Beyond Intelligence

I have spent much of my life valuing intelligence.

Being smart was something to aspire to. It shaped how I thought about myself and, if I am honest, probably shaped many of the people I became friends with and admired. I enjoyed people who could think quickly, understand complicated ideas, argue about them, make unexpected connections, or make me reconsider something I thought I understood. Intelligence was not simply one quality among many. Somewhere along the way, it became part of the currency through which I understood people, including myself.

I do not think there is anything inherently wrong with valuing intelligence. I still value it. What has become uncomfortable is realizing how easily valuing a quality can become a way of measuring a person.

That question became much less theoretical for me when disability became part of my personal life, and as my work increasingly brought me into the lives of autistic people and people with significant developmental and intellectual disabilities.

I found myself confronting a question that is easy to answer correctly and much harder to answer honestly.

Of course intelligence does not determine the worth of a human being. I believe that. Most of us would probably say that we believe it.

But what does it mean to actually live according to that belief when so much of what has traditionally drawn me toward other people has depended upon conversation, shared ideas, humor, intellectual curiosity, or a certain kind of reciprocity?

What happens when I love someone, care about someone, or simply want to know someone who may not connect with me through those things?

And perhaps the more uncomfortable question is this: if I sometimes struggle to make that connection, what does that say about me?

The currency of being smart

There are obvious ways in which our world rewards intelligence.

Parents take pride in children who learn early or seem unusually bright. Schools reward academic achievement. Our professional lives continuously sort people according to various measures of ability. We admire people by calling them brilliant, sharp, insightful, or gifted. Even in ordinary conversation, saying that someone is "really smart" often feels like we have said something important about that person.

I absorbed a great deal of this. Being intelligent became part of the story I told myself about who I was.

But I am beginning to think that the more consequential part was not how I learned to measure myself. It was how I learned to notice other people.

What makes me curious about someone?

What makes me want another conversation? What makes someone's company interesting to me? How much of friendship and admiration have I unknowingly built around qualities that happen to be particularly easy for me to recognize and value?

These questions become more difficult around intellectual disability because there is a comforting way to escape them.

We can expand our definition of intelligence. We can point out, often correctly, that conventional measures underestimate many people, particularly people who communicate differently. We can discover that someone who said very little in a particular setting has an extraordinary memory, can draw beautifully, can write things we did not know they could write, or understands far more than we initially assumed.

Those discoveries matter. Underestimating another person's abilities because they communicate differently is a real failure.

But there is also a trap here.

What if someone really does have profound intellectual limitations?

Why should I need to discover an exceptional ability before that person becomes interesting to me?

If my response to intellectual disability is simply to prove that everyone is actually intelligent in some different way, I may have left the original hierarchy intact. I have only become more creative about finding intelligence.

Perhaps the harder question is why being smart became such an important prerequisite for my attention in the first place.

When the measure stops working

This question has become particularly concrete for me through children I know personally.

I can see how naturally I am drawn toward a child who is exceptionally bright in ways I immediately recognize. I ask what he is learning. I want to hear about school, his interests, and the things he has figured out. One question leads to another. Conversation generates more conversation. Curiosity comes easily.

With an autistic child I am close to, the interaction can be different. He is lovely to be around, but he may become intensely absorbed in an activity or overwhelmed by what is happening around him. I will play with him and genuinely try to enter what he is doing. I care about him.

But I have caught myself noticing that my interaction with him can still be more limited.

That contrast bothers me.

It is not because I have consciously decided that one child deserves more of my attention. But attention itself can reveal something about us.

With one child, I instinctively know what to do: ask, listen, joke, challenge, follow an idea somewhere.

With the other, there are moments when I run out of my familiar ways of connecting.

Perhaps part of what makes intellectual conversation so rewarding is what it gives back to me. I ask a question and receive an unexpected answer. Someone becomes interested in something that interests me. We build on one another's thoughts.

When those familiar signals are absent, or when someone's attention is somewhere I do not naturally know how to follow, I have to find another way of being with that person.

And I am not always sure how.

I should also be clear that autism and intellectual disability are not the same thing. Many autistic people do not have intellectual disability, and a person's abilities may be badly underestimated when speech, sensory needs, behavior, anxiety, motor differences, or the environment interfere with how those abilities are expressed.

Autism has nevertheless repeatedly made me think about these questions because autistic people can challenge conventional assumptions about what interaction and reciprocity are supposed to look like.

There is another possibility I have had to consider as well: the interaction I am trying to create may matter more to me than it does to the other person. Someone who is deeply engaged in an activity may not be waiting for me to draw them into conventional conversation. Respecting another person cannot require them to perform interest in me either.

What I experience as difficulty connecting may therefore say as much about my limitations in recognizing another person's way of engaging as it does about their ability or desire to engage with me.

That is an uncomfortable thought, but an important one.

What parents have taught me to notice

I encounter another version of this problem in my clinical work.

There are times when I genuinely do not know how best to engage an autistic person with significant developmental needs.

I greet them. I ask questions when that seems appropriate. Sometimes a fist bump works better than conversation. Sometimes I try to take an interest in whatever has captured their attention. Sometimes the most respectful thing seems to be letting someone move around the room, focus on an activity, or simply be present in whatever way is comfortable for them.

And sometimes, despite genuinely trying, I run out of ideas.

The conversation naturally shifts toward the parents, because that is a form of interaction I understand much more easily. I still try to return to the patient when an opportunity arises, but I am conscious of the fact that my ability to know the person sitting in front of me is limited.

Parents have repeatedly made me aware of just how limited that view can be.

They tell me things I would never have known from the encounter alone.

