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TPE2
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06 Feb 2011, 8:16 pm

kfisherx wrote:
This is intersting as I wonder what this intellectual "gifted" is on the IQ charts. If it is only 2.2 percent who fall in the 140+ range than there is no way that there are so many "gifted" people here on WP. :) I suspect that this label encompases 130+ or perhaps even lower.


Even if gifted is 130+, this mean two standard deviations above the average - around 2% of the population.

Why so much gifteds in the forum? Possibly causes:

1 - Autism is really more usual in intelligent people

2 - Autistic people tend to the extremes of intelligence distribution - many gifteds and many with mental retardation; because autistics with very low IQ will have difficulty in participating in the discussions, only the gifted autistics appear in the forum

3- High IQ people are over-represented in the Net, and specially in discussion forums

4 - Discussing about autism is a relativity abstract topic of discussion, then attractive to high IQ people

5 - many gifted children are being diagnosed as having AS



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06 Feb 2011, 8:20 pm

patiz wrote:
A way of thinking about giftedness is to understand the spectrum, their are two types of brain on the spectrum, autistic brain at one extreme and normal brain at the other.

autistic brain -------------------------------------------------------------------------------normal brain
in between are the pervasive development disorders
they are aspergers, pdd,nos high functioning autism etc.

autistic brains like routine, sameness, being focused on repeating behaviours etc

normal brains i understand, like chaos,(...). to be gifted you must have a narrow set of traits, such as very focused, divergent intelligence not convergent like NT's and so on. in other words you must be autistic to be gifted, :twisted:


This not make much sense - like you have described the difference between "autistic brain" and "normal brain", it will be expectable that "normal brains" will be better at divergent intelligence, I think (but I don't put much value in this distinctions in "divergente" and "convergent" intelligence/thinking)



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06 Feb 2011, 9:16 pm

Um, since when did "high functioning autism" become in between the "autistic brain" and the "normal brain"???? "High functioning autism" is still simply diagnosed as "autistic disorder" same as any other made-up functioning label. (I hate functioning labels.)

My IQ was in the gifted range when tested at an age where most people don't know how to read, and I had hyperlexia (and this despite massive deficits in other areas, many of which I have a tape of the tester saying she outright ignored because of my high scores in a few areas). By the time I was 22 I was at the edge of some current definitions of the borderline range. (And what used to be MR before they moved it down a few notches in IQ.) In between there, it was.. well.. in between those ranges. It only tested in the gifted range once in my life, and never has again. (And it wasn't on the lower edge of it either.) It's quite possible that now that I'm 30 it's gone down even further. I haven't had a mandatory testing since then so I don't know, but the trend throughout my life is such that an acquaintance started joking about wanting me to live long enough for it to "go negative". (Yes, I know that won't happen.)

I strongly dislike IQ tests, and categories that are determined by them. And I can't stand the intellectual elitism promoted by many "gifted" programs. My areas of weakness meant that I struggled to keep up with even the typical kids, let alone the advanced ones, in many areas, but was pushed ahead and ahead and ahead (they thought I was underachieving from "boredom", and I lacked the language comprehension to do anything but repeat what they said to me) until I finally cracked and attempted suicide. I was nothing like the other kids in the gifted programs, except for a few who were probably autistic, and even they lacked some of the extreme deficits I had, especially in the area of language comprehension which has always been one of my weakest points despite my ability to "fake it" through rote memorization and finding sensory patterns to match my replies to.

(Note that even many people with very severe receptive aphasia have been said to be able to fake comprehension so well that few people, even some trained professionals, would recognize a problem. I'm usually able to see through such things, including with a staff person at the local DD agency who had Alzheimer's and was hiding it from the company he worked for. When I told them he had a severe receptive language impairment as well as other severe cognitive impairments and begged them to test him before sending him out to dispense medication to people (he'd made a mistake that would have killed me if nobody had been there to stop him), they thought I was insulting him. A year later they found out the truth. I can often spot it because I used and often continue to use all the same tricks. And other people who use those tricks can still spot it in me even though my receptive language has improved to the point where my expressive language actually means something a lot of the time.)

