What makes an interest a "special interest"?

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I guess it's rather an invisible difference between general interests and intense special interests, but it's there, if you know what I mean. It's just too complicated to explain. I know an NT who is going to watch the football from 1:30pm to 8:00pm. I really don't know how someone can stay focused on one thing for that amount of time, but I find a lot of men can do this.

And people don't don't have any particular interest in anything often get criticised. My brother isn't particularly interested in anything. Most young men like cars or some sort of sport or computers or golf or something, but he is not interested in anything, and my mum is often getting on to him to get out more and try new things and perhaps get a hobby what he shares with other people. It sometimes helps to bring out your confidence. I know a lad who is running the London Marathon next Sunday with some of his mates, because they are all into fitness and running and all of that.

This world will be such a dull place if nobody was interested at all in anything. My brother's boring. He has some mates but they are just his drinking buddies, and even they can't always come out because one of them likes doing up cars and another likes taking his girlfriend out shopping because they both like shopping, and so on.

I think it's a bit like ''general forgetfulness is normal, extreme forgetfulness could be Dementia and affect the person's day-to-day living''. I mean, when I forget something, I don't get rushed to the doctors and get a diagnosis for Dementia. But I have an elderly relative who had to get a diagnosis for Dementia because her forgetfulness became more frequent and started affecting her way of thinking and doing things to an abnormal extent.

"Special interest" is itself a way of trying to give a more positive look to the expression "stereotyped interest".

For me, a special interest is like this :
I think about it ALL the time.
I have to read everything I can find on it.
I spend all my money buying books about it.
I sign up for courses about it, obsessively.
It is all I can talk about. Literally all. to anyone, even strangers at the shops - for example I might have a realization about how something in the interest works or see some connection I hadn't seen before, and I HAVE to tell someone. Even if they are just some person in a car park whom I have never met.
It is all I can think about.
Nothing else gets any attention until I have a certain depth of understanding of it.
I see its connections in everything
I am like this until I understand the thing really, really well.
This can take a year or many years.
The interest never dies either. When I get to the point of understanding it really really well, a connection to something else might come and I have a new obsession that comes to the fore.
Then I become obsessed again with the new interest, but the other interests are always there and i can never give any of them up.
Any of them can be triggered to come back to the fore and I always have an active special interest/obsession.

Some things that have been my obsession:
Classical music, playing the piano, writing stories, playing the bass guitar, yoga, gymnastics, ballet dancing, psychology, astronomy, law, computers, computer security, nutrition, ancient Rome, ancient Greece, ancient Egypt, hydrogen, numbers, medieval history, ancient religions.

If the special interest can earn you a living then it is not seen as a problem. It is only if its something impractical that its seen as a problem.

For years my special interst has been computer programming. I don't really care which language I just love the practice of it. However I would not say I have any particular interest in computers, even though I studied computing for my degree. I have worked in the industry for many years but have never been interested in anything like hardware, networks etc. But I love software development if it involves coding.

I noticed that the OP said "new to being an Aspie", and I kind of understand that, but the thing is that he/she/you may be newly diagnosed, but has _always_ been an Aspie. I was an Aspie for 65 years or so before I was diagnosed as one, and now my Special Interest is Asperger's itself, and Autism. Part of the fun is in my memories, and looking back sixty years and making the connection, "OH! THAT's what that incident was all about!" when I never understood what was happening there before. And I've had a lot of Special Interests: it was a pain in the neck learning other school subjects, but I was an obedient kid, and I did what I was supposed to be doing. But when I could daydream or do what I wanted to do, whatever was my Interest at the time was what I went to. Probably because I wasn't as _intensely_ focused as some, or because I had learned to divert my mental work to whatever "they" wanted me to do, it wasn't that noticeable from the outside. But when I did hear about them, I could line them up to each few-year period of my life, and, as someone else said, they remained my interests, just that another one was in the foreground.

But to get back to my original point, you don't have to try to be an Aspie, or learn to be an Aspie, you just are one. If you seem to be lacking in one of the many traits (a lot more than the DSM will list), there's no problem: you're still a human being. If you didn't have quite a lot of them, you wouldn't have been diagnosed.

I'm always on the fence with this concept. Yeah, I easily fall into the scope of this, but I don't have the textbook non-verbal or theory of mind-- communication problems with an ASD, outside of ADD.

I've recently wondered how, but this may somewhat common solely with ADHD, via executive functioning-- or *perservation,* but I have my strong doubts with this notion. This unusual cognitive bias is focused on specific details for long periods-- much time.
I remember when I was around 8 years of age, I was obsessed with the tail lights on cars, and would talk about their configurations or different arrays of arrangements to people/family. Once, I shagged my cousin outside to share my enjoyment of their new car's tail lights. He became unglued at this non-sense and scolded me.

