Page 1 of 2 [ 21 posts ]  Go to page 1, 2  Next

Bubbles137
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 17 Oct 2010
Age: 37
Gender: Female
Posts: 563

16 May 2013, 3:25 am

I also quite often obsess with people associated with interests I'm obsessed with, eg an actress in my favourite TV programme, the teacher of my favourite subject at school etc. Anyone else get this?



syndragon
Tufted Titmouse
Tufted Titmouse

User avatar

Joined: 6 May 2013
Age: 38
Gender: Male
Posts: 43

16 May 2013, 10:43 am

Joe90 wrote:
Quote:
U won´t see an Asperger that have the obsess of meeting new people or going for sports like football, volleyball that requires teamplaying and cooperating with a lot of different people.


You wouldn't think so, neither would I, but for some weird reason I happen to obsess with certain people. I didn't have any obsessions when I was a small child, but when I got to about 11, I started getting intense obsessions with people. I am currently obsessed with bus-drivers, and bus-drivers are people, and so this obsessions requires social interaction if I want to pursue it even further. So when I'm looking out for buses, I'm not all interested in the way the buses are built and I can't give an intelligent monologue about how buses work, and I can't memorize the routes or the times or the numbers and destinations of the buses (I barely remember the times of the bus that I get almost every day, I still have to keep looking at the timetable). I just look out for the buses just for the men driving them.

Even my grandmother said, ''they just fascinate you because they're bus-drivers.'' She's right.

I would have thought Aspies naturally wouldn't get obsessions with people.


That shows me and even Aspies can be a lot different from each other, just like NTs.
Interesting.

I thought that an obsession would almost always be something that you would do "with ur hands". Not just something that u would stare at.


_________________
The more I know the less I know.


Marybird
Veteran
Veteran

Joined: 26 Apr 2012
Gender: Female
Posts: 1,818

16 May 2013, 12:53 pm

drewski56 wrote:
Marybird wrote:
I think your cortex is just hard wired for obsessive and repetitive behavior.
I love obsessions. I live for obsessions.To me they are not torture. It would be torture to take them away.


My understanding is that in the Autistic/Aspergers brain neurons form fewer and weaker long distance connections but extra, redundant short term connections resulting in a sort of feedback loop.

That is exactly what I mean. I think It seams likely that obsessive and repetitive behavior is the result of the physiology of the brain rather then just psychological reasons such as self soothing, but I can't find any references to this on Internet searches.



drewski56
Blue Jay
Blue Jay

User avatar

Joined: 13 Dec 2012
Age: 36
Gender: Male
Posts: 79
Location: Cascadia

17 May 2013, 10:04 pm

Marybird wrote:
drewski56 wrote:
Marybird wrote:
I think your cortex is just hard wired for obsessive and repetitive behavior.
I love obsessions. I live for obsessions.To me they are not torture. It would be torture to take them away.


My understanding is that in the Autistic/Aspergers brain neurons form fewer and weaker long distance connections but extra, redundant short term connections resulting in a sort of feedback loop.

That is exactly what I mean. I think It seams likely that obsessive and repetitive behavior is the result of the physiology of the brain rather then just psychological reasons such as self soothing, but I can't find any references to this on Internet searches.


Well I am not sure where I originally heard of the "Connective Theory of Autism" to which I refered to previously, but a little bit of searching casts doubt on its validity. A different neurological explanation the "Signal Imbalance Theory of Autism" which is in line with the "Intense World Theory" could be a more likely explanation.

This suggest that as a result of an excitatory vs inhibitory neuronal imbalance we are more easily aroused by stimuli, both internal and external, while also exhibiting reduced ability to dampen down the response. This again creates a sort of feedback loop, like a runaway train with overheated brakes. Of course this is a very fluid area of study, and none of this is certain.

A few interesting links:

Autism Brains Marked by Weak Local Connections

Study Boosts Signal Imbalance Theory of Autism

Imaging study of autism finds imbalance of signals



MjrMajorMajor
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 15 Jan 2012
Gender: Female
Posts: 8,714

17 May 2013, 10:56 pm

Marybird wrote:
drewski56 wrote:
Marybird wrote:
I think your cortex is just hard wired for obsessive and repetitive behavior.
I love obsessions. I live for obsessions.To me they are not torture. It would be torture to take them away.


My understanding is that in the Autistic/Aspergers brain neurons form fewer and weaker long distance connections but extra, redundant short term connections resulting in a sort of feedback loop.

That is exactly what I mean. I think It seams likely that obsessive and repetitive behavior is the result of the physiology of the brain rather then just psychological reasons such as self soothing, but I can't find any references to this on Internet searches.


Maybe a combination of physiological and psychological? I use repetition to self soothe and the frequency/severity is linked to my stress level. It seems to go hand in hand with an extreme rigidity where I must do something--a compulsion.



Anomiel
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 17 Dec 2012
Age: 36
Gender: Female
Posts: 1,023

18 May 2013, 9:13 am

I've seen the "weak connection"-theory described as "immature connections". They do not actually know if it's a weak connection or not. They only know that it's different, and looks much younger than it "should" for our age - not just the synapses etc but structural too! - and then they call it "immature". :shrug: Also everything is organized differently. You can research yourselves.
I don't know about the obsession part but there's finally an explanation for us being so detail-oriented (and why our obsessions are often details). We don't put objects (people, concepts, ourselves, ideas) into a whole as easily as NTs can. They learn that during a very early phase of their development. We don't.
Anyway, of course having this kind of brain will cause some very peculiar things to happen with our psyche - we don't exactly stay children forever as we do grow up, and our brains are much larger than children's - but maybe we would get better help from child psychologists than those trained for adults as we do not have a standard adult brain? Maybe that's why we have this response to stimuli - have you seen how NT-children behave?

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00916110 wrote:
Previous studies have shown that when presented with a complex stimulus input, autistic children typically respond to only one of the elements of the complex. This phenomenon was called “stimulus overselectivity” (or overselective attention). The present investigation sought to determine if this overselectivity might be a possible basis for the deviant social behavior in autistic children. Autistic and normal children were trained to discriminate between clothed girl and boy doll figures. After the children had acquired this discrimination, the individual clothing components and the heads were systematically interchanged between the figures. Thus, it could be determined which component(s) the children had used to make the discrimination. The autistic children demonstrated stimulus overselectivity in that they formed the discrimination between the boy and girl figures on the basis of only one component or of peculiar combinations of components. For example, one child discriminated the figures on the basis of shoes. In contrast, the normal children responded primarily to the figures' heads but could also respond correctly to other parts. These findings are consistent with previous research on stimulus overselectivity and have implications for understanding the difficulty autistic children show in forming meaningful social relationships.