aka In the zone

Over the past few months I’ve noticed that when I get into the ‘zone’ people can have entire conversations with me and after finishing my coding stint I’ll be oblivious to the fact they were even talking to me, let alone what I said in response. This also extends to the state I’m in when disrupted from a heavy coding session. I’ll not pick up the regular social interaction queues and often either upset people or seem like I’m not listening properly. So my line of thinking goes that the better you are at tuning everything else around you out, the deeper you will be ‘in the zone’. Perhaps turning off the behavioural parts of the brain gives better focus to the more analytical areas required for programming.

Nerds

This may explain why those we see as ‘nerds’ are so good at programming. If you haven’t fully developed your communication parts of your brain, perhaps it’s then easier to shut them off. For a lot of nerds, the only social interactions they have are over the internet via their computer. This means their entire communication development has been built up around the computer, stopping them from needing to worry about subtle queues like the change in pitch of someone’s voice when they are becoming frustrated.

Conclusion

This is something that I’ve been thinking about over the past few months and wanted to get some feedback as to whether anyone else has experienced the same thing. I realise that autism is a serious medical problem and don’t mean to trivialise it in any way. The fact that many parts of autism itself are quite controversial may mean I’ll get a little flak, but I’ll just put this next to the hate mail from my programming personality test?