Are any of you compulsive researchers?

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I am!

While sometimes I'd refer to myself as an obsessive researcher, because I do tend to enjoy it a lot (researching topics is actually one of my favorite things to do), I also often feel a compulsive need to research, not just a desire.

For instance, a friend of mine has to begin dialysis soon, and he recently had surgery to install a fistula in his arm. He posted a picture of his scar on Facebook, and I immediately began researching Hemodialysis Fistulas. I looked at pictures, watched videos and read about them, until I pretty much knew every little detail there was to know.

The thing is, though, that I have a strange and severe 'phobia' of sorts of the inner elbow area of the arm, which stems from Interoceptive sensitivity (being aware of sensations of bodily functions, like blood coursing through veins, etc) and getting blood drawn, to the point that just mentioning the 'inner elbow' in this message moments ago made my stomach lurch. Anyway, the Hemodialysis Fistula runs right over the inner elbow, so the pictures and videos I was looking at made me physically ill and anxious, to the point I felt a panic attack coming on...but I COULDN'T STOP!

Anyone else?

when not depressed and exhausted i do the very same thing - till the wee hours. cannot explain why i cannot stop once a topic has `bitten` me. a compelling urge kind of disrupts my life. once asked psychiatrist if it could be related to bipolar... hypermania

I am, yeah. I don't really find myself unable to stop or anything but if there is ever any question in my mind at all or a disagreement about some fact between two people, I must find out the correct answer. I've been accused of "trying to prove myself right" all the time but that's not at all what it's about. I just want to know the actual facts whether they coincide with what I thought initially or not.

Tell me about it!

I sit reading page after page on the internet or in encyclopedias about things that are totally irrelevant to me! I know ridiculous things: the bi-laws of tree felling in the UK, car felony in Canada, plots of movies I don't ever intend to watch, the details of celebrities I don't care about (although that does help me keep up with NT teenagers at school, who seem rather celeb obsessed), and much more.

I don't know why I do it, but some nights I just have to sit with Wikipedia open and reading any random articles I can lay my hands on.

I don't think it's too big a deal though really, just one of my on/off Aspie obsessions.

Yes, i thought everyone did?

Yes, I do this one often. I really enjoy that type of research though...I like facts, so I really enjoy looking up facts to settle and argument, or in the event that no one in the room really knows the answer. I always just thought of research as a fun, obsessive interest of mine...until the other night, when the particular topic made me anxious and sick, and I still needed to research.

Yes.
Especially when I come across something that I don't know at all. I will immediately research it until I know enough about it to tell you what it really is.
If it's something interesting I could be researching about it for days.
And I don't think everybody does this. I have a friend who teases me with it when I say that I didn't know something she says "and now you will look it up as soon as you can". Then there's my brother who always gets upset when I do this because he thinks I don't trust him when he tells me about something unknown to me and I still look it up. He doesn't believe that I will try to know more about it than the basics. Because of these incidents, I somehow doubt that it's a common thing to do.

I remember a few credit card companies coming after me, many years ago, i did not have enough money to hire a lawyer so i had to do my own research and answer my own summons. The cases would never make it to court because the plaintiffs would drop them. As a result, i have a bit of knowledge in credit card debt/laws.

I have gone without medical insurance for a while. I had a common BUT unique case about 15 yrs ago. I researched it on the web and diagnosed myself. To make a long story short, i was correct. I gained a bit of knowledge on IBS.

I have had to research and solve problems out of necessity ........

Usually i already have an ideal, it's just a matter of gathering information to prove my hypothesis.

TheSunAlsoRises

Last edited by TheSunAlsoRises on 22 Feb 2012, 1:43 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Of course..
Let us see.. UFOs (esp. Roswell UFO Crash(the REAL DEAL btw)), dinosaurs, geology, dolphins, reptiles, autism (current one) are all things I research/obssess over.

Sincerely,
Matthew

Wikipedia was built for us, all sorts of (insert interesting hobby here, geeks pour out their legacy, Their "worlds" and Sthicks onto Wikipedia.

Infact, since I'm a big fan of security blankets, I just found some really juicy colourful information that woudl really colour up the article. etc.

OK, I guess I'm like this too. Isn't the web wonderful? It really makes research so much easier. Almost everything causes me to go off and do a bit of digging, but I have my favorites that I return to very frequently. UFO's, alien abductions, reptilians, psychology, philosophy, spirituality, current news, conspiracy theories, and history are all my most searched for items.

Praise be to the WEB! Long live the WEB!

Sometimes I'll end up compulsively researching the hell out of something even if I don't really want to. I had an infected toenail and started researching ingrown toenails and how they're operated on and stuff. Started out reading articles on how to prevent them and carried on until I ended up watching loads of videos of people being operated on, even though it made me cringe.

Yes, I often get involved in obsessive research. I have my regular special intense interests of roller coasters/amusement parks and house plans for example, but I often get into researching topics that I haven't always been that interested in. Right now I am interested in mountains again. And when I get into something like that, I feel the urge to collect statistics. I like to compare the mountains in terms of the percentages of deaths of those attempting to summit, etc. And I am not satisfied in just knowing how high the mountains are, I am interested in the size of the mountains. For example, Mt. McKinley is a taller and larger mountain than Mt. Everest. Since Mt. Everest rests on an already high plateau, it need not be as tall as certain other mountains to be the highest. Mt. McKinely is taller, but it rests on a plateau near sea level---so it does not approach the height of Mt. Everest. The tallest mountain on earth is Mauna Kea (33,500 feet tall---but it rests on the ocean floor) in Hawaii, and if it were to rest in the Himalayas, it would be around 50,000 feet high which would make it around 20,000 feet higher than Mt. Everest which stands at a height of just over 29,000. Well...that is the type of research I often get into.

Obsessive research can be one of the positive aspects of AS, but only if you can keep it focused. I know that AS is the reason that I am a good researcher. I am able to hunt for information and often turn up information that others have missed.

The dogged determination to follow through the research to the end is also somthing that I get from AS. I would consider this as hyper focus rather than hyper mania, although I can see that the two can be very similar.

The only problem with hyper focus is that I loose track of other tasks that i should doing and time tends to slip away.

Yes. I am a compulsive researcher.

I can't help it either - when there's a question or an issue, there's a 99.9% chance that I am going to find out more details and an answer if it's available....this is providing that the question and topic might be within my intellectual understanding, which is average.


A while ago, I thought about being a ChaCha guide person, except, I realized I would lose way too much sleep *L*, and unfortunately, I don't retain a lot of facts.


http://becomeaguide.chacha.com/

If I'm not researching, I'm working on what I researched or working out how it could relate to me. If I think up a mechanism, I stay on the internet until I definitively prove to myself if someone else already did so or not. I do have the 'standard' list of obsessions; cars, computers, automation etc, but they always lead me to new, less pervasive ones. I don't really think it helps me with my work, but if I expand the body of work to include all the other thought-intensive activities I'm part of, I don't think I could live without my amorphous blob of random knowledge. I used to read books compulsively, sometimes more than 3 lengthy novels a week, which I still do on occasion, but less and less now that I fully realize how much more trivia is available to chew on straight from the internet. My quest for understanding has taken me back into the computer, and now, along with programming, I participate in tests, evaluations and modifications of the very same software I use to absorb all my assorted tidbits. On a normal day, between electronics, work, cars, bikes, science news and whatever else I stumble into (I'm my own StumbleUpon) I have 50 some tabs open in my test build of FireFox, which I've been compulsively modifying, testing and 'improving', driven all the while by the same empiricism that keeps me Googling.