Those accounts have contributed to a popular misconception: that when autistic people are unusually skilled, those skills are impractical and not connected to “real” intellect.

Other autistic people are known to possess extraordinary abilities, yet function at a high level. In the memoir Born on a Blue Day, Daniel Tammet, who has Asperger syndrome, described a childhood filled with social stumbles, but also his delight in mastering 10 different languages. Similarly, some tech geniuses on “the spectrum” might have better luck wooing venture capitalists than romantic partners, yet they still manage to live independently and make bank.

Increasingly, researchers are finding that even autistic people who seem, at first glance, to be profoundly disabled might actually be gifted in surprising ways. And these talents are not limited to quirky party tricks, like knowing whether January 5, 1956 was a Tuesday. Scientists believe they are signs of true intelligence that might be superior to that of non-autistic people.

Laurent Mottron, a psychiatrist at the University of Montreal who has studied autism for decades, led an analysis last year which suggested that the autistic brain seeks out the kinds of information it “prefers” to process while ignoring materials—like verbal and social cues, for example—that it doesn’t like. Just as many blind people have heightened hearing, Mottron says, the brains of autistic people might be better able to understand numbers or patterns.

In 2011, Mottron found that people with autism concentrate more of their brain’s resources on visual processing and less on tasks like planning and impulse control. That’s why, as he showed in 2009, autistic people are up to 40 percent faster at problem-solving.

For his autistic subjects, Mottron used a test called Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices, which relies on visual pattern recognition. At the time, he and others faced critics who thought autistic people would fare abysmally on such a complex test. In the mid-2000s, non-verbal people with autism were presumed by some to be mentally retarded. But as it turned out, “autistics are perceptual experts,” Mottron told me. “They are superior to us in processing complex patterns.”

Mottron has also found that people with autism have excellent memories—both when it comes to remembering long-ago events and in remembering details that neurotypical people would gloss over. That’s one reason why he closely collaborates with an autistic researcher, Michelle Dawson, in his lab. “Whereas the methodologies used in studies of face-perception in autism are for me terribly similar,” Mottron wrote in a Nature editorial in 2011, “Dawson can instantaneously recall them.”

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One of The Onion’s parody news videos is about an “autistic reporter” sent to cover a train accident that killed a man. “Luckily there was not structural damage caused to the train,” the actor says, before rattling off the train’s fascinating (to him) particulars, like its “Westinghouse E-CAM XCA448F propulsion.” That’s the cliche, of course: that an autistic person would memorize a locomotive-traction system but overlook the real, human story behind it.