This is a short blurb about a documentary called Intelligent Lives, the subject of which is people with low IQ. This is sometimes referring to as intellectual disability, or ID. Autistic people can have IDs as well as other conditions like depression and anxiety, and in fact, one of the subjects of the documentary is autistic.
I wanted to take a minute here to talk about IQ overall. In the educational setting, IQ measures intelligence. To the general public, that\’s the beginning and the end of it. A high IQ means you\’re smart and more likely to succeed, and a low IQ means you\’re not, and are less likely to succeed.
Now, I have a psychology degree, so I learned about IQ in more depth than most people do. IQ, or Intelligence Quotient, is a measure of how well any given person learns in an educational setting, especially academic subjects. That\’s all it does.
Does that seem like the equivalent of overall intelligence? If it does, let me explain a bit more. Academic subjects, like math, writing, history, and literature, are only a small portion of what a person draws on to be successful in life. In addition to these, there is also:
- Interpersonal intelligence: how well you sense others\’ emotions and motives, how well you handle disagreements, and how well you can manage and direct people into a working unit. Autistic people, myself included, often struggle with this form of intelligence. Because we\’re so different from others, it\’s not as intuitive to understand people.
- Intrapersonal intelligence: how well you know yourself, your reactions, your motives, your strengths, and your weaknesses. This skill is important for taking care of yourself.
- Musical intelligence: how well you can keep a beat going, identify specific sounds, and even how good your sense of pitch is. Perfect pitch is fairly rare in Western society, but approximate pitch (which is what I have) is more common. Musicians usually score highly in this, for obvious reasons.
- Kinesthetic intelligence: how well you can coordinate your limbs and fine motor movements. Athletes tend to excel at this, but so do surgeons and gamers.
- Existential intelligence: your grasp of what life is about, why we live, and why we die. This tends to come up in religious settings or philosophical ones.
- Spatial intelligence: how well you can visualize things in 3D. Architects, sculptors, and graphic designers all tend to excel at this.
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