And certainly none of them lived in the universe I seemed to live in, where words and ideas and stuff just sort of soared by overhead and the world was about sensory experience and pattern. I'm starting to think it must be somewhat rare for autistic people like me who still live in that world past early childhood, to gain this ability to climb out of it long enough to explain things about it. Because the ones I meet online are few and far between, yet among other autistic people in other situations I've met more of them, usually without having had that "click" moment that allowed them to use language for something. (Some of those who can't use language for something can pass as being able to, as I did, and others don't seem to use language expressively much at all.)

I suspect that's one reason that I've always (whether currently considered "gifted" or not) found it easier to relate to people labeled "ret*d" than people labeled "gifted" overall -- there's more of them that live in that same realm that I live in, than there are people who were labeled "gifted" who live in same. (Despite the fact that there are plenty of us who got labeled gifted, there are just way way way more who got labeled "ret*d" or close to it. And then there's plenty like me who got labeled "gifted" once and never again, often due to a single skill or set of skills that looked really impressive at a young age, and then developed much more slowly than most people who have to work to get there develop, and then eventually get surpassed... etc.)

Another thing I hate: People telling me "That's not your real IQ." As if IQ is something inside a person's mind. Like a real attribute like height or weight. IQ just means how you performed on your last IQ test. It doesn't mean something inside you. It doesn't mean what you're good at or bad at in real life. And when people say I'm "smarter than that" it seems like an insult. Like people with an IQ below a certain amount can't be smart, whatever smart means to that person. Someone on here once said that they were not surprised that I once tested gifted, because I... made sense, or something like that. I found that really insulting too. I know lots of people who make lots of sense who have always tested "ret*d" or "borderline". Some of them have multiple degrees, jobs, books written, etc. which is more than I can say for myself. To say that they are "really gifted" then seems really insulting, like saying "If you really got the score you got then you'd never have been able to achieve..." Just yuck.

Then again, many of the people who say things like that are the same ones who think they can't possibly have an "intelligent" conversation with anyone of even average IQ, let alone below average. They probably talk to lots of people with average or below IQs all the time and just never think to notice because they're so sure they can't communicate with such people. Just like people who think they've never met a gay person, or an autistic person, because they just assume everyone is straight or nonautistic until proven otherwise. There are people with IQs in the 40s who can pass as nondisabled, hello!?! (As well as people with IQs from 130-170 who can pass as being in the severe/profound range due to how they look.)


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10 Feb 2011, 12:03 am

Quote:
Another thing I hate: People telling me "That's not your real IQ." As if IQ is something inside a person's mind. Like a real attribute like height or weight. IQ just means how you performed on your last IQ test. It doesn't mean something inside you. It doesn't mean what you're good at or bad at in real life. And when people say I'm "smarter than that" it seems like an insult. Like people with an IQ below a certain amount can't be smart, whatever smart means to that person. Someone on here once said that they were not surprised that I once tested gifted, because I... made sense, or something like that. I found that really insulting too. I know lots of people who make lots of sense who have always tested "ret*d" or "borderline". Some of them have multiple degrees, jobs, books written, etc. which is more than I can say for myself. To say that they are "really gifted" then seems really insulting, like saying "If you really got the score you got then you'd never have been able to achieve..." Just yuck.

Then again, many of the people who say things like that are the same ones who think they can't possibly have an "intelligent" conversation with anyone of even average IQ, let alone below average. They probably talk to lots of people with average or below IQs all the time and just never think to notice because they're so sure they can't communicate with such people. Just like people who think they've never met a gay person, or an autistic person, because they just assume everyone is straight or nonautistic until proven otherwise. There are people with IQs in the 40s who can pass as nondisabled, hello!?! (As well as people with IQs from 130-170 who can pass as being in the severe/profound range due to how they look.)


As usual, you nailed it.

