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Bill Gates & Executive Functioning

25 Monday Nov 2019

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 27 Comments

Tags

autism, Bill Gates, executive function, IQ, Lion of the Blogosphere, nerdiness, petals around the rose

Like many of the greatest minds in STEM, Bill Gates has been accused of having a touch of autism by armchair psychologists. Others argue he is simply a nerd.

While some argue that nerdiness is a mild form of autim, others, like LOTB, argue that the two concepts are distinct.

I have not done enough research to have a strong opinion either way, but a key deficit in autism involves executive functioning.

What is executive functioning?

Executive functions (collectively referred to as executive function and cognitive control) are a set of cognitive processes that are necessary for the cognitive control of behavior: selecting and successfully monitoring behaviors that facilitate the attainment of chosen goals. Executive functions include basic cognitive processes such as attentional control, cognitive inhibition, inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. Higher order executive functions require the simultaneous use of multiple basic executive functions and include planning and fluid intelligence (e.g., reasoning and problem solving)

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_functions (2019-11-24)

What does any of this have to do with Bill Gates? My subjective impression is that Gates is relatively weak at EF. Perhaps not compared to the average person, but certainly compared to his super IQ matched peers. In support of this impression are three (admittedly weak) pieces of evidence.

1) He sucked at petals around the rose

If you’ve never heard of this game please check it out and record how many dice rolls it takes you to get six consecutive correct scores.

Then compare your performance to Gates’s.

This game strikes me as very similar to the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (a common measure of EF) in that it requires you to infer a rule based on repeated feedback. I infered the rule simply from the name of the game even before any feedback.

In Gates’s defense, he thought the game was called “pedal around the roses”, so this may explain his poor score.

2) He can’t control his hands

Anyone who has watched Gates in interviews knows how erratically his hands move around when he talks. I’m no neurologist, but this strikes me as an inability to inhibit certain responses, a lack of cognitive control or self-monitoring, and poor communication between the left and right brain. I tend to overuse my hands when I talk too so I see a bit of myself in Gates but I was insecure enough about it to stop.

I also have a problem where whenever I wave to someone, I also say “hi” even though they’re often too far away to hear me. I think this relates to the huge gap between my verbal (left-brain) and performance (right-brain) IQs. In extreme cases this can lead to unbuttoning your shirt with your left hand while simultaneously buttoning it up with your right-hand, thus never getting undressed.

3) He’s not that articulate

Despite the fact that Bill Gates’s verbal SAT score equates to a spectacular verbal IQ of 157, he’s not an especially impressive impromptu speaker. As commenter ” caffeine withdrawals” noted, he’s clearly above average, but not much more than that.

A professor of linguistics informed me that based on factor analysis, linguistic ability is actually three different abilities: vocabulary, working memory, and executive functioning. We know from Gates’s sky high verbal and math SAT scores that he’s likely extremely high in the first two, so only the third factor could be dragging down his speaking skills.

How does EF affect speaking skills? EF is all about planning and if you can’t plan your sentences and paragraphs in real lime, they wont be especially succinct. EF also relates to fluency because a certain amount of flexibility is needed to find the right word to express a given thought. People who perseverate too much on one word, or one type of word, will not be smooth talkers.

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IQ and autism

05 Sunday Oct 2014

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

autism, executive function, IQ, schizophrenia

For those who have never studied statistics, the non-autistic population in Western countries is said to have an average IQ of 100 and a standard deviation (SD) of 15. A standard deviation of 15 simply means that the standard amount by which most people deviate from the average is around 15 points, in other worlds, about two thirds of the non-autistic population have IQ’s from 85 to 115.

As for the autistic population, a recent study found 16% of autistic spectrum children had IQ’s below 50, while 3% had IQ’s above 115.

Assuming a normal distribution, an IQ of 116+ is 1.87 Standard Deviations (SD) above the autistic mean, and an IQ below 50 is 1 SD below the autistic mean. This suggests that autistic people have a mean IQ of 72 and an SD of 23 compared to the non-autistic population (mean 100, SD=15). In other words, while the average autistic person has a much lower IQ than the average neurotypical, the autistic population is much more cognitively variable. This resolves the paradox of why autistic people can simultaneously have a reputation for being both mentally disabled and brilliant scientists. Because, compared to neurotypicals, autistic people will be dramatically over-represented at both ends of the bell curve.

Above IQ 100

About 50% of neurotypicals have IQ’s above 100, compared to only 10% of autistic people.

Above IQ 115

About 14% of neurotypicals have IQ’s this high, compared to to only 3% of autistic people.

Above IQ 130

About 2% of neurotypicals score this high, compared to only 0.5% of autistic people

Above IQ 145

Only one in 924 neurotypicals score this high, compared to only one in 1,838 autistic people

Above IQ 160

Only about one in 42,000 neuotypicals scores this high, compared to one in 18,000 autistic people. At this level of giftedness, autistic people are actually OVER-REPRESENTED!!!!!!!!!!!

Above IQ 175

Only about one in five million neurotypicals score this high, compared to about one in 300,000 autistic people.

Above IQ 190

Only about one in 1.5 billion neurotypicals score this high, compared to about one in 14 million autistic people.

