How do smart Aspies think differently to smart NTs?

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I mean...our brains work differently, but I've just posted a comment that ideally i'd be an intelligent NT. (Best of both worlds)

But then it got me thinking...I don't know what it's like or even what the differences are.

Good question. I don't really know. It seems like many of the smarter NT's think more like I do, or at least understand my way of thinking.

well on the up side of being an Aspie, I never had to study, it just stuck. I just come to understand things and see all of the connections between concepts where NT's see no relationship until I have spent hours trying to explain what becomes apparent to me.
then again on the down side, I was invited to a total of 3 parties between highschool and college combined

I think smart Aspies still have all the other autistic quirks that NTs do not have. Plus the inherent difficults with social relationships.

It's been argued that Aspies are better at dealing with details/parts vs. seeing the bigger picture (gestalt). Aspies:

-Detail oriented approach to tasks which may result in missing the “bigger picture”
-Difficulty seeing “parts-to-whole” and “whole-to-parts” relationships

I think both groups are needed. NTs would not have the hyper-focus, detail-oriented persistence/patience to allow for discovery. And without NTs to put these parts together we would be missing the big picture.

I think I'm more of a gestalt thinker than a details thinker though.

I feel like I've become more of a gestalt thinker with age. But I wasn't like this when I was young. I was very detail-oriented, I think? Maybe Aspies are just slower to develop their gestalt perspective?

Interracting with other humans is wired into an NT brain before there's very much other behaviour there at all. The eyes, after all, are one of the first instruments of consciousness birth brings to us. Wiring them straight to musculature and feelings turned out to be a good way to make a successful organism. They build speech, activity and relationship along with the thinking machinery.

We're a bit different. I've never actually spoken about it at any length with another aspie, but it seems to me that there's only one person in my brain. That simple "I smile at you, you smile back and do nice things for me" reflex didn't bubble to the surface in the infant me, and everything else built up twisted around rage, pain, loneliness and frustration. Like Marshall, I've got better in the gestalt area with experience. Learning about autism, after it trashed every last skerrick of personality I'd pieced together, helps with that.

Not that I knew very much about that, I was too busy staying afloat. But I digress.

I wish I knew how normals relate to the world, I really do. I can simulate them in ones and twos, but not in numbers. Now there's an iPad app I'd pay for.

Pretty sure I've always been a gestalt thinker. This doesn't mean I ignore details. In a lot of subjects details are important. Just as a whole I'm more drawn to interconnections of concepts than to facts and figures.

For me the biggest difference is intelligent NT's are able to accomplish more things in a shorter amount of time. They don't have the autistic inertia I do. They also aren't bothered as much by interruptions and don't need to shut out the rest of the world to work efficiently. I envy their ability to drop one thing and move on to the next. If I try to make myself work like an NT I'm always feeling frazzled, irritable, and unmotivated.

I've also read echolalia is gestalt processing for language. Language and learning in chunks, I think.

In trying to articulate my thoughts online I've often had to rely on quoted chunks and recall how other authors said things and sort of put it together as best as I could along with my own sentences.
I've done this too with parts/wordings of theories and ideas I've come across, along with quotes, to help me articulate my thoughts.
I'm not sure I've explained this good enough to explain what I've done to articulate my thoughts. I also just know things, like rational thought, but get frustrated because I may know when something is irrational but find it very difficult to put it into words. I actually can't explain how frustrating it has been for me.
This is how I came up with my name here.

genuis autistics are unconventional.

My AS has given me the gift of being able to see both the big picture and the important detail. This has given me a great boot in my career. I have been a successful systems engineer and now a successful manager. I have no problem visualising complete systems from documented information but I am useless at reading people's true intentions. My new boss (NT) and I work really well together. He is a great mentor to me in pointing out real world (human) situation and I can then come up with very quick solutions to problems that have been eluding him for years.

The only read difference between the highly gifted NTs I work with and myself is I don't feel any particular social pressure to do things a certain way. They will all be able to read the boss's hidden Language/intentions and I may not so I will have greater "out of the box" ideas. It is obvious also at gatherings when they all participate in small talk and that sort of thing quite naturally. I cannot. Other than that gifted NTs are pretty similar to me from what I can tell. If you do a search on giftedness versus Aspergers you will find striking similarities.

IA with this. I think most people with IQs over 140 are on the spectrum or have some traits.

Not that you have to be a genius to be smart, just saying.

I agree with this. Just two examples: I went to a university prep highschool, so you'd say people are smart there. During maths class, most people just learned the formula and applied it when they saw thesame format question. I couldn't do that. I HAD to know why I was using that formula and how it worked before I could use it, instead of just applying it without any notion of why.

Another one: I now study History at university, and before my first class about the Falklands War (so without any knowledge of what intake the teacher would have on the subject) we had to prepare for the subject of the islands since they were discovered till they were claimed by Argentina. I had learned and read all these details, from how many sheep there were in relation to the people and the changes in this over the years, all the names of people who had even remotely thought about the islands, etc. In class it turned out that everyone had just globally learned the diplomatic events and what effect they would have on future events. parts vs. bigger picture?





I have noticed this as well. I absolutely CAN'T concentrate when someone is talking to me during a lecture. Others seem to be able to multitask this quite easily AND have good notes.