He Looks So Smart

“He looks so smart.”

People say this about Charlie again and again, and variations: “He looks so intelligent in those glasses!” (Charlie used to wear Harry Potteresque prism lenses all the time.) “He seems so smart—-but does he really understand?”

I know that Charlie is smart. I also know that, when it comes to an IQ test, Charlie scores very low. Charlie’s minimal expressive language (coupled with the traces of verbal apraxia) and, while Jim and I have long presumed competence in him and feel certain that he understands everything he hears—–however long it takes him to process it—-we have become steadfastly realistic. At his IEP meeting back in June, when we talked about reading, this was in reference to teaching him words for things like signs (”men” vs. “women”—-Charlie has been confusing these). When we talked about “math skills,” this was in reference to counting money. The words “pre-vocational” and “functional” used to bother me—they seemed to me signs that the teachers and Child Study Team did not appreciate the full extent of what Charlie can learn; these sorts of skills have begun to occupy larger sections of Charlie’s IEP.

(Here, by the way, are modern IQ ranges for various occupations.)

Charlie seems mentally retarded to the casual viewer because of his lack of language, and his tendency to use his voice in non-verbal ways (such as humming), and his often slow response to our instructions (”pick up the bag”). It has seemed more and more to me that, had Charlie lived in a previous generation, he would have been diagnosed with “mental retardation”—–a word that used to be full of stigma and sting to me, but that I now see as a kind of cultural shorthand to describe how Charlie, on his own, can manage in society. And the trick for me as a parent is to dance back and forth between acknowledging his limitations—his, for lack of a better way of putting it, lack of intelligence—and emphasizing that he is most certainly smart.

Sharon Begley in Newsweek (August 20-27) [thanks to Bink for pointing this article out to me!] reports on a study published in Psychological Science about how, when a different intelligence test was used than the standard test (which focuses on language and social interactions) to evaluate autistic children, many of the children were found to be significantly more intelligent than assumed.

Testing autistic kids’ intelligence in a way that requires them to engage with a stranger “is like giving a blind person an intelligence test that requires him to process visual information,” says Michelle Dawson of Rivière-des-Prairies Hospital in Montreal [and of the blog Autism Crisis]. She and colleagues therefore tried a different IQ test, one that requires no social interaction. …….

……

For the study, children took two IQ tests. In the more widely used Wechsler, they tried to arrange and complete pictures, do simple arithmetic, demonstrate vocabulary comprehension and answer questions such as what to do if you find a wallet on the street—almost all in response to a stranger’s questions. In the Raven’s Progressive Matrices test, they got brief instructions, then went off on their own to analyze three-by-three arrays of geometric designs, with one missing, and choose (from six or eight possibilities) the design that belonged in the empty place. The disparity in scores was striking. One autistic child’s Wechsler result meant he was mentally retarded (an IQ below 70); his Raven’s put him in the 94th percentile. Overall, the autistics (all had full-blown autism, not Asperger’s) scored around the 30th percentile on the Wechsler, which corresponds to “low average” IQ. But they averaged in the 56th percentile on the Raven’s. Not a single autistic child scored in the “high intelligence” range on the Wechsler; on the Raven’s, one third did. Healthy children showed no such disparity.

If Charlie were asked to “arrange and complete pictures, do simple arithmetic, demonstrate vocabulary comprehension and answer questions such as what to do if you find a wallet on the street,” even if he knew the tester—even if he had done some version of the questirons before—-he would not do too well. Charlie still struggles to identify “man” versus “woman” correctly with photographs; he even more difficulty identifying objects or scenes that are drawn (whether black and white or colored). I am not sure how he would do on the Raven’s but it would certainly be intersesting—Charlie has always had an interest, and an eye, for patterns and designs, especially when color and shape are involved.

The Wechsler measures “crystallized intelligence”—what you’ve learned. The Raven’s measures “fluid intelligence”—the ability to learn, process information, ignore distractions, solve problems and reason—and so is arguably a truer measure of intelligence, says psychologist Steven Stemler of Wesleyan University.

The puzzling thing to me about the Newsweek article is its assertion that many parents have not noticed their child’s actual intelligence, whatever the results of a test. Begley poses both a pragmatic reason, and also another that points to our society’s limited understanding of what is “intelligence.”

Partly because many parents welcome a low score, which brings their child more special services from schools and public agencies, says one scientist who has an autistic son (and who fears that being named would antagonize the close-knit autism community). But another force is at work. “We often think of intelligence as what you can show, such as by speaking fluently,” says psychologist Morton Ann Gernsbacher of the University of Wisconsin. “Parents as well as professionals might be biased to look at that” rather than dig for the hidden intellectual spark.

How often do we equate (unconsciously, or not) silence with stupidity? It is the case that my son Charlie does a number of things that suggest he is, well, not thinking (such as breaking his favorite CD). But I think his reasons for doing things are often based on concerns that I am still trying to figure out—there is a sort of sensory pleasure in snapping apart a CD, and I also wonder if he thinks, or even finds, that is a way to “get to” the music. (As we live in the digital age, I can make as many new copies on new blank CDs as needed—maybe not so smart of me; such is motherhood.)

Further, I think of Ngin-Ngin, my 102-year-old grandmother who does not read or write, and still only speaks in Cantonese, after having lived in the United States since the 1920s. I have never had a conversation with her, if you only count an exchange of words as a “conversation”: Growing up with Ngin-Ngin attuned me to the fine subtleties of non-verbal communication (gesture, tone, body language; food). Ngin-Ngin does not just look smart, she is. Given the Wechsler without my aunt to interpret, I suspect she would not score very highly (Ngin-Ngin has had no formal education of any sort) but if you consider what psychologist Stemler refers to as “fluid intelligence”—”the ability to learn, process information, ignore distractions, solve problems and reason”—Ngin-Ngin’s life is rich with examples. Think of all she had to learn and process and reason through as an illiterate, immigrant, Chinese peasant women with five children to raise, her brothers and their families to bring over from China, all while working full-time (sewing parachutes during World War II; working in garment factories; cooking meals from not much, cooking soups and herbal remedies; taking care of my grandfather when he developed diabetes; more cooking, taking care of other people’s children…..).

Ngin-Ngin can sew entire wardrobes of clothing. I read and teach Latin and ancient Greek and can never remember how to hem my pants. Charlie always knows when the next ocean waves is coming.

It is not that I think “there’s a boy in there”: The boy is here. Language is not Charlie’s mode just as the water—the ocean—is a foreign country to me; as American must have been to Ngin-Ngin, as China is to me. Everyday while we have been here at the beach I have been knocked over by a wave and wiped out (sometimes landing at the feet of of trying-to-be-cool teenagers—I look quite “stupid” indeed); as I try to get the salt water out of my contact lenses, I can hear Charlie’s warble and there he goes again, under, within, a wave.

“Fluid intelligence,” yes.