Autism and intelligence

[Guest guest]

Hello list,

 

yesterday I saw a very interesting document about autism and so called

savant people. Savants are people who have a special talent for numbers,

memory, music etc. About a half of savants are autists.

 

One of the most famous autists in the world, Temple Grandin, was one of the

persons in the program. Grandin is an autistic woman who has attained high

university degrees. She has a special talent for visualising

three-dimensioned spaces in her head. She can also look at the world from an

animal perspective. She has designed less threatening cow houses and

abattoirs, because she knows what causes fear in animals. But she cannot

differentiate facial expressions and she's never been in love and probably

never will. She says that she doesn't understand the phenomenon.

 

ADB has the TOB of Temple Grandin: 29th August 1947 at 2.30 PM +5.00 Boston,

MA (from birth certificate).

 

The neuroscientists in the program said that now we know scientifically that

men and women have quite different brains. When a male foetus is in the

womb, at the time he develops secondary gender features, he has as much

testosterone in him as adult men do.

 

With some people, testosterone afflicts the development of brain. The

scientists noted that those babies, who had had high testosterone levels in

the womb, reacted less to facial expressions when they were one year old. On

the other hand, autism is a condition where a person can possibly be highly

talented with numbers, with memory, with technical information etc., but he

(majority of autists are men) cannot recognize expressions or other people's

emotions. The scientists said that basically autism is " maleness of brain

taken to the extreme " .

 

Today I read a story in the newspaper of audophile (what a word! I mean

people who have an obsession for hi-fi equipment) men (because they usually

are men), and I couldn't help thinking about this male brain thing.

 

Now - because I'm a bit " autist " myself for a woman and love numbers - I'm

naturally interested if we could find something common in the charts of

autistics. I found 12 autistics in ADB (Birth: Handicaps, Defects: Category

Notes Autistic) with B data or higher and though the experiment group is too

small to be " scientific " , I created again an Average Autistic and looked at

his shadbala procents. Here they are:

 

The Sun 114,5%

The Moon 112,2%

Mars 137,8%

Mercury 107,2%

Jupiter 109,1%

Venus 123,1%

Saturn 123,7%

 

When I put them to the shadbala ranking list of 90 people chosen by chance,

I get

 

1. The Sun, ranked as #38

2. Mars, ranked as #41

3. Venus, ranked as #48

4. Jupiter, ranked as #50

5. Mercury / Saturn, ranked as #51

6. the Moon, ranked as #54

 

These people have averagely quite strong Suns! And the Moon is the weakest

planet. Isn't it interesting, that the classical masculine planets, the Sun

and Mars, are on the top? And the Moon, the planet of intuition, motherly

instict, care and energy sensation, is the weakest? The Moon might well have

something to do with getting along with other human beings with instinctual

knowledge, of automatically sensing other's motives, feelings and emotions,

and reacting to them properly. Autists are generally not very skilled in

that.

 

Greeks connected the Sun with Apollo, the god of truth, beauty, harmony,

pureness etc. The Fourth Way student Susan Zannos writes in her " Essence and

Enneagram " that Solar people are a bit naive and childlike and they don't

understand irony or double meanings. Just like autistics. Indians say that

the Sun is about truth. So, it's actually very fitting that autists often

have strong Suns.

 

I made a comparative study about people with Mensa level IQ. I took the

first 50 persons by alphabet in the high IQ category and made an Average

High IQ Person. He had an exceptionally weak Sun! The planets were ranked as

follows:

 

1. Venus, #38

2. Mars, #43

3. The Moon, #45

4. Jupiter, #48

5. Mercury, #49

6. Saturn, #50

7. The Sun, #63

 

The results are again quite average. We can see that our Average High IQ

Person doesn't have an exceptionally strong Mercury. But the Sun is clearly,

even strikingly weaker than the other planets. It seems that a strong Sun

is almost an obstacle to intelligence as we generally understand it. People

with high intelligence seem to have strong Venuses, that's quite interesting

too. On the tropical zodiac Gemini is often seen as an intelligent sign, and

most of the tropical Gemini goes sidereally to Taurus, ruled by Venus.

 

Regards, Sari