No special interests?

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Is it common to be diagnosed with Aspergers but lack the special interest part? From what I read about special interests, they consume one's life. It isn't just a hobby, it's a fixed, narrow interest in one or two hobbys or subjects and an unwillingness to do or discuss anything else. I've never had such a thing, unless you count women. I concentrate on the ideal type of woman for me and would rather be alone than settle. I have a picture in my mind of what she should look like. It's open to interpretation, other than her being brunette, thin, and not mainstream (Think a woman like Roz from Frasier or Winona Ryder) but as you see, Roz and Winona look nothing alike, so it's a general requirement. The girl I dated months ago joked that my special interest might be actresses in tv shows and movies I watch, but at the same time there's no physical manifestation. I don't collect pictures of them or talk about them at length with people. The most I might do is ask another woman online "Do you think she's pretty?"

As far as regular interests, I'm a musician, but it doesn't consume my life. I'd like to be a professional musician, and it's about the only thing I think about when I manage to distract my mind from not thinking about an ideal girlfriend, but I can live without it and I don't talk about music at length or practice a lot or anything. In fact, I can go a few days without picking up an instrument.

I"m pretty sure since there's no concrete, weird, odd interest, this is why I was diagnosed late? I think my Aspergers has more to the fact of a different understanding of the world than a NT and the social awkwardness.

Yes, women count. Swap 'interest' for 'most common topic of thought' and you'll see what I mean. I'm not trying to be funny but you do mention certain things quite often but it's not unusual here so don't worry.

I don't think interests/obsessions are necassary for a diagnosis. People have different levels of interest, it's not just you're obsessed and that's it. I can be very interested in something for a few hours then just have a passing or no interest in it from then on but for those few hours I'd be unusually interested and devour info on it. Other things I find difficult/impossible to stop thinking of.

Yeah, I know I repeat myself. I do the same thing in real life too sometimes.

Another thing is, when I get into something, I get really into it...not on a psychotic level, but for example if I like a song I can listen to it several times in a row. Or if I'm really into a TV show, it's all I think about (other than women and music.)

Well I don't think you need to know all fight date in history or the like. Actually I'm all about computers and science. Those are my main interests, I think that other people around you (your GF, your family) can tell you better than yourself if you are "obsessed" with something. For istance it's 1 week that I talk only about Autism/Aspie (self-diagnosticated 1 week ago, waiting for a psyc this week), yesterday evening my wife told me "I know you're really focused on that, but can we talk about something else please ". I didn't know I was so fucused!

I'm the same way about self-diagnosis. I'm just really interested in AS now, and it's pretty much in my head constantly. Yesterday I was supposed to go to a very small gathering of friends (4 people, total, which isn't too bad a situation for me), but I decided to simply not answer the door because I had gotten hold of a book titled The Complete Guide to Asperger's Syndrome and it seemed more important.

People have always said that I write very well. I enjoy writing poetry but I'm not passionate enough to make a career out of it. When it comes to a choice between reading Shelley and Keats or watching a DVD, nine times out of ten, I'll pick the film. When it comes to doing exercises and getting the ideas going, I'm playing computer games or watching the football.
I rely on moments of inspiration for my creative work and that just isn't enough.

I long to find the passion that makes all the other crap go away. Something that totally consumes me and makes me forget I'm even alive.

It seems you're correct:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnosis_ ... r_syndrome
According to the table (about halfway down the page), only Gillberg sees all-absorbing interests as definitely diagnostic.

My own interests have been very absorbing for a lot of my life.....I've definitely got a geeky side to my personality - supposed to be a musician but I must have spent 90% of my music time not on artistic development but on techniques, theory, building multi-track tape recorders, working on computer systems with a view to using them for music, and even when rehearsing or recording I've usually been sucked into focussing ridiculously hard on the tiniest details that nobody else would be likely to notice, probably at the expense of correcting much more "obvious" faults. Rather like a guy who gets a car but instead of using it he spends all his life messing with the engine.....somehow the pleasure seems to be in working on the technology rather than using it.

I've often noticed with horror the gap between my apparent goals (making good music) and my activities, but somehow I always find myself getting seduced by the geeky side of it unless I make a firm effort to follow the art rather than the science. When I succeed, it's great, and I've been through artistic phases lasting many months without greatly missing the technical stuff - phases of my life which I see as times of great joy and liberation, but somehow I always find myself sliding back into geek mode. But hey, I've somehow managed to become a passable musician, and I've shown with my multi-track recording that if only there were four of me then I'd be a fairly good band.


Well, I have AS and I've certainly been guilty of a powerful interest in the opposite sex for a lot of my life.....I'd still find it very difficult to see myself as quite complete without a partner. But I'm sure that's also very common in neurotypicals, almost universal I'd have thought, especially during the fertile years. Incurable romantics are probably a lot more common than AS.

Strangely, if it weren't for the obsessional way I tackled the "problems" of being partnerless and not very good at music, I'm sure I'd not have got very far with either. I think I lost out a lot through being somewhat deaf to the advice of others, preferring to keep my problems to myself and sort them out in my own way.

Perhaps the hallmark of the Aspie obsessional interest is the tendency to spend hours in solitude working on the interest, so we'll tend to exclude ourselves socially for the sake of what NTs would see as a mere hobby.

