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Yensid
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21 Apr 2011, 5:45 am

kfisherx wrote:
If you CAN have conversations with people that are not about your interests, if you can look at people and if you feel comfortable around people and you are gifted it is likely you are just gifted. I work with mostly highly gifted people and they are very similar to me including their general disdain for people not of our kind. Still when the social times come, they actually can participate. I have a WAY hard time and many times simply cannot (not capable). It is subtle but pretty significant. They can read other people's body Language and are aware of how people perceive them. I really am not and cannot. Etc... Subtle but significant...


I work with a lot of highly gifted people, and there is just a difference between me and them. I do fine in work situations, and have no trouble talking about my work. On the other hand, ask me a question about a different topic, and my mind just goes blank. I've been in conversations about topics that I am quite familiar with, but I still cannot keep up with the conversation. By the time that I manage to get my slow memory to pull up the appropriate information, the conversation has moved on to something else. I miss half of the jokes that people make. In larger groups, I find that they talk so quickly, and I cannot find a pause so that I can say something. They socialize together, and I get left out. At parties, I can never do more than stand at the edge of a conversation, and pretend to listen. I'm always distracted by my current interest, and have a hard time focusing on new topics. It's just so obvious that I am seriously lacking in a lot of skills that they take for granted.


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21 Apr 2011, 6:32 am

swbluto wrote:
I was doing a study correlating verbal and nonverbal IQ scores and autism test scores and, surprisingly, VIQ and PIQ were correlated at roughly -.18 with DIAGNOSIS_SCORE(Which is a linear combination of AQ test scores and the Aspie / Neurotypical test scores.); this suggests, everything else being equal, those with a higher IQ are likely to score less on autism tests. Of course, does this mean they really tend to be "less autistic" on average or are they just more capable of influencing the test score in a way that makes the score "less autistic" (Since most probably desire not scoring in the "autistic region")? Or is it something else, like they are better able to socially compensate with their intellect and thus they're likelier to be more social and score "less autistically" on the 'social questions' of the AQ and Aspie tests?

http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt158261.html


Other possibilites:

- People with more autistic traits can have difficulties with the IQ tests

- imagine that the probability of someone be interested in this forum is a function of two variabels: his degree of autism (more autistic, more the interest in WP) and his inteligence (hypothesis - more inteligente people will have more interest in the forum, because they could have more interest in issues like mental conditions); in these case, an artificial inverse correlation between IQ and autism could appear in the users of the forum (in more concrete terms - while the forum probably have severe autistic people in all range of IQ, perhaps only the mild autistics with high IQ participate, while the mild autistics with low IQ does not even suspect that they can be autistic).



kfisherx
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21 Apr 2011, 9:17 am

Yensid wrote:
kfisherx wrote:
If you CAN have conversations with people that are not about your interests, if you can look at people and if you feel comfortable around people and you are gifted it is likely you are just gifted. I work with mostly highly gifted people and they are very similar to me including their general disdain for people not of our kind. Still when the social times come, they actually can participate. I have a WAY hard time and many times simply cannot (not capable). It is subtle but pretty significant. They can read other people's body Language and are aware of how people perceive them. I really am not and cannot. Etc... Subtle but significant...


I work with a lot of highly gifted people, and there is just a difference between me and them. I do fine in work situations, and have no trouble talking about my work. On the other hand, ask me a question about a different topic, and my mind just goes blank. I've been in conversations about topics that I am quite familiar with, but I still cannot keep up with the conversation. By the time that I manage to get my slow memory to pull up the appropriate information, the conversation has moved on to something else. I miss half of the jokes that people make. In larger groups, I find that they talk so quickly, and I cannot find a pause so that I can say something. They socialize together, and I get left out. At parties, I can never do more than stand at the edge of a conversation, and pretend to listen. I'm always distracted by my current interest, and have a hard time focusing on new topics. It's just so obvious that I am seriously lacking in a lot of skills that they take for granted.


This is EXACTLY how it is with me. My coworkers were blown away by my DX as they never really saw me too out of the ordinary. Now that it is out they are all seeing just how much it affects me and they are all making great efforts to include me in social situations and to coach me as well. Before my DX I could hang out with all these exceptionally bright people and fit right in. In fact some of them are so weird that it is a huge/shared joke that I am the only one with a label in my lab.



swbluto
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21 Apr 2011, 9:49 am

Yensid wrote:
kfisherx wrote:
If you CAN have conversations with people that are not about your interests, if you can look at people and if you feel comfortable around people and you are gifted it is likely you are just gifted. I work with mostly highly gifted people and they are very similar to me including their general disdain for people not of our kind. Still when the social times come, they actually can participate. I have a WAY hard time and many times simply cannot (not capable). It is subtle but pretty significant. They can read other people's body Language and are aware of how people perceive them. I really am not and cannot. Etc... Subtle but significant...


