Autism and Intelligence... a start

I'm writing this in reaction to a recent video title I saw on facebook: "Autistic girl expresses unimaginable intelligence!"

Though I must say that I sort of understand the title, as long as the girl in question showed unquestionable signs of a lack of intelligence. But since the subtitle is "This amazing girl proves autism is not what most doctors think!", I must conclude that there is at least a hint of an insinuation that autism is commonly linked to lesser intelligence: hence the surprise in the tone of the title. I may be reading a bit too much into the whole 'unimaginable' aspect, but in view of other remarks and discussions and serious reports, there seems to be a general consensus (mainly in the NT community, obviously, since they seem to think they know so much about us, more than we do in some cases, they say...) that autism is more often linked with mental deficiency that the rest of the population. I disagree. In the case of high-functioning autistic people and aspies, it's obvious that many are gifted or highly gifted, but even more 'severely' autistic people can be gifted to profoundly gifted, it's just less noticeable, since their ability to communicate with the outside world is limited or non-existent. But someone's intelligence is not (or should not be) defined by one's ability to show off that intelligence. Stephen Hawking needs a computer to communicate, but he's still considered one of the world's greatest minds, is he not? So why can a non-verbal autistic individual not be as much a genius as Hawking? We just have not found out if it is possible for that individual to find a way to express whatever intelligence is locked away from the rest of the world. And maybe that's how they want it. Maybe some are intelligent enough to know that they don't want to communicate with the rest of the world. I know there are sometimes I wish I too was locked away inside my mind, utterly oblivious of the world around me.

What I believe, is that autistic people as a whole are no less intelligent than NTs. I even lean to the opinion that they are, in general, more intelligent than NTs. Possibly because their brains are not cluttered with all that built-in social nonsense of the NTs. Only time will tell what the reality of the story is. All I do know, is that we cannot assume to know what's happening inside the heads of our silent brothers and sisters of the spectrum.