For the millionth time: Social skills can't be learned

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It's really none of your business to tell me what I can post on any thread, especially not one that I've already posted on.

I'm correcting the misinformation that you have posted, so that others are not confused or misled.

Stop telling me what to do, and mind your own business. You do not have the authority to go around setting your own rules here.

I myself have managed to learn some social skills, but I don't think they ever really feel natural to me. I don't ever really know if what I'm doing is correct, either. And there are some things I know I can't learn. But I'm still going to try.

It's up to each individual how much effort he or she is willing to put into socializing. For some, it may not seem worth it. And other people may just have more difficulty because they have more severe social deficits.

Since socializing doesn't come naturally, anything learned is really just a workaround or a "trick" that NTs don't usually have to use.

The part about the brain being plastic is correct, however. There are studies now being done to see how certain therapies and exercises may change the way the autistic brain works. They're using fMRI to view any changes. The study has been going on for several years. It will be interesting to see the results.

it all reminds me of that thing about how those of us with Prosopagnosia lack the brain part that specializes in facial recognition and that we must make do with the general object recognition module instead, with clumsy results. the social module is missing so other less well-suited parts of the brain must pick up the slack, albeit imperfectly.

The problem is that no one really even understands the way the brain works when it comes to these things. So much is just educated guesses. They know a little bit about why people are autistic, but there's so much more that needs to be discovered.

They don't even yet understand what causes people to have autism. Genetics seems to be a factor, and possibly paternal age.

Many things we now know concerning autism could be completely proven wrong in a decade or so.

So all we can do is try based upon our understanding and figure out ways to work around our deficits.

I read that at least part of autism/a part of some autistic people, is the result of a brain that has not pruned its neural connections properly, resulting in an excess of the wrong neural connections, a musclebound brain in a sense, lacking in tone with a traffic jam of neural connections- a brain that gets in its own way. sometimes I feel like I have gotten lost or stuck in place in my brain.

Yes, I have also read that. I think I feel that way, too. I've read other theories, but can't remember them at the moment.

Anything can be learned with patience,

What you mean to say is social skills are not natural to aspies, someone with autism can learn anything that an NT can learn. Its just things that come natural to NTs don't to us. Nothing about autism impairs the ability to learn.

perhaps not for some folk, but at least for me it sure has slowed many things down.