Has anyone else 'swapped' logic skills for socialising ones?

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I have been pondering this for a few months and surely I cannot be the only one that has experienced this.

When I was younger I was extremely smart, I especially excelled in maths and was way ahead of my year, in fact I was on the next years text books and even coasting through them. However I spent most of my time alone as a child and as a result I got absorbed in anything I wanted to learn. I don't recall having any friends between the ages of 5-10 and if I did there are clearly not memorable. I could barely function socially and I lived in my head and not the real world.

Now I am an adult my ability to perform even the simplest mathematics is practically none-existent, I try to do sudokus and I can feel my brain start to throb. At work when I need to perform simple mathematics I have to grab the nearest calculator. However I now have a decent amount of friends and function quite well in society. I am independent (live with friends, have a job) and I spend less time in my head and more time realising I am in a world surrounded by other people and social interactions.

There seems to be a correlation (now I look back on it) between my decline in logic (in the form of maths) and my rise in social skills. It's almost like there was an option available to me subconsciously, I could either; have more knowledge (in whatever area) and have less socialising skills or have less knowledge and more socialising skills. I'm not sure if I made the choice subconsciously or if I was swayed by my ever increasing social environment.

Has anybody else noticed or experienced this? Is there anyone out there that has superior logic and socialising skills, or is it one or the other?

Looking at it now, I would say I have noticed something like that over the last few years. I used to find mathematics ridiculously easy, and had fewer friends. Now I find the maths more difficult (although it is degree level mathematics), and have a social life.

Yes I have a social life now and I work hard not to commit social faux pas but I've noticed that I can't do math or other such things as easily as before. Even my grammar is messed up.

The same thing happened to me. I've decided that socializing requires a minimal amount of logic, and upon that declaration I've become a worse person, but better at socializing. I can pass for a NT now, but I can also pass for a bad person, because I think I am. It's important to have a balance between the two.

I have always suspected something similar, this is my thinking behind it.

Aspies use the same area in the brain for logic (i.e working out maths problems or designing algorithms) as they use for social skills. In other words when aspies socialize they do not use the social neural networks in the brain as NT would. Instead they use the logical brain networks. Maybe by updating this logical network with new 'social' knowledge, it overrides the old logical patterns learned from 'maths' for instance.

That's a very interesting comment. Perhaps that's why we always try and learn as many different social 'moves' as we can rather than learning the rules to the game (playing chess by knowing every move there is instead of understanding how the game works).
To put that in to a computing analogy; it's like we use a CPU to 'software render' an image whist NT's use a graphics card. Aspies have powerful CPU's which are capable of dealing with great logic but seem to lack a GPU to 'render' social behaviours. We are incomplete computers missing the graphics card(s), which is annoying because I have a GTX 580 .

I love a good analogy!

This would explain my decline in grades... I had a stable group of friends, but I can't seem to think on higher levels easily anymore. Math, Science, and other "logical" stuff was easy, but now I have trouble with things I learned in 3rd grade. Like times tables.

My only problem is it is not easy to reverse the effect. It seems to pervade no matter how hard I try to ignore it. Darn procedural memory!

You're worse at maths because you haven't been doing maths. It's totally unconnected, even if you use the same processes for working out people. There isn't a fixed amount of comprehension points that you allocate to different tasks, but rather you get better at what you're doing.

I don't even know Multiplication. I only know Adding and Subtracting. AND I'M 21 AND I DON'T KNOW HARDLY ANY MATH. I try and try and try and fail fail fail.

I'm the same way. Used to be able to study for hours and hours. Now I can't even stand the sight of a book without falling asleep from boredom.