Are AS people truly intelligent ?

Post Reply New Topic

I've often had obscenely high scores on written or standardized exams.

Similarly, I've learned to play Scrabble at a ridiculously high level--because I remember words and like solving puzzles quickly.

OTOH, I have this annoying habit of answering questions that weren't meant to be answered.

They are typically potrayed this way. However, not All Aspie people are as smart and successful as people like Bill Gates. At lowest intellegance scale, asperger people just about have the same intelligance as a normal person. So Asperger's Syndrome does not come with an intellectual disability, which about 2/3 of people on the ASD also have. It can also be on an individual's very own choosing that has nothing got to do with their condition. For example, a friend I used to have at high that had Aspergers skipped College to work at a pizza place. She does not have a college career, just regular work. She now moved up north with her boyfriend. Aspeger does not mean genious. They have uneven areas of knowledge. Like they know their very subject in such a superior way and have at the same time below normal knowledge in another area (usually social skills). Did you know that some low functioning and serverly autistic people also actually have normal to above normal, even genius General IQs? Low functioning does not mean low iq, so especially in the autism context it means that the person cannot take care of himself and is not aware of anything of the real world around him.

Yes we're intelligent. No we're absolutely not more intelligent than NTs. Yes most of us probably appear more intelligent than NTs due to absurd amounts of knowledge in specific areas. I personally (and I'm sure many of you) have excellent long-term recollection.

Example: 8 years old, Sunday school teacher recounts somewhat uninteresting story from her college years. Literally 8 more years later (16) the teacher's daughter is in a class with me. Whole new teacher is explaining a religious principle. Girl raises her hand and says something along the lines of, "Oh! Oh! My mom has an experience like that! It went like this..." She completely messes up the story and acknowledges it by saying, "I don't really remember the story all that well... but it does relate to the religious principle. I raise my hand and recount the whole story accurately. So I having heard the story one time 8 years ago versus the daughter of the story teller most likely hearing it multiple times throughout her life and I could recollect it better.

The point is that we (probably) have strange but still good recollection of things- especially our special interests. When we talk about our special interest we are perceived as intelligent despite intelligence and recollection being mostly unrelated (in our case).

Of course we are...if you doubt me, try to knock that battery off my shoulder!

Make my day!

Like anyone else, I believe that people on the spectrum can vary widely in terms of their intellectual strengths and capabilities. People on the spectrum are often stereotyped as being "geniuses" or "idiot savants", pardon the term, but I think it varies a lot more than that.

I once had a boss who, in a yearly performance evaluation, compare me to a computer. He was a gifted software architect and considered it the highest compliment. Then again, in that same evaluation, he mentioned difficulties I had with peers and the need for me to have better "bedside manners".

You can compare people to computers, on a superficial way some autistic people appear to think more like computers than other people, but fundamentally autistic people think like people, not computers, as they are in fact people, not computers. On a superficial, computers are also intelligent, but it's really just a reflection of the intelligence of the programmers. We are intelligent on the virtue of being people, not from being autistic. Autistic intelligence varies like the rest of the population.

OP, what your doctor said sounded very patronising to me. Of course I don't know the tone he used, was it warm and friendly or austere and cold? Did he look down his nose at you? It sounds like he was diminishing and/or invalidating you, cutting you down to size.. maybe it wasn't like that at all, only you will know.

If a doctor asked me that question, and it had no relationship whatsoever to whatever the consultation was about, I would see it as inappropriate behaviour. Did his question have any relationship to what you were there for?

Watch out for invalidating health personnel - there are plenty of them unfortunately and the arrogant ones consider themselves vastly superior to their clients and so entitled to patronise them.

Your doctor is an A$$HOLE.........period.