Seeming spacey and distracted

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I'm just wondering if this is a typical aspie trait.

My whole life people have said I'm "spacey." They complain that I don't seem to be paying attention when they talk to me. I was actually tested for deafness in elementary school because teachers would ask me questions and I would just stare into space and not respond... (the results were that my hearing was actually well above average)

Yes, this is a common spectrum trait.

Dido

If this isn't too off topic, may I ask whether you know if you're paying attention to them or not? My sister gets a blank expression on her face sometimes or looks like she's off in her head, and I know for a fact that she isn't paying any attention to me, and she knows it, too. I've asked her, "Hey, where are you right now?" and she's said "I was listening to a conversation in the other room." Do you find yourself doing that?

I can appear to be paying attention and not be, but that's probably because I look people in the eye when they are talking to me. Then I get lost on a train of thought and I'm still staring at them but I'm not hearing a word they're saying. I don't think they notice because they never say anything about it.

I don't know if either my sister or I are on the spectrum, but I know that neither of us is NT.

I frequently (and unintentionally) space out and slip into my imaginary world while other people are talking to me. It's just that what they're saying is so boring compared to what's going on inside my head.

I also fail to notice changes in my environment. The biggest example of this was when my dad had bought my mom a bouquet of flowers, and I didn't notice them sitting on the table until about a week later. My mom was so disturbed by this that she mentioned it to my psychiatrist, who said that I fail to pay attention to other people and my environment because my brain doesn't find anything worth focusing on besides my special interests.

Ah yes...this happens to me from time to time. One recent example: I was in a meeting at work, and I was totally engrossed in something else that I had stopped paying attention to the meeting entirely...until someone called my name, and asked if I'd be able to do something. "Uh...sure." Same thing happens when my mom tells me about her day.

Oh yeah.

I am spacey but even at age 24, I am still regularly accused to have a hearing impairment and sometimes a sight impairment. In truth, my hearing is fine and my sight is corrected. I have sensory processing disorder as part of the autism however which apparently is mistaken for a hearing impairment by some who struggle to imagine and understand the nature of SPD well enough and that what I have isn't an "ear-thing" but a "brain-thing".

I have ADHD and it means that I am easily distracted. Again, this fact went largely unnoticed by teachers and my early reports and later my secondary school teachers described me as having normal or good focus. The obvious effects of my distractibility were misunderstood and wrongly attributed to deficits that I was later proven not to have.

Yeah I'm aware I'm doing it. I struggle to pay attention but they'll get half way through a sentence and I'll suddenly be thinking about something else. Or yeah, I'll be listening to some other conversation or noise across the room. Sometimes I'm just concentrating too hard on looking interested and making the right facial expressions that there is no room left in my brain to process what is being said.

I ask people to repeat themselves a lot and I think it makes me seem slow lol. I'm so much better when I'm given written instructions.

I'm also not positive I have Asperger's but I relate really well to people who do, and I have a lot of the symptoms. They are mild though, and I actually think I function the same or better than the average "normal" person (graduated university, have a good job, live alone and take care of myself etc). The social aspect causes me a lot of stress though.

I space out alot especially when something's boring and when I do I'm thinking abou my special interest

I'm often spacey and distracted, especially in class.

Yes it is a Aspie trait and because I do that kind of thing all the time, that gave me one more thing to add to my list of symptoms when I first began researching to see if I had AS. When I realized that was a symptom and I found others that described me, I got more and more excited.

"YES! I know why I am the way I am now! " was how I felt when I made my discoveries. Usually when this happens to me, I just start thinking about something else for no reason and then when a person talks to me, I don't even realize they said anything. But yet I can hear perfectly fine.

When it happens to me, most of the time, I also am thinking about my special interest, but other people hate it when I do it.

yep. . .I actually got my hearing tested a couple of years ago (at the age of 28ish i think) because my husband was complaining about me always asking him to repeat himself. . .

I don't know if people think I am distracted. In my opinion, most people don't care at all if I listen or not. They seem to prefer talking over thinking, and just unleash a vast load of meaningless words in may presence about things I don't care about. Therefore, I don't listen to them, nod every so often, and think in my head about whatever I want. Even when I listen actively, if I don't care about the topic, I don't really know what to say, so I don't necessarly bother unless the discussion is purely functionnal (e.g., with my boss at work).

I always seem like that. I can stare and space out into oblivion for ages.