Words like "smart," "intelligent," or "gifted" really have no meaning beyond what an individual chooses to assign to them, which, unsurprisingly, almost always reflects the particular skill set of the person doing the defining; hence, it becomes a matter of "ego." It's probably my AS flairing up, but I find I have very little use for nebulous, fuzzy, ill-defined concepts.

That's one of the reasons I take "giftedness" with a grain of salt. I have had any number of "intelligent" conversations with all manner of people, some of them social, some of them not, and I never once requested a copy of their IQ score. Also, a requirement for being labled "gifted" is having had an assessment done at some point in your life where a person with some kind of degree pinned a "gifted" lable to your chest; not everyone has had that opportunity, or, as you've pointed out, people who, for whatever the reason, did not APPEAR to be "intelligent," so no one even considered "intelligence" as a possibility.

This is why anyone who wants me to believe that they are a "genius" had better produce something of actual value to society; otherwise, as far as I'm concerned, they're just some schmuck in a world full of schmucks. Same goes for "super intelligence." Without results, it really is as significant as the ability to throw a basketball into a hoop while blind-folded: it's certainly a talent not possesed by the majority, but really, who cares?

P.S. I think you're a great conversation partner, Anuebend, with loads of "intelligent" things to say, and I couldn't care less if you are "gifted" or what your IQ is.


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10 Feb 2011, 12:17 am

XFilesGeek wrote:
P.S. I think you're a great conversation partner, Anuebend, with loads of "intelligent" things to say, and I couldn't care less if you are "gifted" or what your IQ is.


This is my preferred approach, I get kind of annoyed about how some labels get used, or assumptions made about what they mean. Speaking of which, your points about who has the opportunity to be tested and labeled are good points.

In a very real sense I probably wouldn't even be here* if not for Anbuend's writing. Sure, it took a couple of years, but without her writing there's a good chance I still wouldn't have a firm idea as to what's going on.



Last edited by Verdandi on 10 Feb 2011, 7:10 am, edited 1 time in total.

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10 Feb 2011, 1:36 am

I didn't read the article, however concerning interactions becoming normal, when I was a child I was always able to converse much easier with adults who actively worked to engage me.

I've also had some rather nice conversations with those on the spectrum in the academic realm, so I do think a part of smooth social dynamics is whether or not the person one is conversing with is on one's "level".



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10 Feb 2011, 7:05 am

XFilesGeek wrote:
Words like "smart," "intelligent," or "gifted" really have no meaning beyond what an individual chooses to assign to them, which, unsurprisingly, almost always reflects the particular skill set of the person doing the defining; hence, it becomes a matter of "ego." It's probably my AS flairing up, but I find I have very little use for nebulous, fuzzy, ill-defined concepts.


Aside from our concerns about people playing games for ego and oneupsmanship though I think there's still something to people having, per say, a precocious stance or being able to see certain things other people cant and that having a negative effect on their instincts, specifically in how that effects other people's impression of them as that person is acting on parameters that are invisible and unrelatable to most people. Most of the articles, from all over the place, mention that most 'gifted' need intervention to know that they aren't complete freaks because the world pretty much sends the message that if you aren't a lymbic nature first thinker that... well... you're a failed animal and should be in a furnace. If people already don't understand you or why you do x, y, or z, they're also apt to treat you like you're crazy for saying something that goes over their heads - if that happens a lot that can wreak havoc on a person, I'm not just speaking in hypotheticals.



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10 Feb 2011, 11:33 am

Interesting. First off I'm not gonna use gifted, I have no idea what that range is, I have no idea if I fall in there and the whole thing feels fraught with social peril. I'm just gonna go with smarter than the average bear. It's not a defined range, but at least I could get that pic-a-nic basket if I really wanted it. :wink:

Well I have had friends who understood what I was saying. Like I propose a solution to a problem and they pick up on the underlying structure that makes it a better solution than the other options straight away. They don't have to have it explained for 10 minutes before they catch up. I'm used to waiting for people. It's good to have at least one person who can keep up with you in some field, it can get so frustrating if you're always with people who are just a little bit lagged from you. Like when (before anyone thought anything was wrong with me) they always made me sit at the special ed table when I was getting nothing but top grades and feeling bored because they wouldn't let me do more advanced stuff in that year. In the end though I don't need people to be able to keep up to like them to enjoy their input, if they're nice people then y'know, better a nice person I have to wait for than jerk who keeps pace.



