First time in history!! !! The NT/AS open hotline ! !! !! !

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Question for NT's:

Something dawned on me, looking at a Warhammer 40k novel (for those who dont know, it's a sci-fi war series based in a future dark age): For those of you that read horror stories, do you actually get a sense of fear, spine tingle, goosebumps, etc.? I just realized that I've had that (read Frankenstein by Shelly, and a few others).

For me, i guess im too busy trying to figure out what the location looks like to care about it.

sorry posted in the wrong forum.

How long does a special interest last? And when your over it does it feel like a worn out book, or are you still interested in the subject - just not 'obsessively' any more?
Also what triggers an interest in things? If you go onto another special interest does it relate to the previous one in some way or can it be totally unrelated?

Nostromo, that varies. It can be very brief-- I spent one evening with lapwings as my special interest. Some can occur simultaneously, which I'll get to presently. I might not have time right now to finish my answer; if not, I'll be back later.

But anyway. I've spent a couple of years with one of my interests. And writing has been a special interest of mine, sometimes dropping to the level of something I'm merely interested in, for my entire life.

There's also cycling within them. I got interested in fandom, but that's not anything in itself, so I would cycle fandoms, with the works themselves becoming special interests for a couple of months. As that stopped dominating my life, the individual fandoms cycled faster-- not months, but weeks, days, minutes, poof.

Self-interests don't get burned out for no reason. Interest stops when I can't find new material and can't think of anything interesting about old material. Well, it doesn't stop then, but the clock starts ticking then. Or maybe I grow out of it-- e.g., a cartoon that I outgrow, or determining that I'm through reading anything that so much as mentions NLD because it's just Asperger's with more angst. Or maybe I stop being able to get at it-- I lost interest in House between seasons.

After I drop one? I might come back to it. I picked up Robin Hood again for about a week. (Robin Hood is full of material, but it's hard to access, so I burn the available fuel quickly.) I would be interested in hearing anything you might have to say about dinosaurs, Code Lyoko, etc. The other day, I saw a forum thread on Animorphs and that was fun.

The thing that worries me is that with their ephemeral nature, my shifting interests might make a career hard.

Sometimes, they're totally unrelated. Sometimes, they're quite related. A special interest will come of something I encounter or think about, so it might be related to a previous one... or it might not. In fact, it generally isn't. A special interest is more likely to shift and expand if you become interested in something similar.

I've always thought psychology is interesting. For years, I didn't do anything about that, flummoxed about how to start learning. One day, doing research, I needed to read up on and compare DID and bipolar disorder. I did. But DID was interesting, so I kept researching. I did some research in a very old, very out of date abnormal psychology textbook. Then I read some pop psych books, watched lectures from Yale and read the course textbooks, read J Clin when I could find it... essentially, I gained the special interest. When I also became interested in psychopharmacology, that didn't replace psychology/psychiatry. It became part of it.

Whereas, going from that to a fantasy book series is totally different. They're separate... ish. Because I do wonder about dx'ing fictional characters and stuff like that.

Sometimes they occur simultaneously. Sometimes that's an overlap as one fades away and another builds up momentum. Sometimes, they just happen simultaneously. They might balance, or you might be more into one, then another, then back to the first... etc.

Essentially, you quit when you know all you can find. If you can find more, it's interesting again, although it might not be enough. You also need some sort of magical-seeming combination of factors for it to explode into a special interest.

To an NT: Do you feel that bullying someone with AS will rehabilitate them?

Personally I've only been on the recieving end of bullying.

That's the danger of thinking of people without autism as some sort of vast global community. People are still people, for better or worse.