Not understanding what people are saying

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I find it to be the most difficult part of talking to people. They will explain something to me, I will ask why, and it still sounds really vague even when they explain. If I am reading any sort of informal text written online it often just looks like gibberish to me (like a huge block of text that doesn't make sense). I can understand when reading a very formal and precise article, but through any kind of discourse with another human I have a very hard time understanding it. Do you ever find it difficult to understand what people are explaining? Is this an autistic trait?

It is not an Autistic trait.

Do you have any learning disabilities?

Unless you have a learning disability your ears may be the culprit.

If they are blocked, infected, damaged.. any form of degradation can cause auditory attention to crumble. I have this problem myself and I'm not sure what the cause is so for the past few years I have been washing inside my ears excessively in the shower. It doesn't help.

There's probably a million other things that can cause this (could just be a characteristic of yours), but I know there are external problems that can interfere with your abilities.

Try cleaning out your ears with a slightly moist Q-tip if you have them handy.

If this has been an issue since birth then it's likely a part of you, rather than an untreated problem, and you'll probably have to learn to live with it.

I have problems understanding what people are saying too.
And also understanding written instructions.
When listening to lectures, I zone in and out of the audio frequently, probably hearing one phrase, nothing, phrase, nothing, phrase, etc.
Of the phrases I hear, I don't understand most of them, because there was too much missing during the nothing phases to provide the context for filling in the rest.
Class lectures are useless to me if they are powerpoint presentations, the only kinds I understand are chalk talks, as most of the information is coming in visually, and I enjoy hearing the tapping of chalk against slate.
Without the tapping, like if person is using marker on whiteboard, I have much more difficulty zoning into the lecture.
I understand a lot more when I am engaging in conversation with someone, but I often zone out if they talk for more than 30 seconds at a time.
I prefer rapid back and forth eggschanges of short phrases.
Once, I did an eggsperiment with someone who also seems to prefer this, and this was a super fast back and forth conversation that I found ideal.
Most people don't engage in this type of conversation though, they tend to say too many things in succession each time they open their mouth.

I have trouble understanding stuff like you're saying. Have a certain amount of cognitive impairment. Which may be more a part of my other neurological problems like dyspraxia. And I also sometimes have trouble understanding something said to me and need to have it repeated to me.

If these people are expressing subjective information, and you have very concrete thinking, those two could cause a communication problem. There are no precise words for subjective experiences, so they cannot be understood as well as the technical information you read.

Also, we understand other people's experiences by comparing them with our own experiences. People on the spectrum have atypical subjective experiences, which might make it difficult to relate to NT subjective experiences. Also, if you have alexithymia, you may be unfamiliar with thinking about subjective states such as emotions, and that unfamiliarity makes it difficult to understand when similar subjective states are described.

I doubt that's the problem because the OP states that this also occurs while reading.

I've often had problems tuning in and out of conversations, but if I concentrate hard enough and repeat in my mind what is being said, I have no trouble understanding. The problem I do have is that I find a lot of the conversations boring, so I lose interest, or I respond to something I find boring, by going off at a completely different tangent to the subject of the conversation and so upset the people I'm talking to.

I don't know how some people can so fluently multitask [pay total attention to multiple conversation threads in a room, cocktail party-style] and respond instantly and perfectly appropriately to each one at the right time while at the same time checking their email and listening to music].

I haven't met anyone who can do this.
All the people I know, if you talk to them while they are looking at their phone, they didn't hear what you said.

I have trouble understand too maybe since birth (I don't know) I know I had ALOTof damage in that ear when I was in a small fire.

When I was younger, I could understand ppl, but I had so very much problems understanding my schoolwork (I was in special ed, I still had trouble in science & other classes)

ALOT of the time, I can't understand my sister, it feels she talking too fast for me & I can't keep up, my brain just shut off.

I misread the OP, I thought they were using an analogy for some reason.

I agree with your post.

Hello LizardWizard,

When talking to people your stress/anxiety levels probably rise because of your autism. This anxiety can reduce your intellecual abilities very much.

Your reading problems can be caused by poor motor control of your eyes, also a symptom within the autism spectrum.

In both cases it is helpful to learn how to relax to the max. This wil lead to a reduction in anxiety and beter/more fluid motor control. Also, learn to interpret just with a few pieces of data, instead of wanting to absorb all the data before interpreting.

Hope this helps.

I do have this problem as well and I have thought for a while I have something else going on than just AS. I also have listening problems where I cannot listen to a lecture and I zone out but I have always thought it was ADD. Then I just learned from my mother that my school said I had attention problems so I was take to a neurologist and she said my brain was going too fast so it wasn't processing the information and also one side of the brain would go too slow and the other side was going too fast so it was affecting the information being processed. When I was 15, I learned information I process is supposed to be on the other side of my brain than on the other. I am not sure what this is part of.

I used to just repeat instructions and questions before responding and before doing them. That was how I processed it I wonder if this is what they called echolalia. i still did it as an adult because I was trying to clarify I understood the instructions but my office clerk would get mad at me about it because he assumed I didn't listen.

I still have a hard time understanding instructions like with cooking and I have had to read things over and over to understand it, same with word problems.

Something weird about me is I am able to listen to a lecture if it's not having to listen to someone talk and talk and talk or having to watch a video of someone talking, unless it's a documentary, I have no problems listening then. I was able to watch Forgotten Planet and Life After People without a problem because they didn't have someone standing there talking talking talking without any movies. That is why I don't watch youtube videos often if it's long if it's only a person talking and no videos in it or else I will zone it out. I am not sure why it's like this.