Question to nonverbal people with autism

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I just saw this amazing video on Youtube made be one of the most intelligent people I ever saw in my life. She is an autistic womand and she calls herself silentmiaow on Youtube. The name of the video is ´In my language´.

In the first part of the video she shows us how she interacts with absolutely everything in her environment by using her own language. In the second part of the video she explains how her language works. What struck me about the second part of the video was the fact that it seems like she is using a voice machine instead of her own voice, although I´m not completely sure about that.

I am convinced that a lot of autistic people who are classified as low functioning and nonverbal have normal to high intelligence.
My question is why some obviously intelligent autistic people are nonverbal. It´s probably a stupid question but I´m sincerely interested.

I'm not non-verbal but I have gone non-verbal at times...and I was wondering if it was the same for non-verbal autistic people. What is going to make any comparison complicated is how unexplainable the feeling is...
Normal non-verbal moments are times of stress, for instance, they happen to everyone I'd bet, when you're in the passenger seat of a car and the driver doesn't see the car coming to him, and you have no way of telling them other than "NO" or something, or just staring and hoping they see it....
But there are others, too, the times where someone asks you a question that really, you don't know anymore, why would they ask that......and you just stare and your mind won't form any answer to the question, it just refuses to translate , or to look for some socially acceptable distortion of reality, when your whole reality at that moment is "leave me alone and go away" or "please don't speak any more..."
I have been known to tell people " no".
It makes my mother laugh, because she will ask me some sensible open question, like "ok, when do you think you can call this social worker?" and I'll stare for a while and say "no", and actually that "no" is as polite as it can get, it's a word lol, an actual word that I had to force out of my throat to express the feelings I have about this, when all my brain wants me to do is ignore the fact that she even spoke.

I should learn sign language and pretend I'm deaf or something, it would make my life easier....

Verbal apraxia or their brain simply doesn't work that way.

oh your talking about amanda baggs. she is so cool, she has a pretty good site/blog thing. it just has so much information on autism that a doctor just can't explain.
http://main.autistics.org/

I have selective mutism. I like to be social when I'm with friends, and I chat away to relatives like any average person, but when I'm at parties I just go completely mute. I clench up and sit stock still, being afraid to move because of extreme social fear and shyness, and just watching everybody else talking and dancing and eating/drinking. I don't think that is what a severely Autistic person would do, because normally severely Autistic people would stim and get overwhelmed in noisy crowded environments and may react to it, whereas I don't. I have as much control over that as any average person, and I practically just act like an NT with a severe sore throat what prevents me from talking to anybody. Otherwise, I make normal eye contact and smile, etc. OK, maybe I speak when I'm spoken to, but otherwise I just sit and keep my mouth shut.

I'm really not sure what it's actually like to be in a severely Autistic person's shoes. I can picture what it's like to be in an NT's shoes, having all the right things to say to the right people at the right times, generally - even though I can't seem to do it myself. But I have no idea what it's really like for a severely Autistic person. I've only met one in my whole life, and he really has no self-awareness whatsoever. He needs 24-hour care (he is 20 years old).

I don't know if you want my response, as I can and do talk sometimes.

When I can't speak, or when my speaking isn't very functional, it's because I'm in sensory overload.

Yup, she uses a communication device. She types really fast, too. You should check out her other videos. I think "In My Language" was the first video of hers I saw; what I got from it was that you can just interact with your environment, look at it, experience it for its own sake. I like that. It's very artistic.

I do the same thing, though not in the same ways; I think probably all of us either do, or did when we were little--just looking at things, touching, tasting, moving them, rubbing them--pure sensory play.

You don't have to be nonverbal for that to happen. I'm not; I can talk almost all of the time--have to be really extremely stressed to lose it. I think it's just a tendency to see the world and not filter out all those things that most "mature adults" consider irrelevant--experience it in a much more direct way than most people do, forgetting all the symbols and abstractions and simply being a part of your world.

And they say we're isolated! Hah. We're more in touch than they'll ever be, unless they're artists or small children.

I wasn't aware that people consider such things irrelevant. Sensory is HUGE for me. I've always interacted with the world from a sensory perspective. In college, I would walk up and down the halls with my hand on the walls... and therefore tear or pull down papers on the walls. Even in dx report it says how I kept rubbing the edge of the desk and rocking. Boy, the world must be pretty boring without that stuff.