I have Asperger's, but I've also tested at 145+ on IQ tests.
I can remember anything I want to remember. There was something my class in school was supposed to memorize, but I chose not to. The next day in class, everyone had to stand up in turn and be quizzed by the teacher. I just sat there watching everyone else struggle. By the time the teacher got to me, I had everything perfectly memorized, better than anyone else in the class.
I remember details from my life all the way back to age 2. I was learning the alphabet and how to write my name at age 3. I was in 1st grade at school at age 5. The nuns said I could skip 1, 2, or even 3 grades if I continued there the next year, but my parents moved, and I had to go to stupid public school.
I am very good at solving puzzles. I can do the average crossword in 5 or 6 minutes, in pen. I am very good at math. I could always do the hard homework problems in advanced math in high school, which irritated a couple of the people who couldn't figure them out. In geometry, I could figure out shorter proofs than the teacher was showing us.
At a job, there was software that was actually going to fail at Y2K. I was asked if I could create a substitute from scratch. I said yes. They accepted that and immediately told the software company that they could just go away. What the company didn't realize was that all the dates in the databases had been encoded in a proprietary scheme to collapse a full date into two characters. But I successfully reverse engineered it and completed my task in plenty of time. I didn't even get a raise for saving the company. I suppose it was because I don't know how to play politics.
Because of my memory, I have memorized many thousands of rules that enable me to pretend to be normal. Most people don't know I'm an Aspie, unless I tell them.
I am very good at seeing patterns in things and thinking outside the box. I might could get work at any number of high level jobs today if I weren't old and liking my life outside corporate so much.
Another thing I do is talk too much without realizing it. :)
I've heard as autism being an evolutionary adoption to societal complexities - as tools, processes etc get more complex out of necessity, they cant outstrip the ability of people to comprehend and use them effectively. Its probably not a recent thing since evolution doesn't work within a generation or two, but a latent human property that has always been around and has helped with the big tech leaps at the historical points where these have occurred. Agriculture, systems of laws, water-wheels, construction techniques.
Some of say that it's actually the next step in human evolution. We are good at following rules, we like to help people, we almost never lie, we have interests we are super involved with, etc. Because of rules, we can't play politics at work. Also because of rules, we can memorize thousands of them so that we can appear normal most of the time. We've had to learn those rules the hard way, by making thousands of mistakes. Most of us do not act like Sheldon. I knew I was different by the time I was 7. Oddly enough, Einstein's IQ is only 10 or so points higher than mine, but no one outside my field has heard of me.
I have Asperger's, but I've also tested at 145+ on IQ tests.
I can remember anything I want to remember. There was something my class in school was supposed to memorize, but I chose not to. The next day in class, everyone had to stand up in turn and be quizzed by the teacher. I just sat there watching everyone else struggle. By the time the teacher got to me, I had everything perfectly memorized, better than anyone else in the class.
I remember details from my life all the way back to age 2. I was learning the alphabet and how to write my name at age 3. I was in 1st grade at school at age 5. The nuns said I could skip 1, 2, or even 3 grades if I continued there the next year, but my parents moved, and I had to go to stupid public school.
I am very good at solving puzzles. I can do the average crossword in 5 or 6 minutes, in pen. I am very good at math. I could always do the hard homework problems in advanced math in high school, which irritated a couple of the people who couldn't figure them out. In geometry, I could figure out shorter proofs than the teacher was showing us.
At a job, there was software that was actually going to fail at Y2K. I was asked if I could create a substitute from scratch. I said yes. They accepted that and immediately told the software company that they could just go away. What the company didn't realize was that all the dates in the databases had been encoded in a proprietary scheme to collapse a full date into two characters. But I successfully reverse engineered it and completed my task in plenty of time. I didn't even get a raise for saving the company. I suppose it was because I don't know how to play politics.
Because of my memory, I have memorized many thousands of rules that enable me to pretend to be normal. Most people don't know I'm an Aspie, unless I tell them.
I am very good at seeing patterns in things and thinking outside the box. I might could get work at any number of high level jobs today if I weren't old and liking my life outside corporate so much.
Another thing I do is talk too much without realizing it. :)
I've heard as autism being an evolutionary adoption to societal complexities - as tools, processes etc get more complex out of necessity, they cant outstrip the ability of people to comprehend and use them effectively. Its probably not a recent thing since evolution doesn't work within a generation or two, but a latent human property that has always been around and has helped with the big tech leaps at the historical points where these have occurred. Agriculture, systems of laws, water-wheels, construction techniques.
Some of say that it's actually the next step in human evolution. We are good at following rules, we like to help people, we almost never lie, we have interests we are super involved with, etc. Because of rules, we can't play politics at work. Also because of rules, we can memorize thousands of them so that we can appear normal most of the time. We've had to learn those rules the hard way, by making thousands of mistakes. Most of us do not act like Sheldon. I knew I was different by the time I was 7. Oddly enough, Einstein's IQ is only 10 or so points higher than mine, but no one outside my field has heard of me.
I'm one of those people who believe it's the next step in human evolution.
My kids are aspies; I'm probably borderline. We all have rather high IQs.
My memory has suffered over the past few years because of illness and I'm now rebuilding it.
I work my memory by learning multiple languages at once. I'm at about seven right now.