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20 Apr 2011, 12:55 pm

This is an interesting thread.

I haven't been officially diagnoses asperger's. I was diagnosed pdd-nos at age 13 more than 15 years ago. I took the WAIS and scored all over the place, ranging from just below average to high gifted depending on the subsection. A few years back I went into the navy recruiters office to see if I could test into becoming a "nuke". I scored into the 97th percentile. One recruiter asked if I was a genius, and the other said that this was by far the fastest time they've seen someone complete the test. I honestly thought it was some sort of prank because the questions were so easy, and then it was over!

Anyways, I've always had difficulties with social interactions, but feel that my intellectual abilities have made up for some of the deficits to some extent. I also seem to have some splinter savant skills that help out as well. When I was a child this most often manifested as the ability to do complex arithmetics at lightning fast speed. I was doing algebra intuitively at age 5 or 6.

These days I'm not so quick in that department. It seems I could retrain my mind to be nearly as fast, but haven't honed the skill/talent in a long time. What I do now is sort of the same, but applied differently. When I do any savant-like processing, there was a sort of integration of various internal stimuli. It's like incredibly fast transforming images, mixed with colors that sprout feelings, and I even hear notes in there as well.

Very hard to describe. I always have at least one beat running, and a mental image being manipulated. When I process subconsciously/intuitively, it's like this just goes haywire and the solution becomes apparent. I seem to have undergone some sort of neuralplasticity to connect this firing pattern to other brain regions so that I may emulate various social/emotional cues. That's the best guess I've got, for whatever it's worth.


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20 Apr 2011, 3:39 pm

This is an interesting thread.

I haven't been officially diagnoses asperger's. I was diagnosed pdd-nos at age 13 more than 15 years ago. I took the WAIS and scored all over the place, ranging from just below average to high gifted depending on the subsection. A few years back I went into the navy recruiters office to see if I could test into becoming a "nuke". I scored into the 97th percentile. One recruiter asked if I was a genius, and the other said that this was by far the fastest time they've seen someone complete the test. I honestly thought it was some sort of prank because the questions were so easy, and then it was over!

Anyways, I've always had difficulties with social interactions, but feel that my intellectual abilities have made up for some of the deficits to some extent. I also seem to have some splinter savant skills that help out as well. When I was a child this most often manifested as the ability to do complex arithmetics at lightning fast speed. I was doing algebra intuitively at age 5 or 6.

These days I'm not so quick in that department. It seems I could retrain my mind to be nearly as fast, but haven't honed the skill/talent in a long time. What I do now is sort of the same, but applied differently. When I do any savant-like processing, there was a sort of integration of various internal stimuli. It's like incredibly fast transforming images, mixed with colors that sprout feelings, and I even hear notes in there as well.

Very hard to describe. I always have at least one beat running, and a mental image being manipulated. When I process subconsciously/intuitively, it's like this just goes haywire and the solution becomes apparent. I seem to have undergone some sort of neuralplasticity to connect this firing pattern to other brain regions so that I may emulate various social/emotional cues. That's the best guess I've got, for whatever it's worth.


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20 Apr 2011, 3:58 pm

anbuend wrote:
Um, since when did "high functioning autism" become in between the "autistic brain" and the "normal brain"???? "High functioning autism" is still........eing in the severe/profound range due to how they look.)


You've given me a lot to think about.

I remember for a period of my life I was quite obbsessed with IQ, It might have been my special interest, I learned mine and was pleased but at this point - having grown up a little and gotten wiser, I've decided I just took my IQ test well, nothing more, it wasn't in the gifted range, just a little above average - and that says nothing about me, it doesn't tell people I love the piano or star trek, or that I walk on my toes when indoors but not when outdoors.


