Autism = Superpowers?

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LOL. And your picture thing (avatar)? is creepy

the waffles thing was most likely a coincidence and the scariest movie moment thing was just an educated guess.

I am dead serious on that one.

Omg i do beleive i have this power to like make a program appear on tv i will get a part of an episode ive seen and it will repeat in my mind all day and sure enough two to three days later the episode i thought of will come on this may seem like chance but this has happned to me like 10 times before weird eh?

my superpower is chosing a program I have perhaps have seen only one episode of and it is the THAT EPISODE in rerun. It happens too often to be anything but a superpower.

Despite the social dyslexia and eccentricities and other disadvantages. I've come to love my aspergers. Lol!
Just the advantages of it that makes up for everything else. I would choose being what I am now than being normal over anything. I wouldn't give it up for my life, since it makes me who I am. But one reason I love it is because of the attention to detail. And that's helped me with my art. And many other aspies and auties or... speckies as I've seen here, seem to be so amazing to neurotypicals.
In my opinion, being neurotypical is the worst thing ever.
It's like Spiderman, it is a gift and a curse.

Like how some autistics have savant syndrome, or how some can calculate in their head, or how some can paint like Da Vinci, or how others are just completely amazing in their own way.
Obviously I'm nothing close to that. All I can do is draw
But also because I learn faster than others at my school, and I have a greater vocabulary which has greatly pleased my English teacher , my way of thinking or logic, i can easily look at someone's point of view and understand them, and this weird thing I do where I adopt other people's mannerisms and way of talking or walking, etc. I've adopted the Office character, Jim Halpert's facial expressions, since our facial structure is similar, obviously too similar since he is a caucasian male. And I've adopted Michael Scott's way of talking.
Also my special intersts have helped greatly, for example my interest in medieval European history has helped in world history class, we are currently going over English monarchy. so that's awesome. And my memory of past events, I've been able to remember things from when I was 3 years old even now, very vividly. Like picturing things in my head, I can watch movies or tv episodes in my head, or play songs in my head, lol. I can see words in my head and math problems, like I taught myself to multiply big numbers in my head. Which comes in handy whenever I go out to places with my friends and figuring out tip, lol.

I only wish to be like the autistics who can do soooo much more, who are really like super heroes, that would be so awesome. But I'm fine as myself.

i don't have superpowers...
you think that these things are ''superpowers'', where in fact it could be one of 3 things,

1. you made a lucky guess and got it right
2. something you have heard/seen before has made you come across the answer (explain's the ''jaws'' thing)
3. you actually do have superpowers that we don't know about

all of the time it will be either number 1 or 2 that will give you the answer but in the highly improbable case of number 3, you would need to test out your skills in a environment which cannot be tampered so to give you the answers. it would be most likely that you want number 3 but all your stuck with is number 1 and 2.

i don't think i have superpowers, nor does anyone i know, neurotypical or not. i just find that im able to focus for longer periods of time and look into every possibility in a situation (this one included) but even i can see that this could be caused by many other factors including,

1. too much caffeine
2. deep interest in the subject im working on
3. i ACTUALLY have a superpower

when you really look into it you will see it is either 1 or 2 because number 3 is most unlikely, but then again, Occam's razor

[quote="Kilroy"]I think AS is a curse and I would cut it out with a knife if I could[/quote]



Ouch why do that ( well in some cases i can see why i would do the same) thats not good only part i really h8 about AS is me being crap a releationships but w8 i think that might be just me oh well im 15 and already prepared a life alone!

Twist on the english saying! : No happieness for us please we have AS!

in some ways i feel so lonely and in others in perfectly happy being on my own

super powers
smell what people think
tlk to animals without speaking on a deep level
predict some future evens through random black out thing that last 2 sec
super clumsy
hear things except what people are saying
deja vu
je mais vu
when me grandad died i woke up at the time he did 4 min before we got a phone call
speak to my grandad in dreams that are so real i can feel and smell and taste them as well
ultimate flexibility
know when people are near me when i cant see
move in the dark without touching anything
high iq
give people cold shivers just by thinking it
want to be telekinetic too would be cool lik in the last oracle

Same here.

However, my main ability I would say is to be able to just fade into the background in any conversation. Although most of us have this ability, from there I listen in while others are fully unaware I am doing so. I have the ability, as well as fading in to the background, to easily siphon information out of people. they see me as "too trusting". Both abilities go hand in hand to help me jump to conclusions about people.

Hence, from analysing others and extracting information out of others through conversation, I can discover alot about a person. Then, when I meet a neurotypical of similar abilities or share some similarities to myself, I truly fear them, because I know what they/we are capable of.

Another ability, although you could barely call it a "super power", is that i plan and strategize everything mentally. I sit in the background and have everything planned out, with back-up plans. However, if things don't go to plan, I make a complete and utter fool of myself.

I also have the guise of a kind, selfless, unaware person going quite well. People think that, if they tell me things, I'll forget in an instant. The truth being, I always remember anything that is, in my eyes, important. If I don't think it's important, I discard it to the back of my mind.



I've once met someone who's very stare felt like it was piercing through my soul... Creepy...The strangest part was that I was looking away, but I naturally knew he was staring at me.