This phenomenon has always bothered me deep down, because of the unusual fixations and the time spent on it. It's really alienating. It's not a part or normative to the general population.

Well lets see....

An aspie who collects coins for 30 years.... special interest.
An NT who collects coins for 30 years......... serious collector.

Hows that for positive?

I just say NTs have special interests too because I don't think it's fair to discriminate and blame things on autism NTs do too such as collecting things such as coins. I see it as a personality thing, not a symptom.

Put another way, when I was a young child, and Dr. Asperger was still doing his work which hadn't yet been published, if someone had asked me what I was interested in, and nobody knew that I was anything "special" except "bright", I might have said "I'm interested in a lot of things, but I'm *especially* interested in the American Revolution right now". And I was: all on my own, and not because we were doing anything with the Revolution in school history right then, I might be making posters about issues two hundred years dead, like "Taxation without representation is tyranny!" At least I learned to spell three long words that way....

I've also wondered about the "special interest" and if I had one. If duration and intensity can define a special interest then I guess I do. Although mine is not particularly unusual, it started when I was a kid and stuck with me for 50 years. It's changed a bit over the years, but led to the friends I have and have had, led indirectly to the school I went to and the career I had, buying a house as opposed to renting, and where I live in retirement. I've met many people who shared this interest but for most, it lasted a few years and they got tired of it. Not me. It can still make me feel as good as ever.

A special interest doesn't need to interfere with everyday life I think. My special/obsessive interest is reading and learning about diseases and disorders, and random facts. This doesn't control my life though, I only do it on my free time. It doesn't really bother me if I can't learn new things in any given day.

In some ways the forum is part of my special interest, since Aspergers is a syndrome, and while I am on hear I learn new things about it.

Thanks for all the responses. I guess it's inherently subjective and different people attach different meanings to the term, but the common thread seems to be that a "special interest" is an interest that preoccupies you a bit more than just an "interest".

I've wondered whether programming (and computers more generally) is really a special interest, because it's a fairly common thing, but now that I think back to my childhood I really was quite obsessed with computers (and before that - maths). Today I can't call it an obsession, but I'd say I'm more focused on it (and better at it) than the average person who does it for a job. I have been known to spend the weekend programming (after doing it all week at work), but it's certainly not something I do all the time.

I like that way of thinking about it. I guess for me it would be a combination of programming and a certain physical activity I'm into (the amount of time I can spend on the latter is limited more by my body's ability than by time). These are also the two things I can easily talk about for a long time without getting bored.



That's interesting to hear - I love programming, too, but I'm also interested in hardware, networks, computer security, etc.



NT teenage girls, sure, but NT teenage boys? Yeah, I would be surprised!



Yes, I meant "I'm new to the knowledge that I'm an Aspie", but like you, I can look back and realise I've always been one. In fact, I think I'm a lot less of an Aspie now than I was (and a friend who has known me since teenage years said the same), probably because I learned to act NT more and more over time. I think most Aspie traits are weaker for me than for most people here and "special interests" are no exception.

I certainly don't want to "try to be an Aspie" (nor try to not be an Aspie). I'm actively trying to avoid fitting myself to a stereotype. The Autism FAQ by Ganondox mentions that people tend to exaggerate their autistic traits when they are learning about autism. This doesn't surprise me in the least, but I want to avoid that as much as possible. I always try to think scientifically and discover the truth, rather than prove that a particular idea (that appeals to me) is true. So it is with Asperger's - while I think it's very likely I have it I still question everything about it and this thread is part of that.

The way I see it, it's more like:

An NT who collects coins for 30 years..........serious collector.

An aspie who collects coins for 30 years; knows all the history about individual coins; can tell you the exact metals that each coin is made of and if that has changed over time; knows about changes in currency (e.g. decimalisation); the influence of certain coins on language (e.g. "Two a penny", "A dime a dozen", "The penny dropped"); can tell you the exact weight, down to decimal places, of any given coin in his collection, and knows quite a bit about the decoration of various coins (e.g. the origin of the design on the two pound coin, and the meaning of the latin words around the edge of a one pound coin)........THAT'S a special interest. This is different from the museum curator who knows everything there is to know about coins because it's his job. The aspie special interest is a much more 'driven' interest, so to speak. It's not whether the interest is useful or stereotyped, but the intensity and depth of their knowledge of it, when there is no logical explanation as to why you'd want to know that much about one thing. Of course there are NTs who have obsessive interests too, and the intensity of the special interest varies among aspies, but it's more common in aspies than it is in NTs. For me, my special interest is rollercoasters and amusement parks, but I'm actually not that obsessive about it as it goes. I know some NTs who are way more knowledgeable about these things than me.