I'm pretty slow at understanding some things

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Like, say, a person says something and I'll come up with my own interpretation, but sometimes it's malformed or simplified but after thinking about it a bit (Like, say, within ten to thirty seconds), I finally "get it". Is this common among aspies? If it's a problem that can afflict NT and aspies, what is it related to, precisely? Memory? Working memory?

It seems like it's related to what I consider "complexity": the more complex it is, the slower I am to interpret it correctly. For example, some of btbnyyr's posts seem to take me 10 seconds or so to fully understand because there's multiple pieces of information that often seem to come from "wildly different" angles (Upon review, these "widely different" angles really just are different 'perspectives', like her pretending to be someone else, and someone hypothetical being the subject of her example.). Sometimes, it seems like it's related to ... something I can't quite figure out.

For example, in real life, someone said to me "It looks like I'm not the only idiot wearing pants". I took this to mean that everyone else was wearing shorts, but later on, I realized that he was referring to the fact I was also wearing pants after seeing that I had pants on, haha.

So, it's not like people's meanings escape me (Though, I often have to clarify what NTs mean because I can see the semantic possibilities but can't infer which was their intention), but it seems that it sometimes takes a long time to fully comprehend. So, this and the previous example suggests TOM difficulties.

Despite these characteristics, though, I seem to exhibit many NT characteristics like accurately reading facial expressions and understanding someone's tone of voice and I mime behavior (Like, if a dog paws me, I paw them back. If someone waves, I wave.) suggesting I definitely have mirror neurons, and many things suggest I'm fairly smart: I've won first place in science fairs, statewide science competitions, math competitions and made some pretty accurate simulation software that's widely used in the EV world. So, I don't know what it is, exactly.

Does anyone know anything about language disorders? I read online that "language processing" difficulties seem related to theory of mind difficulties, but I don't know if this "language processing" difficulty was independent of, say, autism. I heard that schizophrenics also have TOM difficulties and they can have language processing difficulties, though they wrongly read and infer other's intentions instead of simply being clueless about it. I.E., the person walking behind them is assumed to be following them and is going to kill them instead of simply being some innocent person walking behind them.

I wonder if it's simply a language processing difficulty because both NTs and Aspies have complained that I can be confusing when talking of more complex matters, so maybe it's just a simple expressive language disorder which would imply verbal memory deficits? I remember being in speech therapy when I was younger and I appear to mispronounce my r's and I suppose my syntax is "weird" and I seem to occasionally omit articles and pronouns and, more rarely, words that aren't articles.

But, would a language processing difficulty also affect what seems to be a TOM difficulty? It doesn't seem to make sense, exactly, if it's *that* simple.

It's probably just related to being neurologically different than other people, for whatever reason (due to Asperger's or just your own unique brain wiring).

If you don't think or process information the same way as everyone else, you are bound to reach different conclusions, even though the input is technically the same.

Well, it could be language proccessing disorders, or it could be an auditory processing disorder, where you don't hear someone right the first time - the sounds seem garbled - and you need extra time to proccess what they are saying. Or it could just be part of being autistic and thinking differently, as others have said.

Here's a 'conversation' I've had with an NT recently.

ME:"You should thank your lucky stars for not being twice exceptional."

THEM:"I'm afraid I don't understand."

*At this point, I'm thinking .... "It can't be the twice exceptional part because surely they would've looked it up if they were unfamiliar with it? But what is it if it can't be that?"

ME: Haha, your response seems to directly suggest I have an 'exceptionality' I'm unaware of (Or I might be aware of.).

So, sorry about that but what about my tag is confusing? Is it the seemingly irrelevant "also", the "twice exceptional" part or is it the "Where did that come from?" factor or is it something else? I believe I have TOM difficulties that makes it difficult for me to understand your viewpoint, and to infer something specific from something that seems so ambiguous to me.

THEM: The 'twice exceptional' part.

And, yeah. See, I'm not really sure if that was actually an example of a TOM deficit on my part, as I was thinking they had the capability to look up "twice exceptional" if they were clueless. So, that might be a bad example. Or maybe it's a good example of a ToM issue because I tend to overestimate what other people are willing/going to do?

I just wanted to mention that research has not validated the findings regarding autistic people and mirror neurons - that is to say, there is no conclusive evidence that autistic people lack this.