Myth: People with autism have genius talents.

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I've honestly never heard that people thought it is more common for someone with autism to be a "genius" or that people with autism thought they were. I've heard about a lot of them being intelligent, but a genius? Maybe I just don't know what the common stereotypes are...

Saying the majority of AS or NT people are more or less smart than the other makes no sense to me. There are many different types of intelligence (not just math and writing which schools care about most) so it's hard for someone to compare how smart someone is compared to someone else-it depends on what they are looking at.

To the contrary, there is an amazing study conducted by SB Cohen at the University of Cambridge.

He took a sample of 11 Mathematical Olympiad winners. We're talking world-class mathematical talent here.

What he found was nothing short of amazing. He didn't just find that Aspies are to be talented in math.
Instead, he found a randomly chosen person from the top tier of talent was probably aspie ! !! !

That is, 7/11 olympiad winners met the DSM criteria for Asperger's. 11/11 met 3 out of 4 DSM criteria.

This is no myth.

SB Cohen is now at work looking for the 'Asperger/Math' gene ...

Simon Baron Cohen's paper

This is not to say that the average aspie is talented. But they do appear much, much more likely to be extremely talented (bimodal distribution.)

It's a fine distinction, let me clarify with some numbers. Suppose a randomly chosen kid has a 1 in 10,000 chance of winning the Mathematical Olympiad. And suppose 1 in 100 kids is Aspie.

If half the olympiad winners are Aspie, that means a randomly chosen Aspie kid is 50 times more likely to win than an NT kid.

Put differently, a random group of 2000 NT kids will most likely produce no winners. A random group of 2000 Aspie kids will produce TEN winners.

It is still possible that Aspie kids, most typically, have no special talent. But the class of Aspies produces an astonishing bounty of talent at the fringe of the bell curve.

You can quibble about sample size and such but ... dayamm.

I think the problem is that AS people tend to obsessively focus on one thing, learn all they can about it, and talk about it constantly, so that gives us the ILLUSION to the NT world of being smarter than we actually are. Usually outside of our narrow interest we are ungifted, so to speak, but NTs don't see that because we're talking about our special interest all the time. The reality is that only a handful of people are truly gifted, and even fewer are true geniuses. IQ is useful, but it doesn't measure everything. Some people with higher than average IQ's are very unpleasant people to be around. So they have this high IQ, but they sort of live in their own narcissistic world, which is no good. I think most AS people have normal IQ's, but our special interests create the illusion of genius, when it's really more just constant regurgitation of facts about our special interest.