, so, whilst being an aspie certainly helps, NT folk could logically do the same thing...an NT with OCD/a childhood experience which gives them passion in the area/a socially deprived existence, could become just as good a musician as me, for example ^.^

Of course they can be,. I think we are making a stereotype by thinking we are more intelligent than the rest of the world. With the help of some doctors who say that all the geniuses in history were aspies.

If i weren`t an aspie for example, i could do better at college. I could pay attention in class and follow what the professor is saying. Instead of doing that, what i do is to look for every little detail and take my own path to knowledge. In the end of the semester, i am somewhere far from the rest of the class, and of course many times i have failed subjects as a result of this.

Well I believe most aspies probably have around a 130 IQ, thats 30 points better then average - highly intelligent but short of genius. but I never heard of NT's IQs of much beyond 140, the cutoff for genius.

Studies show that aspies have about the same range (and bell curve) of IQ as NTs, which means neither group has a monopoly on very high IQ.

Now, one doesn't need high IQ to be a genius, or vice-versa. What makes aspies more likely to be geniuses is not higher IQ, it's higher obsessiveness. People who focus on a single subject for their whole lives tend to be "eccentric" due to neurology or personality or both, whereas smart NTs tend to have a balanced life and spread their time among multiple activities including social life, sports, etc.

I think many geniuses are neurodiverse, but aspies are still by far a minority.

Of course some they can be. There's no reason why people with normal social skills must necessarily be idiots, as so many people on here assume.

Source?

Extremely high I.Q. scores have a range of social behavioural issues that are unique to the range of intelligence that those individuals possess. These are "gifted" personality traits that can inhibit NT geniuses from ease of social development and relationships. It suffices to say that there are NTs of every intellectual range who experience intuitive difficulties in aspects of their social lives sometimes, or whom befall poor patterns of relating to others.

There are differences between geniuses and savants, also. You don't need a genius I.Q. to have inhumanly good memorisation skills or special musical abilities. Aspies with special interests are generally more like savants than geniuses, at least I think so. There are also an unaccounted for number of people on the Spectrum with average and less than average I.Q.s. I feel that the nature of the "race to genius" has swept marginal members of the Spectrum, i.e. females, under the rug for quite some time.

IQ is independent of Asperger's; that is to say, they do not correlate with one another. People with high IQs have no trouble socialising, but some studies indicate that people with excessively high IQs do have difficulty. Even in the latter case, it's not a matter of one having Asperger's or not. You also have to understand that these historical figures were never diagnosed with Asperger's (obviously), and that any diagnosis is speculation, based on old secondary sources that aren't all reliable.

Genius and ASDs are not twinned; a person can be one without the other, easily.


M.

They probably can.

And take a look at the community here on WP - it is as diverse as the general population is: Some believe in religion, some are atheists. Some like anime, some others can not stand to watch it. Some have succeeded to make a career, some have not. Some have found a partner, some have not.

Only the symptoms associated with ASD's MAY be unique to people who are affected by them. The world is not purely black and white, there are lots of scales of grey inbetween.

can nt's be geniuses?

yes we can.

many of us choose to not openly express our intelligence because acting like a sub-genius while thinking as a genius means that people tend to assume your success and their failure has more to do with your stupid luck and not some devious plan you have devised against them.

not that i devise devious plans of course.

High IQ = Genius?

Genius is a term that is often misapplied.

I'm brilliant with computers (best out of two year levels last year), but my social skills leave a fair bit to be desired. IQ tests are kinda broken for people on the autistic spectrum (Rather than having a more or less straight line, it looks like a damn sine graph). To be a genius implies having a mind that completely outstrips that of most people.

I see it as less genius and more just a brain thats wired differently: designed for logic and intellectual pursuits rather than social interaction. You need both, but I see it as people with AS learn the social whilst NT people learn the intellectual. It ends up being the same, except we start at opposite ends.

Well said. Being a bit obsessive is how I got a full ride through college.

Although in the case of Einstein, and possible others, having a completely different thought process probably helped too. Then again Einstein was a theoretical physicist.

But for the record, IQ tests are worthless for our kind. My friend (Aspergers) was labeled as "untrainable" after taking one as a child, a decade later he was working for NASA. Trying to categorize people with a standardized test is hard enough without trying to measure AS intelligence by way of the NT standards.