Does your brain ever just turn off?

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Sometimes when I am under a lot of stress, my brain seems to stop working and I am unable to understand written or spoken language - I can look at words on a page or hear a conversation and hear the sounds, but it doesn't mean anything to me. I can't look at people's faces, and if it gets bad enough I get to a point where I am only vaguely aware that there are other people around me and so I might do things I wouldn't normally do in public, like covering my face and rocking. It's as if my brain starts tuning things out, and the harder I try to focus, the less I understand. It's extremely frustrating. If I am stuck in a class or social situation, a couple of hours can pass by with me understanding nothing of what anyone is saying and having almost no awareness of anything happening around me. Once I am in this state, the only thing that seems to help is physically withdrawing from everything and sometimes it can take hours for me to be able to function normally again.

Is this AS-related or something else? Is there anything I can do to prevent it happening?

I do that too but it is not severe. This could also be ADHD. But to me it's just zoning out.
That doesn't seem to be the case for you since it sounds much more severe.
Like I don't take long to recover, I can easily snap back when my name is called or a loud sound is made, etc. Kind of like a trigger.
And this usually happens under the same conditions as yours: stress, but also boredom or too much brain activity.

All the time

Somewhat. When things come naturally to me and I do them repetitively I sort of just do them in a trance.

AS-related. I find myself rocking back and forth and humming or skipping around my house and flapping without even knowing previously.

I just zone in and out, when I'm tired, but I catch myself and zone back in.

I have something similar happen to me. My brain will shut down and I will lose half of my vocabulary. I'll forgot how to spell simple words, like the other day when the spelling of 'difficult' was out of my grasp.

Another shutdown can occur with me, but this one is clock related. My brain will fizzle and I won't be able to read an analog clock for the life of me.

Can anyone else offer any input on this? I'm really curious to know what it is also.

This happened to me at school today. For me, it's stress...I think.

That happened to me at my friends house, I just felt clueless and, in a way I wanted to panic because of it, but luckily I didn't.

For me, it usually means I have received a totally unexpected and often unprecedented communication that I cannot deal with - my CPU just gets overloaded and I freeze up.

OR - I can be reading or listening, my mind wanders in a different direction and gets lost.