It might seem somewhat ironic for a borderline-autist, but I find it kind of comforting that I am not the only one with this condition. To me, eye contact gets

It might seem somewhat ironic for a borderline-autist, but I find it kind of comforting that I am not the only one with this condition. To me, eye contact gets harder if I have to focus. Greeting people or answering simple tech-support questions is not a big deal, but when I have to explain - or listen to! - something moderately complex, eye contact becomes difficult. I suspect the phenomenon is related to the Clippy-disaster with MS Office; recognizing faces takes a lot of brain power, and the human brain allocates a significant chunk to that specific task (at least that is what a neurologist once told me). Somebody wrote a Master's thesis or Ph.D. thesis in psychology about why Clippy was hated so much, and it was basically because face-like things at the margin of our field of vision take up a lot of "bandwidth" in the brain and thus distract from other things.