Oh, I see. All the genius in the world came from autism. Not hard work and simple genius. God forbid really smart people be recognized as such. It would offend the stupid.
This verifies what I have been claiming all along. I am a genius, in my own way.
Some can go through an entire lifetime without being distracted by what anybody thinks.
Psychology once again states: people who are self-confident, read, are not sex-crazed, and don’t believe in collectivist policies have SOME sort of mental illness.
Allow me to skewer this soft science with something learned in high-level math classes: all measurement is done from a base: be it a point, line, or plane.
Why should psychologists, who are all pretty screwed up, use themselves as the reference point?
I have noticed that the super successful people I know personally all literally have OCD. My son has asperger’s. He is getting his doctor of pharmacy degree while completing his requirements for his black belt in karate. He has never had a date. As someone who has been involved with autism spectrum disorders, I can see it with Einstein. Asperger’s is sometimes known as the Absent Minded Professor Syndrom.
His disease was megalomania, with a special French gene variant that makes the disease especially severe, not autism.
The author doesn’t have a clue. Einstein worked in a patent office initially because he didn’t have a doctoral degree. After he received his doctorate, Einstein held positions in several prominent universities - including Princeton after he left Germany in 1933. Einstein certainly “disrupted” Newtonian physics, but I don’t remember any of the biographies of him or his contemporaries that I have read stating that he was an especially “difficult” or “disruptive” colleague.
People. Lighten. Up.
I don’t see all the P.C., pinko liberalism some of you appear to see in this article. And the article DOES NOT SAY that being autistic CAUSES genius, let alone ALL genius.
I’ve seen this happen before. Some Freepers jump on any article about psychology, with ready-to-paste boilerplate about how psychology is about nothing but excusing criminals and unruly children. Even when there isn’t a hint of such stuff in the article.
I have Asperger’s. I have experienced most of what is described in this article—except the part about writing tons of books and being a genius.
What I have experienced is that having some of these characteristics can help with tasks I’m good at, and makes other tasks just about impossible.
Kinda had me going there, till it got to Kant. ;-`
Lingering effects?
Immanuel Kant’s reply “Immanuel can.”
Stuff and nonsense ... a few years ago, they were drafting conveniently dead people into the ranks of “ADHD sufferers”.
He was quite profoundly autistic as a little guy but seems to have outgrown most of the autistic traits. He is doing very well, socially and popular among his classmates.
I'm trying to figure out if he's flawed or if he's a designer baby and there's really no downside to his "disorder", if it really is a disorder.
The key here is the reference to “ASD”. Autism Spectrum Disorder is a hoax, a fiction. All they mean is that some people enjoy solitude and doing mechanical tasks.
Says something about my 15 year math problem besides the “geek” tag. Maybe I can get disability??
PING
An interesting psychological note on this subject is an odd one. There has been speculation that, at some time in the human species’ primitive past, that to reduce risk, people evolved a technique to prevent themselves from getting either too focused, or too unfocused.
It is “talking to ourselves”, or “the internal dialogue”.
Simply put, as a safety mechanism, when the mind becomes focused or unfocused, talking to ourselves breaks up the concentration needed to continue. If focused, it unfocuses us; if unfocused, it focuses us. This keeps us from being eaten by a tiger or walking off a cliff.
From infancy, we are trained in this learned technique of talking to ourselves by every adult we meet. And in truth, in a survival situation, it works.
However, this technique actually inhibits both the attention needed to complete complex intellectual tasks, *and* the ability to become unfocused for creative and artistic “leaps” of the imagination.
Not often being chased by tigers or wandering on cliff edges these days, many other techniques have been evolved, specifically to turn *off* that noise in our heads, so that we *can* become focused or unfocused for greater lengths of time. It is an essential part of most meditations to begin by “stop talking to yourself.”
Interestingly, it can be shown that if you do develop the ability to shut off your internal dialogue for a length of time, your greater focus gives you apparently greater intelligence, solely because you can focus on a problem long enough to solve it correctly.
I say this as background to the Asperger’s “geniuses”. They might simply be people who, by dint of their autism, do not *have* an internal dialogue. They only appear to be geniuses because of their dramatically longer focus.
From personal experience, I met a “California surfer dude”, who was just the opposite. His internal dialogue was so effective that he could barely complete a sentence without being distracted. This made him appear to be an airhead.
With just a few weeks practice with a technique to control his “internal dialogue”, he appeared to have increased his IQ by 30 points. He was thrilled that for the first time in his life he could speak coherent paragraphs, *and* he could finally finish ordinary tasks, something impossible for him before, because he would be distracted.
My own brother said I showed some signs growing up that might now be considered autistic. I’d come home from school when I was nine or ten and just lay on the sofa thinking up stories in my head for hours at a time. I didn’t write them down (except for a few); I just stared into space and lived them.
Thank goodness they didn’t drug kids back then. My careers in information science and my avocation of playwrighting are both going pretty well. I’m no genius, but I think some of my unusual (”autistic?”) tendencies as a child helped me with my creative outlets as an adult.
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Retards with poopy pants bump!