Comments | asperger: Genius in Autism info help

drowninautumn in asperger

Genius in Autism info help

Apr 07, 2009 17:31

I have a report to write for psychology 101, and I am thinking of doing it on the link between Genius and Autism seeing as how the world's greatest minds have pretty much all been posthumously diagnosed with Asperger's. I am finding articles here or there, but most say exactly the same thing in different wording: Great minds like Einstein and ( Read more... )

school, famous autistics, username: dg - dz, advice

Comments 10

tooimpurenangel April 8 2009, 01:42:22 UTC

Good luck! I wish I had some legit knowledge, but all of mine is anecdotal.

drowninautumn April 8 2009, 01:49:17 UTC

Anecdotal might help, if at the very least giving me knew ideas for search terms.

Genius and... poetcsw April 8 2009, 01:45:30 UTC

I've searched and searched for anything that wasn't based on Michael Fitzgerald's work... cannot find anything. He and his colleagues cite their own works, in circular fashion. I was curious when starting my dissertation, but found only the one source for this claim: Fitzgerald.

The world's "greatest minds" are impossible to link to anything without a diagnosis. The "twice-exceptional" claim of autism/AS + genius was among several such claims published in monographs but never demonstrated via an empirical data. It's like the anecdotal links between depression and creativity, ADHD and crime / drug abuse, and, once upon a time, the supposed connection between TB and being a poet or novelist.

Genius is an abnormality, by definition. That is not a negative -- who wants to be normal?

If someone has found other sources for this claim, especially in a peer-reviewed journal, I would love to know the citation, too. I'd certainly be thrilled...

Re: Genius and... drowninautumn April 8 2009, 02:19:26 UTC

I am getting the sense I might want to rethink my topic, as it seems it may be nothing more than a correlation, and perhaps the only reason there is a connection is because autistics have an easier time hyper-focusing on their passion, which again is probably more of an assumption or correlation than anything else.

Probably explains why I can only find articles on how Einstein and Newton were probably autistic.

conuly April 8 2009, 01:49:40 UTC

I think your premise is flawed, honestly.

Some of the world's greatest minds have been posthumously diagnosed on the spectrum - not, by any means, all or even most of them ( ... )

drowninautumn April 8 2009, 02:11:02 UTC

Thank you for the perspective. Truth be told I had not began researching the posthumous diagnoses of the "great minds" in any real detail as of yet. I don't really want to write about how they were autistic, and really wasn't planning on talking too much in depth about that. As of now, the only plan I had in mentioning them was in the intro as a lead in but also to at least shake the preconceived notions of autism for the read right of the bat. "Einstien may have been autistic?" that sort of thing. That is not to say I wouldn't have ended up using this later in the paper, so this is very helpful in keeping this in perspective when writing the paper ( ... )

alchemia April 8 2009, 04:25:03 UTC

Does searching for Autism + Talent (instead of Genius) work for your writing interest ( ... )

drowninautumn April 8 2009, 17:29:44 UTC

Yes that works much better. Thank you for all of this.

idiotgrrl April 8 2009, 13:55:48 UTC

I just unloaded two books on the subject and I'm sure there are more. One is by Michael Fitzgerald.You can google for the name in connection with, I think it's specifically, Asperger's and artistic creativity. The other is by someone whose name I've forgotten but included "High Achievement" among the titles. Jessica Kingsley Publications handled a lot of such titles; also called JPK Publications.

Hope this helps,

Pat