AQ Test

There's a tendency - the name of which always escapes me - for medical students to begin to believe that they have some rare disease or syndrome as they study about all of the many and varied strange diseases that they may one day have to treat. Long lists of varied and vague symptoms lead some to become convinced that they have some bizarre ailment that statistically has virtually 0% chance of being true. I've always figured that my self-perceived autistic tendencies were the result of that same tendency.

As an undergraduate I studied psychology with an emphasis on childhood developmental disabilities. The two areas that I delved most deeply into were type I diabetes and autism. Autism is a fascinating impairment that is hard to define and diagnose, difficult to treat, and bizzare to experience. It is generally characterized by an inability to think outside of one's self. The range of physical and emotional development for austistics can be from a level requiring complete dependency on others to very high functioning, nearly normal seeming adults.

Wired today has an AQ Test that they introduce by reporting that, "Psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen and his colleagues at Cambridge's Autism Research Centre have created the Autism-Spectrum Quotient, or AQ, as a measure of the extent of autistic traits in adults. In the first major trial using the test, the average score in the control group was 16.4. Eighty percent of those diagnosed with autism or a related disorder scored 32 or higher."

The test will take you about 5 or 10 minutes. Leave your score below. The test to me seems that it may also be a measure of introversion. Though one might argue that autism is not much different than introversion run amok. In any case, I scored a 35. I am reminded that, "The test is not a means for making a diagnosis, however, and many who score above 32 and even meet the diagnostic criteria for mild autism or Asperger's report no difficulty functioning in their everyday lives."

Not sure I would say no difficulty, but still, I get by.

Jonathan 3/29/2006 08:11:00 AM