If I could have any superpower it would be perfect control of attention.
It takes a lot of effort to consistently focus the laser beam, and doubly so when there’s too much context switching!
ADHD is a common comorbidity of high-functioning autism (HFA), with sixty-five percent of participants falling above the clinical cutoff in one study (Holtman et al., 2005) and 28.1% in a retrospective (Simonoff et al., 2008).
I’ve been spending the past two weeks on a lit review on twice-exceptional adolescents (highly gifted + HFA), and what characterizes ASD is the difficulty of relating phenomena in the sensorium.
The spectrum from non-verbal to “active, but odd” is nearly entirely explained by IQ from untestable to 100 (HFA). Walking along the spectrum from minimum HFA to gifted, individuals are able to derive theory of mind and narrate stories from pictures in terms of cause and effect.
However, in that HFA range, it can still be difficult for people with ASD to narrate their own lives in terms of cause and effect. However, as you reach gifted, the one of the only deficits one seems to be left with is difficulty in identifying particularly complex emotions.
Anyway, I also think that sometimes people who have somewhat irrational obsessive passions in beautiful and fascinating puzzles and minds that organize and refactor the simulacrum in original ways are lumped onto the spectrum forgetting that brilliance itself is a neurodivergence