I work with a lot of highly gifted people, and there is just a difference between me and them. I do fine in work situations, and have no trouble talking about my work. On the other hand, ask me a question about a different topic, and my mind just goes blank. I've been in conversations about topics that I am quite familiar with, but I still cannot keep up with the conversation. By the time that I manage to get my slow memory to pull up the appropriate information, the conversation has moved on to something else. I miss half of the jokes that people make. In larger groups, I find that they talk so quickly, and I cannot find a pause so that I can say something. They socialize together, and I get left out. At parties, I can never do more than stand at the edge of a conversation, and pretend to listen. I'm always distracted by my current interest, and have a hard time focusing on new topics. It's just so obvious that I am seriously lacking in a lot of skills that they take for granted.


Interesting, that sounds eerrily similar to the characteristics I've observed from my interactions. There just seems to be incredibly slow memory access times that 'accessing conversationally-appropriate-information' speeds are too far below the minimum requirements for standard conversation. I've particularly noticed this on the WP IRC chat channels, and other chat channels as well, which I why I tend to prefer forums where there's time to respond.

Is it really a matter of skill, though? I suppose a person who's been exposed to enough conversation would have a greater amount of conversational data at hand, and they've probably accessed that data multiple times in the past, so the amount of retrievable data is higher and the recall speeds are shorter. However, I'm not quite sure if that's my case as I've always observed I've been a "slow thinker"(A catholic apologist described in my Christian Heritage history book in 7th grade was characterized as a slow but great thinker, and I liked to think I was *just* like him. :P) and I'd imagine that it's simply naturally extending into the conversational domain and I could swear I had a lot of practice during high-school (Maybe not as much as others, but "enough practice" to overcome any presumed 'skill level' thresholds.).



Yensid
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21 Apr 2011, 6:44 pm

swbluto wrote:
Interesting, that sounds eerrily similar to the characteristics I've observed from my interactions. There just seems to be incredibly slow memory access times that 'accessing conversationally-appropriate-information' speeds are too far below the minimum requirements for standard conversation. I've particularly noticed this on the WP IRC chat channels, and other chat channels as well, which I why I tend to prefer forums where there's time to respond.


Yes, I prefer forms of communication which give me time to think. I'm not too bad with one-on-one communications, even when it is face-to-face, but groups of people change topics so quickly.

Quote:
Is it really a matter of skill, though? I suppose a person who's been exposed to enough conversation would have a greater amount of conversational data at hand, and they've probably accessed that data multiple times in the past, so the amount of retrievable data is higher and the recall speeds are shorter.


Well, I think that any skill is a blend of natural abilities and practice. So while I have certain natural deficiencies, I can learn to do better, though, in general, not as well as someone who is naturally gifted in that area.

Quote:
However, I'm not quite sure if that's my case as I've always observed I've been a "slow thinker"(A catholic apologist described in my Christian Heritage history book in 7th grade was characterized as a slow but great thinker, and I liked to think I was *just* like him. :P) and I'd imagine that it's simply naturally extending into the conversational domain and I could swear I had a lot of practice during high-school (Maybe not as much as others, but "enough practice" to overcome any presumed 'skill level' thresholds.).


In my case, I'm actually a very fast thinker. It just takes me a long time to get started. I find it to be a very frustrating combination. I hate that it makes me seem less knowledgeable than someone who can switch topics more gracefully.


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21 Apr 2011, 7:05 pm

kfisherx wrote:
If you CAN have conversations with people that are not about your interests, if you can look at people and if you feel comfortable around people and you are gifted it is likely you are just gifted. I work with mostly highly gifted people and they are very similar to me including their general disdain for people not of our kind. Still when the social times come, they actually can participate. I have a WAY hard time and many times simply cannot (not capable). It is subtle but pretty significant. They can read other people's body Language and are aware of how people perceive them. I really am not and cannot. Etc... Subtle but significant...


anbuend wrote:
Someautistic people can do those things though so be careful not to be too simplistic, especially since many autistic people are unaware of how much trouble we have socially. Such a person could just be a person who could pass well and had no social anxiety. There are many ways to be autistic.


I could be wrong, but from what I've seen in videos of aspies interacting, I don't think I'm anything like that. I don't give monologues on a subject and not even notice that the other person isn't listening. I don't think I have a problem with body language, but yet I have yet to score anything less than very aspie in all of the emotional tests I've done on the internet. In social situations with people I don't know, I usually do not talk unless I am spoken to directly because that's how uncomfortable I am. I find myself confused what I should be looking at and what I should be doing with my hands, but when I'm around people I do know I am perfectly comfortable saying whatever is on my mind, and I usually do.

I'll put it this way; there's too little a difference between AS and giftedness, especially with the huge gray area there is.


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