as small as a world and as large as alone, is it possible for special interests to change...

12:08pm October 6, 2014

Anonymous asked: is it possible for special interests to change fairly frequently? like, i'll get into a tv series and be entirely focused on that, usually entirely focused on one specific character, and that will last for weeks or months and then i'll switch to something else. and i'll still like the last character, a lot, but i can't focus on them with the same intensity anymore. but everything i've read about special interests makes it seem like they last your entire life and don't change?

Absolutely they can change frequently. What makes it a special interest is things like intensity, focus, and unusualness, qualities like that. Duration can be anything.

Also I think there’s a thing that doesn’t get talked about much, just because of the way autism has been conceptualized by people on the outside of it. And that is, there’s an underlying way of looking at the world that can produce special interests. It can produce lifelong special interests, and it can produce rapidly changing special interests.

But it can also produce a more general interest in how things work in general. So this person may lack any lasting special interest at all, but spend all day long on the Internet studying every topic they can get their hands on. And I think whatever cognitive and emotional mechanism underlies that, also underlies special interests. It’s just a matter of where you point your mind, how intensely, and how long, whether you get considered to have special interests or not.

Personally, I have some special interests that have never changed throughout my entire life, and I have other ones that seem to change every few years, sometimes every few months. All of them are completely valid as special interests.

Basically what makes something a special interest, according to nonautistic people who like to make up rules about this crap, is:

Unusual intensity. So basically, the interest could be a fairly standard interest for most people, but it takes over the autistic person’s time and life to a much greater degree than a similar interest would in the average nonautistic person. So an autistic person may be interested in baseball, which is a normal interest. But they will spend all day long thinking about it, they carry their baseball cards everywhere with them and line them up in rows every chance they have a free moment, they will relate every topic back to baseball in some way
Unusual focus. So the interest itself could again be an everyday average interest. But instead of being interested in the whole broad topic, they’re interested in one tiny little narrow thing related to the whole broad topic. So baseball again. Except now it’s not baseball as a whole. It’s batting statistics from the Chicago Cubs in the year 1983
Unusual type of interest. I knew a kid when I was in special ed, whose special interest was power line poles. He had every single one in the entire city (possibly county) memorized and spent his entire day drawing accurate maps on huge pieces of paper with all the right numbers written on each pole. That’s what they mean when they talk about an unusual type of interest. (It’s also what they mean by a savant skill.)

So when they talk about an unusually circumscribed interest, they’re talking about an interest that’s narrower than you’d expect in a nonautistic person. They might also talk about a perseverative interest, and that means it comes up more often for that person than it would in a nonautistic person, like they won’t stop coming back to it all day long, talking about it, thinking about it, etc. The old criteria talk about it being “abnormal in either intensity or focus”, which I’ve covered above.

They don’t always spell it out — sometimes they do — but there’s basically two major kinds of special interest. One is sensory and the other is conceptual.

So like… I have a set of rocks that I carry around with me, hold them in certain ways, arrange them in certain ways, etc. That’s more of a sensory special interest. If I was interested in the different types of rocks and how they formed geologically, and was always reading about that, and thinking about that, that would be more of a conceptual interest. And some people combine the two. I had a geology teacher that I’m sure was on the spectrum, everything he did was about rocks — he climbed rocks (with my brother, who said he was the most intense rock climber he’d ever met), he collected interesting rocks, he studied rocks, he taught about rocks, and he pretty much was incapable of having a conversation that didn’t involve rocks.

Also the things I’m talking about here are the extremes. It’s possible to have a special interest and not spend every second of every day on it. I’m just giving you some background information about what the extremes look like.

So in all this, the common thread is an intense focus on something. That intense focus can be on one topic. It can be on many topics. It can be sensory. It can be conceptual. It can be a lifelong thing where a person only ever has one or two interests, or it can be a thing where it changes every year, even every day. I don’t know that a doctor would always recognize it in every possible form, but I know it exists in all these forms and all of them are valid. And I know it’s possible for a person to simply have the kind of mind that grabs onto things and focuses like that, but that doesn’t grab onto them and keep the interest forever, so the person could spend all day learning about new things and more new things and more new things and that would be their special interest even if nobody else saw it that way.

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