Narrow obsessive interests vs. the encyclopedia

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A different thread sparked this question...

Having obsessive narrow interests is a characteristic of AS, yes? But so is reading the entire encyclopedia from beginning to end as a child (me: both World Book and Britannica, at age 6-7)

These two behaviors seem to contradict each other: Only interested in a couple things, but absorbing information about "everything."

Are there any theories that reconcile this seeming paradox?

I had an almanac that I used to read. I also become obsessed with Guinness World Records..

I don't really have any theories, all I know is I wanted more and more information. It had a calming effect on me. Probably because it kept my mind preoccupied.

Maybe the obsession is for the information itself. To be a walking talking encyclopedia. I know with the world records book I wanted to know what was the biggest, fastest, strongest ,shortest and tallest human or animal on the planet. It was still quite narrow in the fact that it was just one book, it was just over a wide variety of subjects.

Maybe not the same thing but similar

My guess is that it's data collection as an organizing principle. Both the encyclopedia and the Guiness Book present information as a format. It's alphabetical (the encyclopedia) or it's extremeties of measure (Guiness Book). In both cases it might be the formatting that is the positive mental experience more than the information itself. And yes, I used to read both when I was young.

If I really cared that much about aardvarks and zydeco music, I'd go to the zoo and listen to zydeco albums. But it wasn't the things themselves that were of interest. It was that one was at one end of the encyclopedia and the other was at the other end. And everything was in between in its' proper place. A format. An organizing principle.

For me, I read the encyclopedia as a kid, when my dad would yell at my family at night, I'd go down in the basement, sit on a garbage bag of clothes with the radio on, and read World Book from like 8-10 at night. My biggest obsessions from reading the encyclopedia as a kid were phonograph records, magnetic tape, laserdiscs, CED (contact laser discs that work more like a phonograph record) discs, and film, like not movies, just film itself and cameras, that, and animation. Also over the air television, antennas, radio, etc, could never really do much with those hobbies, though, due to lack of money. As a kid, I made a record player out of a spool of thread, pencil and a sewing needle and a paper cone. I also made flip books on index cards. I wanted to invent a really pointless medium involving a phonograph needle on a spool of tape, a record on a tape. I realized it'd be pointless, but I thought it'd be such a great medium. I like analog things, as you can tell. Yeah... Looking back, damn, that totally sounds like a stereotypical Asperger thing to do, getting obsessed with things like that. I still would read the encyclopedia, but as a kid, I probably read the articles on those subjects a few hundred to even a thousand times. No wikipedia when I was a kid, if I had wikipedia when I was a kid, my God, I'd be like Nikola Tesla by now or something.

I had sorta narrow interests, but not like, really really narrow. I managed to sorta "juggle" lots of interests at once, and as I got older, I took my old special interest knowledge and sorta evolved it. I think it was more my parents encouraging me to try lots of stuff. So lots of stuff I tried, I liked. I didn't really have an aversion to trying things, and I still don't. It's really odd, I'm not afraid to try things at all, my only thought process is like "well I won't die if I try this, right?," but I get completely pissed when my routine gets broken, as my family observes. Maybe me trying new things so easily is a way to offset my low adaptability in other areas of getting my routines or surroundings changing.

Oh well.

If your special interest is information, then an encyclopedia is perfect. I am very heavily oriented towards information in general. I see it as a giant river flowing by with all sorts of cool things in it (I mean I literally SEE this in my mind). So you could say my special interest is sitting on the river bank fishing for information.

A special interest is often like a Tardis, being larger on the inside than on the outside .....if you spend all your time reading one book instead of participating in the myriad wonders of the neurotypical world, you will look narrow to everybody else. But from the inside, your special interest may encompass more of the universe than the average NT would get from their own activities over the same time frame. Reading an encyclopaedia is broad or restrictive, depending on your viewpoint.

Yes, I have narrow obsessive interests. However, as a child (and still to some extent today) I wanted to know everything about everything. I would read encyclopedias as you did, and "Encyclopedia" was one of the less offensive nicknames I had as a child. I also would take trips through dictionaries. If I read a word somewhere I didn't know the meaning of, I would look it up, but wouldn't stop there. From its etymology I would look up related words which sometimes branched off to yet more words. It was like taking a stroll through a forest of words. I could follow trails for hours. I still do that to some extent online. If something, anything, catches my attention I want to learn more about it and look it up on Wikipedia, which then frequently leads me to follow hyperlinks to related content. Online dictionaries are fun too. I appreciate their sometimes having links to click to hear how the word is pronounced, because I never really got very good at reading those funny IPA characters and stress indicators. While I still want to know everything about everything, I realize my span of years is limited. I focus mainly on my favorite interests now more than ever, but still will look up things from other subjects that catch my attention if I encounter references to them in articles I am browsing.

Even when reading an article or news story about a particular World War 2 fighter plane for example, I sometimes end up reading about quantum physics or the latest astronomical findings, or the price of tea in China, whatever. There used to be a show (was it called "Connections" with James Burke?) in the 1980s I think that told stories of how one discovery is linked to something completely different, following the chain of links similarly to the way I read and study. This may have opened my mind to the reality that everything is connected, which I appreciate more than ever now after decades of studying comparative mythology, especially Native American and eastern philosophies.

i am more of an encyclopedic type, but i tend to say that "my special interest is collecting trivia", which about covers it for most people that are indeed looking for a single obsessive interest

Haha, me too. A friend called me a "maven," someone who collects and shares information. And yesterday my new roomate asked me if I "know everything about everything."

But as a kid, I read the entire encyclopedias, a to z. I wonder if that's just an obsessive interest in and of itself.