Not to be a pedantic asshole and not trying to necro this but it’s flowers for Algernon. Very good read.

Yeah, I’m autistic, so I have a swing from 25th percentile in some categories to 99.9th percentile in my best categories. The crazy thing is that it feels the same from my perspective. I can only tell I’m relatively good or bad at something when I compare to others. And it makes for alot of confusing scenarios when people know me as a “genius” but then see me not catch something they would think is obvious.

I have a pretty special relationship with intelligence, and a somewhat uncommon perspective.

One of my strengths is spatial reasoning, I basically have a full map of everything I have ever seen permanently running all the time in some part of my brain. Down to milimeter precision. I can tell you exactly how far away something is from me now based on the last time I saw it. When I park my car in the garage, it is always within the same milimeter in both dimensions. Which is helpful, because my space is pretty tight.

The downside is, when there are alot of moving objects, it can cost alot… and I can’t not do it. So driving in heavy traffic is basically no. I would end up going catatonic, and thats not a good way to drive. So I always drive at the least congested times, even if that means having to fill a few hours of time before an appointment or something.

One of my weaknesses is of course the standard one that comes to mind, facial expressions. I have set up various ways to logic it out, but no matter how much thought and reasoning you put into it, the differences can be too subtle to make up for not being able to intuit them. And generally, it takes me so long to guess what someone is feeling that I might as well just default to guessing “annoyed” as it will likely eventually be correct anyway. Lol.

But, interesting enough, being smart at something does indeed feel like everyone else is bad at it, rather than that you are good at it. And being bad at something doesn’t innately feel like you are bad at it, and surprisingly, it also doesn’t feel like other people are better at it, despite me knowing that to logically be true. I would guess there is some survival instinct or ego preservation mechanic at play. But yeah, it kind of just feels like I make random mistakes and other people are getting lucky more often. Which kind of alligns with the way I’ve heard lower intelligence people describe their entire lives. So that kind of checks out. Unfortunately for me, I am otherwise smart enough to know that how it “feels” is an illusion.

Some of the things I am bad at are more like low aptitude, I could learn them with enough time and effort, it just takes so much more time and effort than the things I have high aptitude for. But other things are unfortunately seemingly impossible to improve, some physical structure of my brain just wasn’t initially designed in a way that it can perform that function. I’m assuming the aptitude stuff is mostly things that depend on regional neuron density, and mine likely varies across the whole. Some missing function ones have kind of all of a sudden sprung to life at some stage of my life, out of the blue. I would guess those are ones that I didn’t initially have the physical pathways for, but eventually neural plasticity found an alternate route to it. I didn’t have empathy until about age 15, but now I almost have too much, lol. But I do actively practice it. I will sit there and spend an hour literally emulating someone elses life in my imagination to the best of my knowledge. It’s very helpful for alot of things. I’ll know when I hit a wall in my emulation, what sorts of things I would like to know more about.

Another interesting note, because my brain is somewhat poorly wired in alot of ways, it actually accounts for a much higher percentage of my daily caloric use. I can eat so much more food than other people my size, sucks when paying for it, but awesome when eating some of my favourite stuff.