Neurodivergence at top universities -are we seeing the stereotypical character features associated with intelligence?

[mids2019]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14506757/oxford-students-diagnosed-adhd-extra-time-exams.html

It looks like conditions such as ADHD are now quite prevalent at universities and I was surprised at some of the figures.

Is the rise of ADHD something general in society or could some of the characteristics of conditions such as this always have been with us in terms of being a product of being clever?

My DC went to private school and such 'push' is unheard of infact it was almost groundbreaking when DC got his diagnosis and we had to discuss it with the school. Most of the dc are bright and certainly not in desperate for an extra 1hr. See anecdote doesn't equal data.

I was at Oxford decades ago. It was very male dominant then. With hindsight, there were so many (undiagnosed) ND people. Several of my old friends have been diagnosed since.

And also that it had to be negatively affecting their work so that they were below expected standards - so if somebody were exceptionally bright/able, there was nothing to see here, look, it's not affecting their learning, they're either just the same as everybody else or still above them.

What that can't allow for are those who could achieve far, far more had their needs been recognised.

Maybe all of the factors around being in independent schools - failure to meet needs, failure to recognise needs, failure to get around gatekeeping, a tendency to miss the generally compliant kid who is motivated in lessons (when not half listening, having grasped the content already and just drawing cartoons in the back of their exercise book) but zones out or acts out in the playground, always hands homework in but only did it during lunchbreak, the ability for parents in a position to pay fees being able to navigate the system, not take 'ah, she just daydreams a bit' or 'he just needs to take part in more sports', to pay for private assessment and ensure that it's accepted by the NHS, independent school SENDCOs not overwhelmed with having to meet the needs of significant numbers of other children without the funding to do so - they are why there is a greater number of students with diagnoses at universities that are more challenging to access?

No, it’s prevalent enough that Ofqual is looking into it.

https://schoolsweek.co.uk/ofqual-investigates-extra-exam-time-at-private-schools/

Thank you, @applegingermint . We have UG students used to mitigation at school who do not meet out criteria for such, even though we are known as a good university for ND students

This doesn't surprise me and I'd actually go as far to say these are probably students with AuDHD (autism and ADHD) rather than just ADHD.
It takes a special type of dedication, a fixation if you will to get into a top university. In addition, academia as a career is probably also higher than other careers for representation of people who are ND.

People with AuDHD are more likely to slide under the radar (myself included), not looking like your average ADHD or autism stereotypes and in my experience, the ones to be able to get to a higher level before they burn out.
The autism keeps you on path and the ADHD makes you think outside the box.

That article is from Nov 2024 and so there’s been a full exam cycle since then. Has Ofqual investigated and reported back to BP and has it been published anywhere?

Cambridge academic here, although I do minimal undergraduate teaching. I work across clinical medicine and engineering, and I would say most of my academic colleagues are NT. They are passionate, hardworking and extremely clever, but none of them show any of the signs that are associated with the neurodiversities mentioned here (there’s a push for awareness of these conditions so lots of material out there). To be honest, I don’t see how you could run a group/international collaborations/clinical work and trials if you required any amount of scaffolding, which historically hasn’t existed. I would say the majority of my colleagues are also not English.

Maths might be a bit different, but again my collaborators in Maths don’t fit those boxes either.

Nonsense.

Absolutely this. I know plenty of autistic/adhd students with no extra time because they didn’t need it. I also have a DC who gets extra time (NOT private school) and the school has to gather evidence across the whole year to prove it is needed AND be given that extra time in all school tests.

Coming back to ADHD medications - these work differently in people with ADHD and those without.

Both autism and high IQ are largely genetic, with significant overlap.

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnins.2016.00300/full

A suite of recent studies has reported positive genetic correlations between autism risk and measures of mental ability. These findings indicate that alleles for autism overlap broadly with alleles for high intelligence, which appears paradoxical given that autism is characterized, overall, by below-average IQ. This paradox can be resolved under the hypothesis that autism etiology commonly involves enhanced, but imbalanced, components of intelligence. This hypothesis is supported by convergent evidence showing that autism and high IQ share a diverse set of convergent correlates, including large brain size, fast brain growth, increased sensory and visual-spatial abilities, enhanced synaptic functions, increased attentional focus, high socioeconomic status, more deliberative decision-making, profession and occupational interests in engineering and physical sciences, and high levels of positive assortative mating. These findings help to provide an evolutionary basis to understanding autism risk as underlain in part by dysregulation of intelligence, a core human-specific adaptation.

This is an interesting study:

https://www.nature.com/articles/jhg20083

It would also explain why autistic genes arw prevalent: there is clearly an evolutionary advantage to offset some of the difficulties or they would be highly unlikely to have become so widespread.

It’s also the case that many autistic people have children with other autistic people, just as many intelligent people are attracted to and have children with other intelligent people, so both sets of genes become concentrated.

No, it isn’t nonsense at all. Numerous studies have shown a significant correlation and identified some of the genes which contribute to both high IQ and autism, hence the overlap, per my links above.

And numerous have shown the same with learning disability.

A quick look at your narrative articles also doesn’t say that more people with autism have high IQ. It says high IQ is often associated with autism. Which is the same with low IQ.

You said that the comment from another poster stating that “a larger proportion of autistic people have high IQs that the general population” was “nonsense”.

It is not. It is a statistically proven fact and supported with a genetic explanation because the genes causing high IQ overlap significantly with those causing autism.

