Curiosity?

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I've been super curious my whole life, and I'll ask questions or look at almost everything if it's not too complicated. I've always been somewhat interested in knowing anything, even simple unimportant things, sort of like a semi compulsive behaviour. It's obviously far more complicated and I've explained it terribly, but the problem for me is that even though I feel interested, I often forget even seconds after I've had someone tell me something, and never really consider it again. It's like I just want to hear/learn information just for the sake of having it present itself to me.

For example on many days I'll ask my mum where the cats are, but then stop paying attention.

Is anyone else like this? How is curiosity, if at all, affected by having an ASD?

I've heard repetitive can be a sign of anxiety in ASD. Do you think that's true for you?

know a lot of aspies are known as "walking encyclopedias" because they are curious about everything and pick up bits of info and facts on a ton of stuff.

I am intensely curious. I pay attention to the answers though (in at least in adulthood, I have). I have no idea if that relates to ASD.


Funny you mention cats...recently I was watching old home videos to see what my speech was like as a young child. The first thing caught on tape was we me around age 3 asking my mother, "where did the cat go?" about 16 times in a row. (She was nice on camera, but I remember that making her yell at me in real life. It took me years to realize that I needed to ask a different question to get a new answer.)

I have an insatiable curiosity. I always have to know more, more and MORE.

I'm not sure, I don't think so in this case. My curiosity is also related to precision and other weird tendencies. For example, I may be using a word where I know the rough, but not exact meaning. I'll do a Google definition check and look at it and then go back, but then forget one part of what it precisely had written, then have to go back and look at it again. Sometimes I don't forget, but I just don't look at the whole thing and waste my own time. It's difficult to explain.

My behaviours seem to be inconsistent too. When considering the above Google definition example, that doesn't happen all the time, only sometimes.

To be honest I can't even really describe what I mean properly as I'm not currently experiencing it; I'm sitting at my computer making another post on WrongPlanet so there's nothing new around me. I'm also tired and have other things on my mind.



The stuff that would make up my 'encyclopedia' is mostly worthless, unfortunately for me.



I pay attention to answers as well if it's something I really want to know, just I have many times where I seem to ask questions/be generally curious about things for random reasons and a lot of the time I don't seem to pay attention or remember the answers given to me, or discovered by myself. For example, I ask my mum 'What's for dinner?' multiple times a day because I forget what she said. I don't do it in the fashion that you described as a child though, and don't think I ever did.



Yep!

Last edited by Norny on 11 Feb 2014, 8:47 am, edited 1 time in total.

I am curious about a lot of things at the moment.

Well, usually the collection is more in the form of trivia. "did you know a giraffe has an 18 inch tongue?"
stuff like that. not really going to change the life of anyone hearing stuff like that rattled off.

Yeah that's sort of the stuff that I know, though I don't really care about giraffes, nor have I ever read anywhere how long their tongues are.

The annoying thing is I don't trust my memory unless it's in one of my fields of interest, in which I have done extensive research/learning. Sometimes when it feels like I know a fact I refrain from saying it in case it's incorrect. Even if I'm fairly sure, for example that 19% of cats are black (they aren't) I won't say it if there is doubt in my mind. I'm not sure how common that is.