But at some point, you'll need to deal with other people [share your discoveries, ask for research funding, going grocery shopping, etc], and here I would say this "profound focus" is actively hurting you.
This is often the case, but we need to be careful not to overgeneralize. Basic social functionality is important for two reasons:
1) it allows us to secure the resources we need to pursue our projects
2) it satisfies our wants and needs for the various sorts of human companionship
But note that neither of these is a logically necessary characteristic of a human being.
1) is not logically necessary because we can imagine a person being born into a situation where she does not require interaction with others in order to get the resources she needs. She has sophisticated robots who raise her crops and prepare her food, for example, or she has a magic wand that takes care of her problems, or she is born into wealth and has devoted people in her employ who handle all of these issues for her no matter how she treates them.
2) is not logically necessary because we can imagine a person having literally no psychological need or desire for human interaction. We can imagine this person as having neither a desire for interaction
in itself, nor a desire for anything that requires the existence of other humans as an ingredient. This would not be
normal, of course, and we would be right to be suspicous of someone who claimed to be that way. The probability is that anybody who thinks they have no need for human interaction is simply the victim of her own self deception. Yet it would be dogmatic to assume that it is
impossible.
Attitudes like "The thoughts in my head are more important than listening to you" will not endear you all to others, and even if that is not what it feels like to you, it very well may feel that way to others.
For a person like the one I described above, this would not count as a criticism, at least in the normal sense of criticism (the one that involves pointing out to someone that they are undermining their own goals, or else the goals they
would have if they stopped to think about it). Are you sure that the people you're talking about have the goal of being endearing? It seems entirely possible that the people you're dealing with assume that your behavior is determined entirely by the relationship of their
work to certain standards of rationality and not at all by personal factors; if that's the case, there is literally no reason to assume that the less sociable among them take themselves to have any reason to be concerned with other people's personal feelings about them.
Of course, that's not to say that they
shouldn't care, but what they
ought to think may be quite different from what they
actually do think! And if they think that they have no self-interested reason to be nice/polite/patient/whatever, then your only options are to a) live with it, b) convince them that the system (very) often allocates resources on the basis of things other than the objective merit of the project, or c) convince them that they have an ethical obligation to be more respectful
edit: I should have included a fourth option: d) convince them that they'll feel happier/more fulfilled/better about themselves, independently from their professional concerns, if they establish good relationships with their coworkers