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20 Apr 2011, 3:59 pm

I've been mistaken for profoundly gifted and mentally ret*d. On one occasion, both things happened in the same day. I found it amusing... :lol:

Seriously, though, I'm good at a few things, horrible at a few things, in-between on a few other things. You can't really predict how good I am at any one thing by just looking at how well I do on the tasks you're given in an IQ test. What I know about myself, IQ aside, is that I'm good at logic, science, and writing; and that's good enough for me.

If you use very complex language, like I do, people will assume you're gifted even if you aren't; or will assume you're more gifted than you actually are. That's frustrating sometimes because that often means they don't believe you when you talk about having a problem. Because obviously, gifted people never have problems of that sort.


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20 Apr 2011, 4:36 pm

Callista wrote:
If you use very complex language, like I do, people will assume you're gifted even if you aren't; or will assume you're more gifted than you actually are. That's frustrating sometimes because that often means they don't believe you when you talk about having a problem. Because obviously, gifted people never have problems of that sort.


Thatthatthat. So much that. Online at least. Offline I have a whole different set of problems.


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20 Apr 2011, 4:43 pm

I'm an adult who was identified as gifted at a young age, and I've very frequently experienced feelings of isolation due to not having anyone similar to me who I can relate to.

I've always been into video games and the like, and my friends would always be the other people who were also into these things. These types of friendships were fun, but they didn't seem quite fulfilling to me. However, it came as somewhat of a wonder to me at times when I actually would meet someone on my same wavelength and feel like, "Wow, this is a true friend I am searching for!" Before I realized what was going on, I thought I was too flawed in some way for a long time, and believed in fate and that God was leading me to the people like me who I could befriend.

No offense intended to anyone who might have religious views, but I am an atheist now and find that belief pretty funny, looking back. :P

I don't know if I am diagnosable with any 'disorder'; I have suspected ADHD in the past, and I am currently researching Asperger's. From what it seems so far though, I don't have either. I am a bit socially impaired to the point where both my mom and my step-mom have independently told me they thought I had autism after watching TV specials, but I don't have a problem with reading people or knowing what the expected behavior is for a situation.



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20 Apr 2011, 8:34 pm

It's not impossible that you are part of the large group of non-diagnosable people who have autistic traits. You'll see it in engineers and other highly specialized people--no outright autism, but autistic traits, echoes that remind you of autism. Families of autistic people often have traits themselves. After all, autism is genetic, and those genes are floating around in the general population--there are probably a lot of people who have some of the genes, but not enough to outright have autism; there's that in-between region where there's no reason to diagnose because there's no disability, but you can still get people who are pretty close to the spectrum, and may even identify more with autistics than non-autistics, and effectively be culturally autistic themselves. It's not like there's this huge gulf of separation between autistic and typical; it's more of a gradual thing.


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20 Apr 2011, 8:50 pm

Callista wrote:
It's not impossible that you are part of the large group of non-diagnosable people who have autistic traits. You'll see it in engineers and other highly specialized people--no outright autism, but autistic traits, echoes that remind you of autism. Families of autistic people often have traits themselves. After all, autism is genetic, and those genes are floating around in the general population--there are probably a lot of people who have some of the genes, but not enough to outright have autism; there's that in-between region where there's no reason to diagnose because there's no disability, but you can still get people who are pretty close to the spectrum, and may even identify more with autistics than non-autistics, and effectively be culturally autistic themselves. It's not like there's this huge gulf of separation between autistic and typical; it's more of a gradual thing.


And that's exactly where I am. I think I have AS, but it could be that I am just gifted, my symptoms seem to match both extremely accurately. The often overlooked positive effects of AS are much more noticeable in me than the actual diagnostic criteria. It's not so much that I can't have a conversation as it is I would rather be doing other things. But one thing is for sure, even if I do not have AS I can relate a lot more with people that do have it as compared to NT's. And, not too ironically, I am pursuing a career in engineering.


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