The common ground of giftedness and autism

Even though I only score about 50% on the autism test, I have always felt attracted to autistic people feeling that there are a lot of commonalities between gifted people and autistic people. Although I have never had any communication problems (apart from being introverted) and never shown any of that typical repetitive behaviour, there are a lot of autistic traits I can relate to, in particular a total fixation with one particular subject/idea over a long period of time.

Simon Baron-Cohen has described the autistic brain as an extreme form of male brain. He describes autism vs. neurotypical in systemizing vs empathizing. Even though this describes the typical male form of autism quite well, there is also a female version of it. The female version does tend to be very empathetic, but it is not an extreme version of the female brain. Autistic girls have a great fear of speaking of the phone, for example, and in general are not very talkative either. The often have imaginary friends.

What Baron-Cohen doesn’t see however are other personality traits: autistic people are typically introverts and they are typically intuitives.

In Myers-Briggs terminology typical autistic boys correspond to

INTP/INTJ types

Whereas typical autistic girls correspond to

INFP/INFJ types

So, how are gifted and autistic people similar? Here is a list of shared traits of gifted autistic people:

1. Verbal fluency or precocity
2. Excellent memories
3. Fascination with letters or numbers
4. Specialized areas of focus or interest
5. Hypersensitivity to sensory stimuli
6. Memorization of factual information at an early age

To these I can add personally:

• hyperlexia
• hyperfocus
• a hightened sense of justice
• ADHD (frequently co-occurs with ASD)
• social anxiety
• gets easily frustrated
• sticking to routines and neophobia
• lagging behind in emotional development
• lagging behind in motor development
• neotonous traits, including delayed skeletal development. 
• fussiness 
• picky eater
• being skinny
• risk of being born prematurely
• potentially lower sexual dimorphism

All of these traits were equally true for my two-year-old gifted son Andrej (INFP type like me). In fact, his hyperlexia made me worry if he was autistic. He started to learn the numbers around twelve months old, soon followed by the letters of the alphabet, with the Greek and Russian alphabets to follow in rapid succession.

By age two he was a fluent reader in English. Foreign language learning also came very easy to him. Here the numbers in seven different languages.

Whenever Andrej had a new interest, he was completely obsessed with it and would not want to learn anything else until he had mastered his current interest (e.g. dinosaurs, minerals, etc.). In his first year of kindergarten he wouldn’t socialize with any of the other children and prefer to play on his own.

In school he displayed aggressive behaviour when forced to work and signs of ADHD (the passive variety, him being an introvert).  Despite his ADHD and lack in work ethic at school, he has kept up well with academics at age 11 now, in particular language development (years ahead of peers), has a great sense of humour (loves puns and pranks) and an avid interest in history and acting (not unlike autistic "masking").

ADHD is a common diagnosis for both gifted children and ASD children. There are also other common overlapping diagnoses like OCD, dyslexia, HSP, social anxiety and even schizophrenia. Also cases of twice exceptional gifted and autistic children are not uncommon.


Isolationist feature are generally common to both gifted intutives and ASD kids. Both have delayed puberty. Ironically they separate themselves by not accentuating their secondary sex characteristcs (no make-up, unisex clothes, etc.) and thus become more isolated from their peers during puberty. During puberty a lot of intutives develop social anxiety and suddenly start to look like ASD teens, even though ASD is typically disgnosed around preschool age. ASD children avoid touch and social contact even more than gifted children. Presumably not to be touched by the wrong kind of people. So, they isolate themselves even more than gifted intuitives.   

So, what determines if a person (e.g. with an INTP personality) turns into a highly gifted person or an autistic child? As searches for an autism gene have proven fruitless, my best guess is the environment. Oxcytocin probably influences neural development in a myriad of ways in combination with other genes. However, the biggest factor in developping ASD is a mismatch with the original environment in which intitutives were programmed by natural selection. 

One sign often found for autistic children is “bottle fed” vs “breastfed” in gifted children. Breastfeeding releases oxytocin, which intuitive people seem to need more of than non-intuitive people (or neurotypicals, as it were). 

Oxytocin-preventing occurrences that might (NB: current research tends to disagree with this idea) aggrevate problems in autistic children:

• Caesarean section (prevents mothers from releasing oxytocin during childbirth
• Bottle-feeding
• Separated sleeping (prevent the cuddle hormone from being released)
• Absence of a caring father and/or other relatives (intuitives are more social breeders who need deep connections
• Absence of intuitive siblings and intuitive playmates
• Growing up in an orphanage (institutional autism)

Genetic testing of intuitive children should be possible. If my hypothesis is correct, they have OXTR gene (oxytocin receptor) rs53576  AA genotype. The AG genotype might also be at risk for milder forms of autism (as well as other mental disorders). If intuitives can be identified early on at, a host of preventive measures could be taken, and many cases of autism could possibly be prevented.

I think my hypothesis also explains why there are so many occurrences of ASD among children of university professors and people working in Silicon Valley. 

To sum up: both gifted kids and ASD children have what I call "hunter-gatherer" minds. Read more about them in this posts. 

Dedicated to my step brother Harald and his autistic son

Also dedicated to Temple Grandin and Greta Thunberg, two great ASD heroes who try to make the world a better place.