I dunno', I also find a lot of people in technical/detail driven fields will often circle their thoughts. Not that they meander stories around over superfluous detail, but they literally repeat and refine specific statements or messages multiple times, sometimes even verbally.

This can easily appear as, "talking in circles" when all they're doing is refining their statements for better accuracy. Sometimes, it's literally circling back to clarify points that might not matter outside of doing the thing when people might simply be curious.

I realize a lot of these are mental disorders when they're bad enough, but that's my point: Talking in circles can mean many things. Maybe they just often talk about nuanced topics that need circling back to fully discuss and OP doesn't like nuance.

[–] RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Well, yes…that’s why I used conditional language “sometimes”. For some people this is normal to verbally rehash and refine an idea, and I’d think a prompt to get to the point would be successful and not problematic. For someone not neurotypical, this might create frustration or break up their ability to complete the story.

Like walking a path, but someone throws a branch across it. Now you’ve lost the path and maybe focus on that loss of direction, the branch, why is there a branch, did they really need to put the branch there, people are looking at me and I can’t deal with the branch…wait, I have to walk back down the path, pick it up, and try to find my way forward without this continuity I have in my head…

[–] MotoAsh@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago

Indeed, following those stories that circle and break is quite annoying, especially when attention is scarce. Regardless of why the conversation is meandering. lol

Ironically, if they're good at story telling, the picture painting can even sometimes give enough on-topic targets to keep a wandering mind in the conversation. Though that's more of an ideal situation where the speaker isn't circling back randomly. ha