Another anecdote in the opposite direction: I've had good social skills, made friends with diverse groups of people easily, etc. all my life. When I was working

Another anecdote in the opposite direction: I've had good social skills, made friends with diverse groups of people easily, etc. all my life. When I was working in a grocery store in my mid-twenties, I was a typical person to call on when there was a customer who needed to be placated. I spent my years 17 - 20 doing little aside from programming. I went from having written two little things in VB to writing games and game engines, emulators, 3D model loaders etc. Whenever I was on a bus I was probably reading Real-time Rendering or the OpenGL Superbible. I had no social difficulties at that time. And soon after I quit programming because my wrist were bothering me, and I fairly easily made a new group of friends who I started hanging out with (non-nerdy friends with no technical backgrounds or interests). BUT, by the time I was ~27, after spending about 2 years working obsessively on a software project (it was a new way of writing code that could make it efficient to do without mouse/keyboard)—I could recognize in myself the characteristics of a more stereotypical social-skill lacking engineer: difficulty making eye contact, excessive tension, generally fumbling/passive in social interactions. Eventually I got out of it, but my understanding of what happened was similar to what the GP posted: I always had that project on my mind. I would get deep insights about it out of the blue, and if I was working (grocery store) or watching a movie or hanging out with friends, I was still trying out different ideas related to it. When you don't leave that abstract/analytical mind state, you can't really connect with people, and you end up approaching things with a similar conscious problem-solving mind set, which is just not effective for so many aspects of human interaction. There's also some difficulty from how other people perceive you when you're interacting with them while in that state of mind. And there's almost certainly some connection to anxiety here: anxiety is a feeling of needing to change your situation; at its core, rational thought is our means of detaching from current happenings to form a plan for an alternate course of action. I think that if you're always thinking, you're always at least a bit anxious as well, which makes you something like more fragile in social interactions.