Why do we get special interests?

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With me, I would say that special interests started before my social problems got severe. My unusual interests pushed some people away. Also, when I get too obsessed with something it gets very difficult for me to focus on socializing.

As some of the above posters mentioned, I don't think this is a conscious counterweight to offset a social vacuum.

The "interest" is neurologically driven or 'locally biased' to look for details, though it does work that way, i.e. to replace people. The "bias" to form "such" isn't there from the beginning.

I agree with many of the posts above. A love of systematizing encourages gathering facts to organize in the mind.

In addition, many of those on the spectrum have to deal with a high degree of anxiety. Focusing on a special interest blocks out anxious thoughts.

I don't know why I have them, all I do know is that I'm just an obsessive person anyway that dwells on things. So it's just a given that I will have intense interests at some point. When I have a special interest it usually takes up most of my brain space, like it just randomly pops up in my thoughts whenever. I could be thinking about some important thing I have to do then suddenly my special interest just goes "hi there long time to see!" then I can't get rid of it.
What pisses me off though is that the vast majority of special interests I've had cannot be used as a very good social tool and it's not something you usually share as a group.

Something for our mind to focus on.

Special interest for me is a way to understand how things work around me. Also, it may be a need to fill that large memory space in our head. Because I can make connection easily between parts of informations I gathered, I have a good mind for innovation. I can go further in my research for truth, thus I am more efficient than most of NT as an engineer.

I discussed this topic with my mom, and she said that she doesn't believe that special interests are a substitute for social interaction. She said it probably has to do with the way our brains are wired. She also mentioned that that's probably why people with AS are more prone to have OCD as well even though OCD thoughts and special interests are different.

We then discussed the differences between an NT interest and a special interest: she gave the example of how even though she enjoys Fleetwood Mac, she doesn't feel the need to memorize lots of facts about them, and she is able to go months or years without listening to them. She also said that when she listens to them, she gets tired of them after a couple of weeks to a month.

This is in contrast to my special interests, like Alice in Wonderland for example. I have memorized a lot of facts about it, and I have been thinking about it every day for the past year and I still haven't gotten tired of it yet. An even better example would be my obsession with Japan, which lasted 10 solid years from age 8 to 18.

Fleetwood Mac and Stevie Nicks were my main special interest in high school I guess the fact that I somehow managed to acquire 20 Stevie demo tapes, a copy of her high school yearbook and that I know the name of Lindsey's high school band (which Stevie later joined) was the Fritz Rabyne Memorial Band would also set me apart from your mother

Yeah, I think you are right that our brains are wired in another way. I don't go out much with others but, when I crush on people I meet, I turn THEM into special interests. I look up everything I can find about them on the internet and think about them 24/7. It's really a debilitating thing to do, especially when that person has no interest in you.

I wish I didn't have special interests, because mine are over people. Being obsessed with people really isn't healthy. When I was 14 I got so obsessed with a middle-aged bloke that I ended up in trouble, and I got detentions at school if I talked about him to the other children, and if you think that is really bad to give someone a detention for talking about someone, then you should have seen how severely intense my obsession was !
But it was horrible - I even wished I wasn't obsessed with him myself, but I couldn't stop it. I even lost a lot of friends at school because of my obsession!
At least I finally stopped being obsessed with him at age 17, and I went onto somebody else, but since then I have learnt to tone down a bit and keep it at the level of how NTs keep their special interests at, so that I don't get into trouble or look weird or anything like that. Even though I think about my obsessions a lot, I still try not to involve all my relatives and friends into my obsessions - like I did when I was younger.

I don't even remember putting my special interest over people, but I do remember I've always had them. It may have something to do with my lack of social skills - as in, so long as I had a specialist interest EVERYTHING else came second, even socialising.

Because they're fun!

If you look at a hobby, a hobby is a special interest + social interaction. My grandmother used to do bowling, and the actual bowling part was very minor to the whole experience based on what she said about it. If you took all that away and only the bowling was left, it would be like a special interest. It's very rare for someone to not have any hobby or interest. So it seems to be innate in humans to get interested in things. People with AS have a better ability to concentrate and focus, so their interests are more obsessive, but then hobbies are also obsessive for others. (What I am trying to say is that others see the AS special interest as "obsessive" because of the lack of social interaction, and don't realize hobbies in general are obsessive too.)

There's a lot of "churn" because it's easier to exhaust any given special interest. There's only so much that you can learn about any given topic before you start realizing you've seen everything you're seeing before. The average everyday AS person learns more quickly than others. Without the social interaction, this also doesn't take as long. After a point, you're just seeing the same information presented in different ways. I took about five years to exhaust what could be known about Asperger's Syndrome, for example. Eventually I saw each new book was saying the same thing in different ways. Plus a narrow special interest is easier to exhaust than a wider one.

I suppose the most long-term sustainable special interests involve a skill that can never be totally perfected (eg martial arts), or something that is always new within prescribed rules (eg RPGs). The least sustainable ones would involve some set of knowledge or items that can be exhausted (eg finding digital copies of a childhood comics collection - there are only a finite number of these).

For me, an interest has to have some personal connection, or I don't care about it. I have to have some reason to feel connected to it or else it doesn't register.

I would say more about this, but I've got to go work on a special interest.