PDD-NOS/AS vs. Giftedness?

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When I was in high school, I found that the brightest students were the hardest for me to get along with. I got along a lot better with the poorer students. They were much more likely to accept me for what I was. The good students were much more likely to be judgmental and competitive. The same was sort of true for college, but not quite as extreme.

Oh. You mean evil geniuses. They're the worse, enjoying the pain they cause and oh so good at causing it.

And that's just it, I just ordered a book from Amazon that's supposed to help sort that out. I'm crossing my fingers and hoping the info is valuable.




Right, it seems like society really picks and sorts based on its current flavor of the week - if you're out life gets frustrating. BTW, I've never heard of 'intense world syndrome', not sure what its about but I'll have to give it a read.



It seems stranger still for me - I understand theirs for the most part, just that few people understand mine. My mirroring abilities as well as my ability to pick up on mood or sense what people are up to is pretty good, just that my facial expressions don't work or - better way to say it - they ring hollow or seem to have no velocity. Same for my voice, its not flat monotone per say but its flat volume and I have to deal with people not hearing me, cutting me off, or talking over me quite often.


That's what worries me about the label, and a lot of conservative politicos on the radio tend to see it this way as well - tell people that their gifted or special and you can easily make as bad of monsters as...say... the yuppy popular kids I went to school with who's parents bought them $80 jeans to wear and who'd be out driving Audi's in the summer drunk or high, wrap them around telephone polls or trees, and their parents would buy them new cars. Entitlement rots everyone's brain. Still, there's a line that has to be carefully walked between spoiling some people rotten to save others and saving those who would be spoiled but at the expense of those who end up with severe depression or even offing themselves because they never got the resources they needed.

Most of this obviously comes down to bunk parenting, I'd like to think we'll come up with a way to deal with that one of these days whether in public or in private or 'gifted' institutions.

Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 03 Feb 2011, 4:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.

When I was in school, some kids were nice while others were mean. Mostly the ones who were mean had rotten home-lives. The smart ones weren't really mean to me.
The one who instigated others against me the most had a terribly abusive situation at home. She also believed she was really smart, when she was just mediocre. She was just really good at manipulating people and getting them to like her and to dislike whom she disapproved of. I wasn't her only target.

One way to look at it:

We know obviously that someone with an ASD is further down the "Theory of Mind spectrum" than a 'gifted individual.'

And typically the "gifted" have to bridge ToM somewhat to effectively communicate, and hence the isolation...different minds here.

Take away Theory of Mind as in ASD, and anything in greater intellectual prowess could only benefit .

The better abstractions, the better the "understanding," and the better are the coping mechanisms.

I would have a hard time seeing that the giftedness in the ASD would or possibly could cause more problems.

Lets say someone with AS scores a 150 on the WAIS and another 85. We know both have delayed ToM; likely or typically which one on average( all things being equal) would cope or communicate effectively to bridge ToM? The one with the greater abstractions? The greater vocab?etc.


This is one of my favorite articles on the problems with general giftedness: http://www.prometheussociety.org/articl ... iders.html

We don't know anything about whether both have "delayed ToM", given that "ToM tests" as usually given to autistic people have serious shortcomings as to whether that's exactly what they're measuring or not. (In fact, from various research, it's pretty clear ToM is not what they're measuring.)

Being labeled as gifted made things more complex and difficult for me. Without any acknowledgment of my difficulties, I just got dropped off the deep end, and when I couldn't manage the work it was because I was "bored because it was too easy/not intellectually stimulating enough."

I was a favorite target for bullying, though.

I'd have to debate with her that the mark is quite likely lower than 170. Personalities vary, obviously, but I think people start seeming neurotic or weird as low as the mid 120s and that just pronounces itself more the higher you go. Even social butterflies though, as I mentioned - I have a friend who fits that profile and is around 150, can't date well no matter how much he can charm women. His guy friends are also quite select as are mine. I'm somewhere between 125 and 130 but I know that I have a lot of peaks and valleys in that as well.

I guess its not all IQ so much as how much you do with it - typically for social skills and relatability, the less you apply it to life an existential matters the better. Otherwise, if you use it for more than just career or hobbies (which is inevitable with some people), life's a lot more fascinating but at the same time socializing is significantly rougher.


Really? I've always notice intelligence and social skills working directly against each other. Its not because social skills are for the dumb, more about the fact that the center of the bell curve is 100 and the farther you go in either direction from center the more strange or exotic your way of compiling data and life in general becomes to the 70% who are in the middle. Dumbing down is perhaps something people can do in short bursts but its not something they can hold up, nor can they really be downward compatible as some like to think. You can't calculate all the nuances and differences of how a person would walk, talk, and think who has an IQ thirty points below your own because theirs is still a very in-depth and sophisticated network of beliefs and you'd never be able to get the nuances of it right unless you were literally one of them, anything other than that and you'd just about need a second brain for all the related computations. You might be able to predict them somewhat but that has nothing to do with being on page with them. I've noticed that a lot of people have an ability to say absolutely anything, clear out of the blue and completely unrelated to any conversation around them, and it works - everyone laughs, is interested, or agrees, no one corrects them for doing it whereas if someone who has a much different intelligence level tries the same their going to get five seconds of hard silence at best. So, when a person is reserved their seen as unconfident or worse quite often, and much of the time the intelligent have to play by a more strict set of rules because their not naturally 'like' other people. Hence the inherent dilemma of progressively higher IQ clipping social skills.

For me, I could always do the work. My problem was that when it came to social skills, I was ret*d. I really needed someone to explain the basics of social interaction to me in the most basic language. Nobody understood that someone could be so smart in most respects and yet could be so slow at learning social interactions. It also didn't help that my family was pretty antisocial, which cut down on my opportunities to interact with other people.

I have ADHD and dysgraphia as well. So hard to focus on work if I'm not interested in it, and my handwriting is painful, slow, and hard to read. This kind of has an impact on education.

Honestly, I feel like from reading what other people say that my executive function is pretty awful, and I recognize elements that are common to both ADHD and autism in my problems, and this makes everything rough if I'm not having fun in the process. It's really annoying.

Apples to apples , I'd say yes. One time I thought the same regarding myself. It certainly sounds good.

But the implication here is that the person who lacks ToM is closer to someone who does have theory of mind, due to having the same general intelligence- probably meaning same vocab. and similar experences on the strata of the economic scale for one? I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that wouldn't fly.

The ASD, even the High I.Q.'d likely take things literal where the High I.Q.'d non ASD wouldn't at all. Reading body language by developing algorithms in high intelligence folk would trump someone who was found wanting, for one example.

I think the only correlation here is the High I.Q'd on both groups would find mutual common ground, and the High I.Q'd in both groups can bridge the communication gap to a different mind( better able) as to a typical neurotypical.

This isn't directly demonstrable, but it is my hunch is that this is the mechanics or dynamics of it.

I feel like this article basically looked at some Aspies, noticed that they weren't actually heartless robots, looked at some gifted undiagnosed Aspies, noticed that they were Aspies, and concluded that giftedness mimics Asperger's without the parts that, coincidentally, Aspies don't really have either.

Unfortunately, that will continue to happen until someone comes up with a good, objective way to measure "Aspieness". Right now, it is far to easy to say that someone does not have AS if they function sufficiently well, so high IQ Aspies are probably heavily under-diagnosed.

High IQ doesn't automatically equal functional.

Absolutely, but I think that a lot of people, even people who should know better, confuse IQ with functioning.

I totally agree with this.