It was the seeming lack of a special interest that put me off seeking a diagnosis for so long. I saw two people - one said I had PDD-NOS since I seemed to lack a special interest, the other said I had Aspergers.

It's hard to explain, but the more I have read and thought about AS, the more I think I have come to understand the underlying abnoramilty that leads to this marked "special interest" trait, even though it is a trait I do not seem to possess.

My teenage years and early 20s were marked by an almost constant feeling of fear of the future and frustration at my inability to "stop time". I would waste my summer holidays doing things like arranging my cassette tapes while my peers were out earning money and having fun.
I know it's difficult to explain how this would make me any different to an NT. I very much agree with what John Lennon said about how "life is what happens when you're busy making other plans".
He was an NT as far as I know.

I have obsessive interests but they tend to be about trivial things rather than serious academic subjects. My current obsession is retro video games; I have nine VIC 20s that I keep in my kitchen cupboards as well as a ton of other computers/consoles. I'm also an avid Spurs fan and have a mind full of obscure and pointless football facts and statistics. When I was at school, I was responsible for collecting the class registers every morning. By the end of the year, I knew the home address of every pupil in the school.

I am not sure whether I have "special interests", since even with the computer, which I spend 4-6 hours a day on (sometimes even longer if I get the chance), I can usually manage to get through the day without it if it's crashed again, and I don't end up constantly thinking: "Oh if I just had my computer". I also don't tend to talk about my interests a lot. However, I do tend to focus on one thing for a long time at a time.

I'm the exact opposite of this. I can't stand to be away from my computer for more than a couple hours AT MOST for any reason. I'm not quite as dependent on it as I was as a kid (I had an emotional breakdown once because I was at a summer camp for two days. They sent me home early, and my parents just took me as being shy and overreacting...), but I had my only computer sent in for repairs a couple weeks ago, and I quickly became physically ill, and spent most of my time just staring at my phone, waiting for the shop to call back. On the bright side, I think I called them so much about it that they got it done faster :3

You'd probably get PDD-NOS.

Mine change over time.. Some are ongoing ones that i have over a longer period of time, and some are things i might only be intensely focused on in my thoughts for a few days. One of my ongoing ones is reptiles. I definitely have an unusual fixation on them, but it's not constantly at an extremely high intensity in my thoughts. For the past few months i've been obsessed with the autistic spectrum to a more intense degree, whereas it seems to take over most of my thoughts, but i still end up talking about reptiles and stuff too. So there's usually i kind of hierarchy of special interests that i have at any given time, or at least that would be the best way to explain it. There will be one main thing that that is taking over my thinking, but i still have one or two ongoing ones in the background that i still end up reading up on and talking about a lot, just not devoting nearly as much thought to as the one i'm intensely focused on at the time. But then, in the absense of another intense interest, i become intensely interested in one of my long-lived stand-bys.. If this makes much sense.
I can do other things, and there can still be other things that get my interest thoughout the day.. But there's almost always something that i'm focused intensely on, so i can't really give many other things a big enough chunk of my thought to have anything resembling "balanced" interests. So i most definitely have special interests, it basically feels like i think in obsession, but i don't think that generally has to mean that one can't ever think about or do other things at all... It's just extremely unbalanced compared to the things other people do and think about.
It always amazed me how other people seem to be able to have a bunch of interests that they always give equal attention to. All of my interests are things that i have at one point or another had an extreme fixation on(and may briefly go back to at times), and i might talk about them if they are brought up because i had previously learned a lot about them.. But i can't have any kind of real focus on all those interests together. It's hard to explain, but i can't seem to weave all sorts of different interests together all through my life the way other people seem to, despite trying. But i think that obsessive/repetitive thought patterns can probably manifest in different ways and to varying degrees. For example... The routine thing... I don't have any kind of day-to-day rituals(at least not since i was a kid), even less than most NTs, but when i'm doing something that's not usual for me i like to plan out what's going to happen so that it's predictable and i don't get confused. So i don't have rituals, but still the underlying need for structure that it's usually centered on. So it seems to me like it would make sense that some people don't have classic special interests.

The opposite is true too... I thought because my weird interests took over my life, I must be aspie. Nope... so I am sure the opposite is true, there are aspies with no special interests. Nobody experiences a disorder in exactly the same way I don't think.

In all truth I find my special interest is trying and doing as many different things as possible, save things that can directly harm myself or others (Not harming other however, needs to be a conscious effort). As for the idea of most common though, well my though is usually equivalent to a epic train wreak, I have about 250 things at one time wrap into the wreak which varies depending on the hour of the day. Things tend toward constructive, but are like artistic projects, with some involving an insane level of categorizing things.

I think that the narrow special interest certainly can happen, but it's a bit of a stereotype. You often here of children with AS knowing everything and anything about bridges or dinosaurs, but I don't think it always presents this way.

As a kid, my mind was consumed to listening to everything (although I don't think I realized how much I did this until recently.) I didn't constantly spew facts about acoustics or anything like that. Rather, I was a very quiet kid and was simply consumed by listening to my environment. Since sound and music is a fairly abstract concept that's relatively difficult to put into words, I suspect I didn't try very much.

These days, I have a tendency to get consumed by one at a time, and then eventually that interest fades and I'm on to something else. My most recent one was researching AS. I'm still here on WP, but I'm not completely consumed by it anymore.