It is also the case per the links that I posted that there is a different cohort of the autistic population - often with other cormorbid conditions affecting their cognition - with lower IQ than the general population: autistic people’s IQ tends to be clustered at the extremes, the opposite of the bell curve of IQ in the general population.

Therefore, the comment you stated was “nonsense” is not nonsense at all. It is a statistic fact that amongst those with the highest IQs there are a disproportionate number of autistic people.

It is not. It is a statistically proven fact and supported with a genetic explanation because the genes causing high IQ overlap significantly with those causing autism.

High IQ genes overlapping with autism doesn’t mean autistic people have high IQ. Just as the statistically proven fact supported with a genetic explanation that genes causing Down’s syndrome overlap significantly with autism doesn’t mean autistic people have Down’s Syndrome.

As someone who worked in the University sector for a long time, and who is late diagnosed ND, I really think that ND people have been disproportionately represented in Universities, both as students and as academics, since the first University came into existence.

I’d be extremely surprised if neurodivergence wasn’t in fact instrumental in the creation of that type of institution.

I mean that traits like having deep and focussed lifelong interests, interest based intellectual motivation, advanced pattern recognition and so on are pretty fundamental to academia.

The statistically proven fact is that a higher proportion of autistic people have very high IQs than the prevalence of those IQs in the rest of the population. This is what you said was “nonsense”. The research data shows that it is not nonsense at all.

You have not given evidence of that. You linked a narrative paper suggesting people with high IQ are more likely to be autistic, not vice versa.

Short terms and many frequent assignments is a total nightmare for the ADHD student, so I must disagree with you. They may manage school with its structure and support very successfully, then arrive at top universities with high levels of assessed work, it all needs extensions to even be remotely feasible.
Plus universities seem to be shortening the terms and increasing the workload.
It's very very hard to be an ADHD student in the top UK universities and a lot of reasonable adjustments and extensions are needed. That's why these students have appalling mental health a lot of the time.

UK students with ADHD find it reasonably easy to get the adjustments needed as GPs are usually supportive, but the formal diagnosis route is very very long, long waiting lists and then the government wants fewer people to get diagnosed, so often you can't get a diagnosis. So then you can't get any medication and ADHD person is failed by the NHS ultimately and faces huge extra challenges at university that neurotypical students do not face.

I can believe that the top 2% of those with high IQ have a high proportion of autistic individuals with innate skills. My 7 year old with verbally delayed skills who struggled with social communication aced the tests at 99.4 th percentile.

That doesn’t mean that all autistic or ADHD people are the same.

It also doesn’t mean that support is inappropriate. . .

Why was my post saying very clever people are not neurotypical deleted? ‘Neurodiversity’ refers to differences in the way the brain operates/thinks. It is NOT as synonym for autism and ADHD. It includes a whole range of conditions including for example dyslexia, dyspraxia, low IQ (learning disability) AND high IQ (very clever people). By having a high IQ they are by definition not ‘typical’. Very high IQ is a recognised Special Educational Need.

It frustrates me that ‘neurodiversity’ is used so widely to seek support on the basis that there is diversity in how the brain operates and people think. But so often most of that diversity - people with a range of conditions affecting ways of thinking - are quickly ignored and only autism and adhd are considered.

It is disappointing to see @MNHQ joining in this deletion of people with other neurodiverse conditions.

Absolutely. There is a huge prejudice and misunderstanding in many people (including, shockingly, many social workers, education stagg and healthcare staff who aren’t specialists in neurology) believing that when an autistic person has a high IQ and can mask that this indicates they have lower support needs. Research has demonstrated that those who are capable of masking suffer a “double whammy” of their support needs being underestimated, and the damage that masking itself does on top of dealing with the effects of the autism itself.

It’s one of the worst prejudices and failings of public services towards autistic people that these “services” in their ignorance (or perhaps, it often seems, wilfully) try to justify their minimisation and dismissal of these particular autistic people’s support needs by using as an excuse the fact that they happen to be in the proportion of autistic people who are highly intelligent.

It is so well-evidenced and prevalent across the country that it’s difficult to conclude this is any kind of “misunderstanding” that just so happens to be repeated everywhere, rather far more likely indicative of systemic and deliberate attempts to circumvent the law and illegally deny support to people who are, in many cases, extremely vulnerable despite their IQ, but often unable to advocate for themselves against such deliberate gaslighting.

I agree: finally you have posted something that isn’t factually disproved!

The term “neurodiversity” is so broad as to be meaningless for the reasons you’ve stated. It has also been co-opted by many people with no clinically diagnosed/ diagnosable medical condition that would meet the diagnosis threshold. Everyone is “neurodiverse” because every human brain is different. And as you say, by definition someone with high IQ is “neurodiverse” in any sensible interpretation of such a term given the IQ rarity charts and how unusual very high IQs are as a percentage of the population.

Far better to stick to discussion of actual data on diagnosed neurological conditions that actually meet the specific diagnosis thresholds, as for discussion of any other medical condition, hence me highlighting the claims you made earlier as being without any basis given the statistical data which demonstrates the opposite of what you had claimed in your earlier post.

I do agree, however, that nebulous terms like “neurodiverse” are unhelpful to any rational and objective discussion and if they must be used then it is self-evident that high IQ would fall within this. Have you challenged to Mumsnet why they deleted your post about that? It was a perfectly reasonable and factual comment so I can’t see any justification for deleting it, unlike many of the horrendous and factually disproved comments about autism that are left to stand on this thread and others. Mumsnet really needs to get a grip on its moderating of these topics and apply its Talk Guideline appropriately and consistently.