Same here.

Actually, given the bouts of irrationality and the high rate of people who still believe in something supernatural/religious in our society, I would consider the ability to use logic easily a superpower. lol

I thought I would quote and respond to this by saying that when it comes to alot of the posts mentioning "guessing the program", etc, I would agree with you about options 1 and 2.

However, that being said, cases of heightened senses with various autisic spectrum disorders have been documented clinically before, so saying having an ability of heightened hearing or the ability to hear at a higher frequency is somewhat based in empirical fact. (In my own personal case, I took the liberty of going to a local science museum which actually had a sound generator capable of generating frequencies from 1 all the way up to 50 000 HZ (it was part of an exhibit on bat sonar), blindfolded myself so I could not see the meter, and then hit the up frequency button and stopped when I couldn't hear the sound any more. When I removed the blindfold, the meter registered 22 000 HZ as my upper hearing limit. According to studies, the maximum of human hearing is supposed to be at 20 000 HZ, so at the very least this is a heightened ability.) Also, strictly speaking, various savant capabilities such an autistic savant who could generate new algorithms referred to on the Discovery Channel Documentary "The real Superhumans" is an example of a documented superpower, (i.e., a genetic mutation which is superior to human standard capabilities). Yet another example of a heightened ability is the hyperfocus and ability to learn about a single subject well enough to rival the knowledge of professors and academic experts in a given field which Dr. Hans Asperger himself documented in his original studies and named "the little professor syndrome." (If you would like proof as to how this could be construed as a superpower, look up the biography of a related ability, but used as a superpower in the life of one Ferdinand Waldo Demara Jr., better known as "The Great Impostor" and inspiration for the late '90s show "The Pretender.")

So while alot of the "predictive" stuff, which crosses into the pseudo-scientific crap of psychic stuff, I would agree with you is probably a case of option 1 or 2, certain heightened abilities of autism, well documented under clinical conditions, could be construed as superpowers, in that they are heightened abilities which exist in less than 1% of the population (Asperger's Syndrome is currently estimated to be in about 1 in 150 people) therefore making those abilities beyond the conventional 95% confidence interval which is supposed to incorporate most of the normal distribution of mental abilities expected to occur in the human race. Of course, this also means that there are also sub human abilities documented which fall outside the norm on the other end of the distribution. One example of this would be the autistic inability to read body language and requiring conscious training to learn social cues. As autism spectrum disorders in general tend to push for extremes, it is highly likely that some autistics will have an excess of heightened abilities which might be construed as superpowers, some have an excess of sub human abilities, and some have one or two super, and one or two sub, in order to compensate to some form of average. This is necessary for the statistical distribution of abilities across humanity. Also, since standard hypothesis testing considers that any data out beyond 2 or 3 standard deviations has a low probability of being within the human deviation by chance, should one see empirical documentation of a heightened ability, be it mathematical, sensory, predisposition for logic, such as I see you have demonstrated in spades here, etc, one should construe as more likely of belonging to a different population, possibly a superhuman one as per classical rejection of the null hypothesis.

Also, I would like to make one final case for a greater predisposition to logic and rationality being a superpower in this society, but not one confined to autism or Asperger's Syndrome. If the majority of people are irrational, such as the 2008 Gallup Poll would indicate with 60% of the US population believing that the creation story as described by the book of Genesis is literal scientific fact, and with evidence that the average IQ around the world seems to be steadily declining according to a UN 2003 Report,
and with that, presumably, the ability to think and act rationally, the ability to function rationally, such as skeptics do, could be construed a superpower based on two definitions:

1. It is an ability which very few people in society seem to demonstrate.

2. It is an ability which a group of heroes are already using to attempt to better human kind. In fact, I would not only state that certain heightened abilities of autism could be construed as superpowers, but I would consider this ability to function rationally a superpower already used by the minority in our society who are everyday heroes, pushing the limits of human understanding and knowledge through empirical research and application of the laws of the universe, and also those who relate the findings to quell irrationality and superstition. By this, I mean that I consider scientists, engineers, doctors and skeptics to be the real life superheroes of our society and I salute their efforts to help quell some of the worst villains in our society by exposing their BS for what it really is.

Anyway, I didn't mean to rant, but regardless of personal anecdotes, I thought I should point out that as an autistic, the fact that you are even so logical is in its own right a superpower, and that my own definition of neurotypical is the average irrational human being. Those with sub human abilities I would consider non neurotypical, and I would expand the definition of superpower to anyone who has developed the ability to see the world through rational, empirical eyes. Also, I really hope that this is developing to be the norm so that soon enough it will no longer be a superpower, but the standard which is considered normal by humanity.

I dont no if it counts but I predict things abit aswell mostly I read a page of a book and can tell how it will end its the same with a film. I always know which songs are going to be in the charts aswell. I dont think its some superpower though

I lol'd on this one.

Sometimes when I focus and unfocus my eyes when I look at a red light when I'm in a car, the light changes green.
And sometimes, I can look at my friend and just read him like a piece of paper. Idk....

The funny thing is, the same occurs for me too. However, it only occurs for me when I'm in a taxi, strangely. In my parent's car, it doesn't seem to work as effectively.