Some questions about special interests

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Do you have different special interests now than you did when you were a child?

How often do your special interests change?

Do you remember everything you used to know about childhood special interest(s)?

Are your special interests expressed through vast quantities of gathered knowledge, or very small extremely specific areas?

I'm just wondering, because I can remember some of the things I was especially fixated on as a child (Cats, Amelia Earhart) but I don't have nearly the knowledge about them that I did when I was younger. It's like, when I get a new obsession it becomes so consuming that it crowds out the old one. I became obsessed with musical theatre and Broadway in my teens, and I still have quite a vast expanse of knowledge about that. It is my one enduring special interest. The others come and go, but whenever I am interested in them, I am completely obsessed to the point of abandoning everything including homework in order to pursue them. Does this experience seem common on the spectrum? I've read accounts of people on the spectrum discovering autism and then it becomes one of their special interests, and that has certainly happened with me as well.

I'm also wondering - I know in the diagnostic criteria when it talks of special interests, it talks about them being "abnormal either in intensity or focus."

I tend to fixate very very specifically on things. For example, musical theatre is one of my special interests. But inside that, I have been focusing very specifically on one song, in one musical. Nobody's Side from Chess. For months, my ipod playlist was a repeat of four different cast recordings of just this one song. I listen to this one song over and over. I know exactly how many seconds long each version is. I know every word, every note, every difference between the women singing in each cast recording.

Is that abnormal in intensity, or in focus? Or both?

Does anyone else fixate on very small pieces of things, like me with the one song?

I used to obsess over aliens/paranormal study when I was about ten or so years old, but now I simply dismiss such as pseudo-scientific silliness. Before that I studied general knowledge, mostly scientific, having no appreciation for the facts that I memorized. At about age eleven I began to distinguish certain fields of study from others, and my first truly narrow subject of interest was microbial life, of which I have now forgotten all that I knew about. Electronics is now my most persistent special interest (I have held onto it for about five years now), but I have taken on and abandoned other interests on the way such as: chemistry, botany, quantum physics, 4-dimensional metaphysics, nuclear physics, etc...

Yes/no
In a matter of months
No!
Neither so I guess they weren't so special after all
Yes I tend to push away everything so that I could just obsess over something
Both sometimes gives me high-spells
It boils down to details but everything is important

Do you have different special interests now than you did when you were a child? I like all the things I liked ad a kid, but for nostalgic reasons. For example - some music, The Simpsons, video games, comics to an extent.

How often do your special interests change? They usually change if my personal circumstances change, they're my instinctive way to cope/up my mood. The longest I held a special interest was 10 years (Manic Street Preachers).

Do you remember everything you used to know about childhood special interest(s)? Probably.

Do you have different special interests now than you did when you were a child?

Yes. In fact, my interests have changed many times over since I was a child.

How often do your special interests change?

Major ones change every 2 to 3 years, minor ones change every couple of weeks to months.

Do you remember everything you used to know about childhood special interest(s)?

No. Once I'm done with an interest, I tend to forget almost everything I knew about it except for the basics.

Are your special interests expressed through vast quantities of gathered knowledge, or very small extremely specific areas?

I'd say vast quantities. My dad doesn't call me "the Encyclopedia" for nothing!

I have primary and secondary interests.

IF i was not concentrating on my current interest, i would be dealing primarily with economics. I had a decent background in basic micro and macro economics. I am able to pull from that background but it's been awhile since i have delved into it.

TheSunAlsoRises

I have to add that I'm exploring anthropology which is one of many subjects i have had very little exposure to.

TheSunAlsoRises

Wikipedia is an aspie's best friend! I have no idea how I used to survive without that website. It's the perfect place to obtain a new interest, and it even points you to books\papers you can read to further your knowledge.

Thanks to Wikipedia, I now understand that just about anything is interesting if you know enough about it. I have hundreds of interests that I can happily spend a day reading about, but I still have the same "favourites" that I did as a child.

I agree.

I have had the same major special interest since I was 8 which is my obsession with computers, in truth the obsession started a few years earlier, but I had no access to a computer at all. I must have had at least 4 hours a day on a computer every day since I was 8. Of course computing is a wide field in itself and my interests within computing tend to change. I've never played games much.

Secondary interests include music (Guitar, Piano mainly), Calligraphy, Sudoku, Fantasy Books, Self-Help, Films, Smoking Cestation, Weight Loss, Swimming and Running.

Fantasy audio-books are something I listen to everyday to hide behind my headphones and get to sleep at night.

The secondary interests seem to rotate, I have yet to be at the right weight, quit smoking and have an exercise routine simultaneously.

Jason

Do you have different special interests now than you did when you were a child?

Yes I moved on from dinosaurs, Lion King and dogs to science, sci-fi, and the air force. Although I have always loved air craft.