A person from whom I can elicit very little may draw beautifully at home. Someone may write things I would not have imagined they could write. Someone else may have an extraordinary memory. A child who appears unsettled during much of an appointment may, in familiar surroundings, be generally cheerful. Parents describe humor, preferences, attachments, routines, frustrations, abilities, and entire parts of a personality that can be invisible to me during an hour in a clinic.

Initially, these revelations can feel like discoveries about the child.

Increasingly, I think they are also discoveries about the inadequacy of my observation.

There is more here than I can see.

And again, I have to resist turning this into a search for impressive abilities. Drawing, writing, or an extraordinary memory may make it easier for me to appreciate someone, but a person should not need an extraordinary memory to earn my curiosity.

The more interesting questions may be much more ordinary.

What does this person enjoy?

What overwhelms them?

What do they return to again and again?

What makes them comfortable?

What makes them laugh?

Whom do they seek when they are frightened or tired?

How do they express affection, if and when they want to?

How do they show that they want space?

What does a good day feel like to them?

What might they be experiencing while I am sitting across from them, somewhat awkwardly trying to initiate a conversation they may have very little interest in having?

Perhaps appreciation has less to do with discovering what is remarkable about another person and more to do with becoming curious about what it is like to be that person.

A language that is still there

There is something else I notice repeatedly through parents.

Even when I am unsure how to connect with someone in the room, the parent often understands things I do not. They may know what a particular sound means, what might bring a smile, what will probably be too much, when to come closer, when to give space, and subtle ways their child communicates pleasure, distress, excitement, affection, or simply "enough."

The affection between parent and child is often remarkably visible.

I have seen that even when the circumstances around the relationship are enormously difficult. A child can have limited language or severe dysregulation. There may be aggression. A parent may be exhausted, frustrated, frightened about the future, or uncertain about what to do next.

Love does not make any of those difficulties disappear.

I do not want to romanticize disability, and I certainly do not want to romanticize families. Parents and children are individuals, family relationships differ, and love is not a treatment for the practical realities of significant disability.

But I have been repeatedly struck by how much can exist between two people even when relatively little of it is accessible to me.

There is a language there.

It might be in the way a parent anticipates a need before it becomes distress. In a familiar phrase. In allowing a repeated activity to unfold. In knowing when a behavior means "leave me alone" and when it means "help me." In the brief return of a smile. In touch, when touch is wanted. In proximity, routine, patience, irritation, repair, and familiarity accumulated over years.

And it is important to say something else plainly: a parent's understanding is not the same as the autistic person's own voice. Parents can help me see things I would otherwise miss, but the person's own communication, preferences, boundaries, and autonomy still matter, however they are expressed.

Watching these relationships has nevertheless taught me something important.

A parent's love does not give a disabled person their value. Their value was never dependent upon someone else loving them.

Rather, witnessing a relationship sometimes allows me to see how much I was failing to perceive on my own.

There may already be humor, attachment, pleasure, preference, trust, comfort, or connection in forms that I am simply not fluent in. And there may also be a wish for solitude, distance, repetition, or an experience that does not need to be shared with me in order to matter.

My inability to immediately access another person's inner world is not evidence that there is less of a world there.

What does it mean to appreciate someone?

I have started wondering whether the word "appreciate" itself is useful here.

To appreciate someone does not have to mean finding them extraordinary. It does not require assigning a compensatory talent to every limitation. And it cannot mean pretending that every interaction feels equally satisfying or that disability never makes relationships difficult.

Perhaps appreciation can be quieter.

It can mean paying attention before judging.

It can mean taking another person's preferences seriously even when I do not share them. Recognizing that something repetitive to me may be absorbing, pleasurable, regulating, or comforting to them. Understanding that a person does not owe me eye contact, conversation, affection, or enthusiasm in the form I expect in order for their way of being to have meaning.

It can mean allowing someone to be enjoyable without being impressive.

It can also mean allowing someone simply to be, without requiring that they be enjoyable to me at all.

And perhaps, for me, it means interrogating what I have traditionally expected other people to provide in return for my interest.

This does not require me to stop valuing intelligence. I do not think I could, nor do I think I need to. Intellectual curiosity remains a genuine source of pleasure in my life. I will probably always enjoy an intricate argument, a clever idea, and a conversation that wanders somewhere unexpected.

The change I am trying to make is subtler.

I want intelligence to be something I value without allowing it to become my measure of value.

Those are not the same thing.

Beyond the measure

I do not think I have resolved this.

I still notice my attention moving more easily toward certain people. I still sometimes find myself unsure what to do when the usual conversational bridges are unavailable. I still have moments when another person's way of being in the world feels difficult for me to enter.

Maybe the goal is not to pretend those moments no longer happen.

Maybe it is to notice them.

To ask whether I have mistaken familiarity for depth, verbal fluency for an inner life, intellectual reciprocity for connection, or achievement for worth.

And then to become curious again.

Not, "What hidden ability will make this person impressive to me?"

But, "Who is this person when I stop requiring them to impress me?"

And sometimes perhaps even: "What are they already telling me about who they are, if I stop insisting that they tell me in my language?"

For someone whose identity has been shaped in no small part by being smart, these are not small questions.

They have made me reconsider not only how I understand intellectual disability and autism, but also what I admire in people generally and what I want my own children to learn to admire.

Intelligence matters.

But so do affection, humor, pleasure, trust, patience, familiarity, resilience, comfort, companionship, autonomy, preference, and the countless small ways in which a human life can matter, including ways that do not depend upon another person's recognition.

Perhaps there are forms of connection I have been trained to notice, and others I am still learning to see.

And perhaps going beyond intelligence does not mean denying the value of intelligence at all.

It means finally recognizing the limits of what it can measure.