While not the most accurate analogy, the 386/Pentium analogy works quite well when discussing someone with ACC as compared to a neurotypical individual. There is no doubt that I am intelligent, that I can remember wrote facts, patterns, sometimes to an encyclopedic extent...but it is what I can do with these in the moment that makes me different than your average bear.
Perhaps, for me, one of the most frustrating aspects of my ACC is what I term "lag-time." In the course of any given conversation or interchange, it may initially go unnoticed by the parties involved but it's result is not. This is particularly true of social or emotional situations between peoples, things that an average person wouldn't think twice about...
I might be asked a simple question of how I am going to respond to a situation and before they even finish asking the question the "gears in my head" come to a screeching halt. Sometimes it's not even "I don't know the answer" sometimes it's just blank and very frightening, so very difficult to describe. Then oftentimes the gears might move a little, back-up, then move again. This is especially true if a situation is not what I expect it to be or is outside of my expectation, I will simply have great difficult grasping it, no matter how simple the concept, regardless of my intelligence...
This is where "lag" comes in, because minutes, sometimes even hours later the answer will click and I will have an AHAA! moment. When my soulmate was alive we might have a disagreement in the morning over something I simply could not understand...ten hours later, when she'd be home from work and we'd be in the living room I would just start talking about it like we'd never left off of it with an understanding of it just as she intended. Frustrating for her and for me.
There is also the matter of being able to decode and express my own thoughts so that others may understand them, but that is a subject/post for another time...
I have come to experience that no amount of reasoning is going to correct these processing errors or this lag time. I experienced it (I believe) far more profoundly in childhood, and was severely punished for it time and time again because I just could not understand what was going on. Unfortunately, as an adult, I have grown into a pattern of avoidance with people simply so that this has less of a chance of occurring, (but it still does.)
I will write more about this in the future, today I just wanted to introduce the subject...
Thanks for listening,
Joseph
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