Quote: My poor W and the heavy cross she bears by having to listen to me go on and on and on....just like my posts. She claims that I say things 3 times.
My bf says the same thing about me, that I go on and on (like on this BB). But in my 27 years of doing grant and direct mail writing, I KNOW that people don't get it the first time, even if they are listening (reading) intently. It's just the nature of the listening process. I don't know about the influence of Asberger's, but I know that people will sit and nod and smile and agree while you're talking and not have the faintest idea what you're saying.
I consider myself a very good communicator-- speaking and listening-- but it's the nature of the listening process to hear first the things that resonate with what you already know and believe and simply not hear the new stuff. I see this happen over and over again at the organizations where I work when new projects are being developed. Most of the time there's nothing malicious in it-- people want to hear and understand. HeII, if it were that easy to grasp something upon one exposure to it, why would we put people through 16 years of school followed by four or more years of college? How many times in school did you think you "got it" and then found out on the test that you just didn't, even after studying.
They say that when Columbus' ships landed in... can't remember... Hispanola? Santo Domingo? (How many times did I hear it in school? ), the natives on the beach couldn't see his ships. They visually took in the objects, but their brains had no frame of reference, having never seen anything like the ships before, so their thought process simply discarded the information. Of course, this is speculation, but it is thought provoking, and leads to the further idea that when we encounter something completely new, we will look for someway to "hook" it into what's already in our brain, and if we can't find anything, we discard it. Kind of like when you hear a foreign language you listen hard for something that sounds like a language you know, but some languages are SO foreign-sounding to us (whatever our native or acquired languages) that they truly sound like gibberish to our ears. Then we'll listen for inflection or laughter or SOMETHING we can relate to.
), the natives on the beach couldn't see his ships. They visually took in the objects, but their brains had no frame of reference, having never seen anything like the ships before, so their thought process simply discarded the information. Of course, this is speculation, but it is thought provoking, and leads to the further idea that when we encounter something completely new, we will look for someway to "hook" it into what's already in our brain, and if we can't find anything, we discard it. Kind of like when you hear a foreign language you listen hard for something that sounds like a language you know, but some languages are SO foreign-sounding to us (whatever our native or acquired languages) that they truly sound like gibberish to our ears. Then we'll listen for inflection or laughter or SOMETHING we can relate to. 