Child Progodies and Autism

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What Prodigies Could Teach Us About Autism - New York Times

Very interesting. Thank you.

I believe there is a correlation, since already lists of traits of gifted people and lists of traits of autism overlap by at least half.

Also, who's to say these prodigies have no social problems? No problems at school with other kids? Really? This I find hard to believe. These kids (and gifted children in general) usually spend more time with adults anyway. They are able to handle adult conversation about various topics and find childish conversation cumbersome. These prodigies *have to* spend time with adults because they are actually working at that level.

So, if they are apt to copy behaviors, they are generally going to be copying the behaviors of responsible adults (either those they are working with or their parents who care enough about them to feed and develop their interests.) They have good models to copy and will even come across more mature and socially adjusted because they are copying...adults!

But do these kids have actual peer group friends? Or is it seen as something like "Of course they don't. They can't relate to other kids." Well, that would be a social problem, would it not? I am very curious about their social development among peers.

Very interesting.

The overlap of traits is only superficial. "Gifted" kids are much better at reading social cues and their IQ is either homogeneous or better in verbal IQ. Autistic kids and prodigies often have a few very high performance IQ subtests, and a heterogeneous result with high performance IQ / average verbal IQ doesn't really exist in NT kids. For example, there are some subtests in performance IQ that NT kids, no matter how "gifted" they are, will never excel at. Code, for example. It's the kind of subtest that show almost certain evidence that you aren't the "NT" kind of gifted if you saturate it or almost, because it's very rare for NTs (even gifted ones) to perform significantly above average at this subtest in particular. And it's also true for all atypical logic and math subtests, any kind of logic that isn't taught at school won't have a great score in NT kids unless if they already learned that kind of logic first.
It depends how IQ is calculated though. The whole test easily takes a whole day or more and few specialists are willing to do it, but it's necessary to detect specific cognition problems and to know with precision how heterogeneous IQ can really be. It's often what psychologists do because they know how to measure IQ only in NT kids, so they often skip a lot of subtests that are crucial for non-NT kids and they skip measuring extreme low and extreme high scores. That's how a kid can be misdiagnosed as NT if he / she learns fast and imitates others well enough to seem "almost normal". Neurologists who have studied cognition won't skip any subtests because everything must be measured to have a truly accurate result. To tell you how much it's true, I can tell you how my own IQ and score at subtests were radically different between the 3 times where i had the test, my problems weren't detected the two first times, only the last time was done by a good neurologist and it revealed a much more atypical profile (and the cognition problems coming with it) than expected... You'd think that you've got 2 completely different persons' IQ in the 3 tests.
Being a prodigy isn't only what you know in the end, it's also how abnormally fast you learn it. And some things don't even need to be learned. Or sometimes it's even the capacity to do things that no NT can do.
Puberty should be considered physical, but in non-NT kids the brain rarely matures like a NT brain. Some kinds of prodigious memory for example (which have a positive correlation with autism) are supposed to be caused by an extremely neotenic brain.

I can't recommend 'Married With Children,' but was just reminded of one particular story.

The dumb blond is cramming for a test, and forgets what the doorbell means.

My nickname was 'the absent-minded professor,' and I've received national honors, while forgetting to do things.

(My acct keeps timing out.)

Artistically gifted kids often have the Block Design peak that's been linked to autism.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jennifer_Haimson/publication/40848499_'Autistic'_Local_Processing_Bias_also_Found_in_Children_Gifted_in_Realistic_Drawing/links/00b7d515dc40c9259e000000.pdf

Note to all readers: occasionally I'll see confusion between the terms prodigy and prodigious(as in prodigious savant)

if the distinction isn't clear, further reading may be required