How often do your special interests change?
Lately that don't change but go around in a cycle. I've tried to get control over what I focus on to help me write my sci-fi.

Do you remember everything you used to know about childhood special interest(s)?
Some things but you know the old saying "if you don't use it you lose it."

Are your special interests expressed through vast quantities of gathered knowledge, or very small extremely specific areas?
I don't have the most detailed memory so it's a wide area of knowledge but in a kind of summed up way. But my very limited knowledge in selected areas is a bit more detailed.

Oh, yes. Very much so, to my continued surprise.

As a child, I started out with a strong interest in dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals, aside from that I also enjoyed reading about modern-day animals- and another special interest of mine was Transformers: the cartoon, the comics, and the toys. Also, I very much enjoyed drawing, and did it every day. I used to think these interests would stay with me forever, and when thinking about my future, I knew I'd be either a paleontologist or an artist. In my teenage years, I adjusted this dream toward ecology and/or ethology.

When I entered a difficult phase in my late teens, those special interests had already started to fade away. I hadn't been occupying myself with them as much in my teenage years as I had in my primary school years. So my interests shifted. Since the mid-2000s, I've had very different special interests, most of them tied to some kind of pop cultural phenomenon. In 2004, it was Buffy The Vampire Slayer. In 2005, it was collecting comic books, especially Uncanny X-Men. By 2009 and 2010 I was mainly interested in Asian pop music (Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Indonesian), and now, as of 2011, my main special interest is Indonesian culture in all its facets. I'm nowhere near an expert on any of these subjects though, not even the latter one, dunno why.


As of the mid 2000s, approximately once a year.

Not nearly. Sure, there remains quite a bit of residual, albeit outdated, knowledge of dinosaurs in my mind, but less than half of everything I've read about it has stuck in my head.

I try to be as broad as I can on my special interest. I try to absorb the whole package, although I must admit that I'm nowhere near an expert on my special interests at any given time.

I am very hesitant to use the word 'abnormal' in this context, because the word has very little significance to me. As long as the special interest isn't hampering your functioning, I think it's okay if there's an unusual focus or intensity. I mean, you did say you abandon homework to pursue your interests at times, but I've done similar things with my interests, and prioritising them above things, which some other people may call 'irresponsible'. The point is that, in my assessment, the special interest is important enough for me

I can't comment anymore on what you've said about the excessive focus on details of certain aspects of your objects of interest, as in recent years I've pulled away from focusing on my own interests quite so intensely. I sometimes consciously stop myself from chasing my interests, and then other times, I just let myself go and full-on read four whole books pretty much uninterrupted on a subject that's interesting to me at that time. It's all very erratic, as I've recently grown averse to structures.

Yes, my interests have changed over time. No longer a dinosaur freak. However, some stuff has more evolved than changed. For example, my obsession with powersets(I mean like superpowers and such) in various media forms has more expanded than anything(damn you tvtropes!)

Heh... So I'm not the only one who moved away from dinosaurs.

I love answering these little question things on WP. People should post more of them, asking hundreds of questions! LOL

Do you have different special interests now than you did when you were a child?
Well I didn't really have any special interests until I was about 11 (as soon as puberty kicked in, funnily enough).

How often do your special interests change?
Well, I'm not sure. My special interests kind of overlap eachother, popping out little special interests that are somehow related to the main special interest. Like for example, when I was aged 13 to 17, I was obsessed with these certain people I knew of, and amoung those 5 years I got little special interests like snooker, pubs, and the cockney accent. This was because these had something to do with the people who I was currently obsessed with. I have developed a cockney accent now, but that's not because of the obsession I used to have. My current special interest is a certain bus company, which started when I was 17 and is still going today. I hope I never stop this obsession - I love having it! Plus I'm more mature now, so I can be more steady and not get too involved and look like a fool. I can be obsessed with the drivers and everything in disguise.

Do you remember everything you used to know about childhood special interest(s)?
Not really, only bits and pieces.

Are your special interests expressed through vast quantities of gathered knowledge, or very small extremely specific areas?
Um, I'm not sure. My special interest always seem to be based around social interaction.

My special intrests are the same ones I had as a child. My special intrests rarely change but when they do or I get a new one, it's always something related to the previous obsession or something inspired by the previous obsession. Lion King was my first major obsession that I can remember and meerkats were a "bi product" of my Lion King obsession. Yes, I still remember everything I rememberd from my previous obsessions. Every obsession I've ever had was animal related. My newest obsession is Sonic the Hedgehog; so many people automaticay assume that I am into video games. Nope! I got exposed to Sonic via the cartoons. I think I might be trying to use Sonic to subconciously subdue my Lion King obsession becuase of the many bad memories associated with it. I will never give up my meerkat obsession and that will be the one I take to the grave. Anyway, obsessions have always been my strongest autistic trait.