The fact that autistic people are so incredibly variable in IQ comfirms Pumpkin Person’s groundbreaking theory that autism is not actually one phenotype, but two phenotypes, that have been arbitrarily conflated by psychologists: Nerdiness (slow life history?) which causes high IQ, and executive dysfunction which causes low IQ.

Analogously, schizophrenia is probably also two phenotypes: coolness (fast life history?), which causes low IQ, and executive dysfunction, which causes even lower IQ.

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Was John Carpenter’s Michael Myers autistic?

04 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

autism, executive function, Halloween, John Carpenter, nerds, Rob Zombie, social class

 

myers.PNG

An idea, I’ve had for years (and I’m not the only one who has thought this) is that that the Michael Myers character from John Carpenter’s Halloween (and its sequels) was autistic.  I realize it was not the film maker’s intention to make him autistic (autism was not well known in the 1970s) but characters take on a life of their own.  Autism is a developmental disorder characterized by impaired communication skills, repetitive ritualistic restricted behavior, obsessive interests, and poor physical coordination.

Myers clearly fit the criteria.  His communication skills were so impaired he went completely non-verbal, and facial expressions displayed only what his psychiatrist Dr. Loomis called a “blank, pale, emotionless face” with no understanding of human concepts like “life or death, good or evil, right or wrong”.  A key deficit in autism is impaired “Theory of Mind” (ToM).  ToM is the ability to understand that other people have minds just like you do and to form theories about what they’re thinking and feeling; why they behave the way they do.  Because of this, many autistic people are said to relate to other people more like objects than like living entities.  If Myers lacked ToM, it would explain why he couldn’t grasp the difference between life and death, since he was oblivious to the mental states of living creatures.  Also, the scene in Halloween (1978) where he pins the teenager Bob to the wall and then Myers tilts his head to the left and right looking at the hanging corpse, seems to suggest Myers was viewing a person as just another object. Autistic people also struggle to make eye contact and communicate with appropriate facial expressions, so it’s no wonder Myers avoided both by always wearing a mask.

Myers also had repetitive ritualistic restricted behavior and obsessive interests.  He repetitively killed people over and over again in very much the same way, making a ritual of only killing them on Halloween while always wearing a mask.  Indeed he spent his whole life doing nothing but obsessing about his childhood crime of killing his older sister Judith.  Myers killed his older sister when she was 17 on Halloween and then spent 15 years planning to kill his younger sister when she too was 17 on Halloween and ritualistically brought along the big sister’s grave stone to make it more ceremonial.  When he failed to kill the younger sister (Laurie) when she was 17 on Halloween, he then waited 20 years to try to kill her when her son was 17 on Halloween.

This kind of repetitive obsession with symmetry (both sisters, both 17, both Halloween), numbers (17) and calender dates (Halloween) seems classically autistic.   Indeed some autistic people are so obsessed with numbers and calenders that despite being mentally disabled, can multiply huge numbers in their head or calculate the day of the week for almost any date you can throw at them.

Myers also lacked physical coordination.  He seemed incapable of running, despite being physically fit, and had terrible aim and hand-eye coordination: In Halloween (1978) he tried to stab Laurie but ended up stabbing the couch.

Also, the fact that Laurie was his sister, also reveals autism.  As I explained on my other blog, there seems to be a genetic link between autism and nerdiness, so many autistics tend to have nerdy family members.  This happens because nerds and autistic people have certain overlapping traits: interest in numbers and systems, social and physical awkwardness etc.  The main difference between nerds and autistic people is that the latter seem to have a mental disability called executive dysfunction which prevents them from living a normal life.  By contrast, nerds can be extremely high functioning and successful (i.e. Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg), however because nerdiness and autism are genetically linked, it’s not uncommon to see a hyper-successful silicon Valley millionaire, with a child so autistic he requires life-long supervision.  This was clearly the pattern with Laurie and Michael.  She was the successful high functioning nerd while he was too low functioning to live anything like a normal life.  Despite being high functioning, Laurie’s nerdiness was revealed by the fact that despite being pretty, she couldn’t get a date because boys thought her too smart (she was probably better at nerdy subjects like math and science than they were) and was treated like a freak by her friend Annie.  And like her brother Michael, she was a virgin.

However while Michael Myers seemed clearly autistic, in Rob Zombie’s remake, Myers was schizophrenic.  Some horror fans hate Rob Zombie’s remake because they feel Rob Zombie turned Myers from a middle class person they could relate to (scary thought) to what these people call “white trash”.  It’s fascinating that Myers went from seeming autistic in the original series when he was middle class, to being schizophrenic in the remakes, when he was lower class.  As I’ve previously explained, autism is more common in the higher social classes, while schizophrenia is more common in the lower social classes.

What’s fascinating is that autism and schizophrenia appear, in my opinion, to be opposite sides of the same coin.  When someone with a nerdy middle class or upper class personality has executive dysfunction, it tends to turn into autism.  When someone with a cool lower class personality (like the long haired heavy metal fan Myers of Zombie’s versions) has executive dysfunction, it tends to turn into schizophrenia.  Isn’t it interesting that the Halloween franchise so perfectly fits the pattern?

 

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