Sora wrote:
b9 wrote:
if someone is very intelligent, then they will seem intelligent to others
I see how experiences differ greatly here - many kids and such with AS actually face being thought ret*d or 'just' stupid because their AS makes them appear slow, otherworldly and unable to do what most people with normal intelligence can easily do. Nothing about the real level of intelligence showing through.
i was not really talking about intelligence within the context of AS. i was talking about intelligence in general.
i know what you are saying about some people with AS seeming superficially dull, but anyone who is
VERY intelligent will do something in the fullness of time which demonstrates it to people who know them.
if someone has an IQ of say 160, they may seem like a dull witted person to a person on the checkout at the supermarket, but people who know them would not think of them as dull witted. they would show some exceptional skill in their area of aptitude at some point.
i know there are some people who may not easily be able to be seen as gifted. like stephen hawking for example would have a hard time seeming as smart as he is to a group of people who never heard of him, and if he did not have any electronic communication aids with him.
my friend has a brother with a supposed iq of 175 and he is seen as very slow, but that is because he is severely ill with schizophrenia. he is mostly in mental hospitals.
he talks in a slow and uninspired way, and he never initiates any ideas of interest.
when i was a child, i used to go around to my friends house, and his brother (who i did not know was that smart at the time) used to always be sitting in his room on his bed doing nothing. he had no apparatus or reading material in his room. he seemed "dead in the head" as it were.
a couple of years ago, my friend came over and brought his brother with him. he was as dead in the head as ever, and had a vacant look of mental poverty as he sat there speechless. i was talking to my friend about what i was doing and i said that the expansion of a fractal animation sequence i was programming seemed to develop too slowly at a certain point, and i wondered how i could speed it up in exponential increments with a formula that steps up in value returns equal to the exponential lag of development ...blahh blahh..etc.
my friend asked his brother to have a look at it and he reluctantly did. his brother did not know the language i wrote it in, and he knew nothing before that minute about what i was trying to achieve, but he grasped the language immediately by watching the animation the code produced, and he reverse engineered the logic from the animation back to the code he read, and it was amazing to see. he was slumped foreward and looked like he had just woken up even while he was making such an astounding spectacle of learning ability.
he quickly realized i did not need the levels of precision to be constant in the iteration loops that dealt with depth magnification, and suggested i inversely set the precision based upon the depth.
it seemed like such an obvious and clean solution that i had not thought about yet. he just picked up the whole thing and had it mastered within minutes, and after he gave me that comment, he reclined back and retired form all further conversation.
wow. but you see, i never realized he was like that when my association with him was just 1 minute glimpses. but after just one extended encounter where we interacted, i was left amazed at the quality of his mind. his mind is like a prism and most problems to him are like white light that is split into pure componentry with a boring inevitability (boring for him that is)..
i contrast him against young cocky people who are very proud of themselves and want to be seen as superior in all manners including intellect, and in order to try to secure a position of intellectual admiration, they have to quote the number they scored in an IQ test. i just have that impression of people who like to bugle their iq scores. i know my impression may be ill thought out.
i mean anyone who is that smart will not have to resort to pulling out a "score card" if the have said smart things in their time. it is like someone who claims to have a ferrari, but you have never seen it, and then all they can do is pull out it's pamphlet and the spec sheet to show you. hmmm.. i do not need to see their pamphlet if i ever saw their car.
it just raises suspicion in me that people who shout numbers may not have that ferrari in the skulls that they claim to have.
Sora wrote:
Your statement totally doesn't take how AS/HFA is actually a disorder of social abilities and communication into account.
that is very true.
Sora wrote:
I wonder where you live because because I got the impression you expect people to know what autism is?
i think you may be confusing my response in this thread with my response in another thread that was something like "self diagnoses" or similar.
in that thread i was a bit ignorant due to my lack of knowledge about various countries health systems. i said something like "if you are significantly autistic, then you will come to the attention of people in authority such as preschool teachers and teachers etc, and you will be assessed as to why you are markedly different than expected at an early age."
i went on to infer that i thought it was almost impossible for a person to go through life for 40 years without ever being suspected by anyone who ever met them of having autism. i said if they had no inkling that they may have autism until they read about it somewhere late in life and they clicked that "that" is how they feel, then they were probably wrong.
but i was only basing my opinion at that time upon my local environment. i got a pm from a moderator that told me that the health care systems in various countries are not free, and they are not so lucky as australia where i live. also, people who do not have enough money for diaganosis in these countries are disadvantaged and i should not be maybe so one eyed about it.
i have seen that i was wrong to assume that everyone with a "clinically significant" level of autism will be aware of their possible diagnosis at a young age.
but that is off topic. my words about intelligence are not related to my earlier idea about the age of discovery of autism.
i may be wrong in what i think you mean though so sorry if i am.
Sora wrote:
It can't be Europe (and probably not the US where things seem similar) where you live because here the vast majority of people doesn't recognise a strongly autistic child and think autism is 'that thing that makes people space out and be in another world'.
ok i do accept what you say as valid. i grew up in sydney australia in the "north shore". health care was free, and there were dentists who came to the schools for free to do dental work on the kids, and there were doctors also who came to check us out for free. we got free bottles of milk (yuk they were warm by the time we could drink them and i never ever had one).
there just seemed to be so much concern about kids who deviated from the norm, and an abundance of facilities that were free to asses these kids that were deviant to expectation.
my family saw i was very different from birth and they thought i may be profoundly ret*d so they took me to a doctor. that was the beginning of my medical history.
but in other countries i guess they may not have the resources to provide a saturation of free health cover.
sorry i can not be more concise. brevity is the soul of wit i know but i can not be brief.
my participation in this thread is over for now. i will look for another to try on.
21 Jun 2009, 1:18 pm
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