extensive interests?

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I came out asperger's to a professor today and she said she never would have guessed I have it. She said, "your interests seem extensive, rather than mono-focused, you are, if you don't mind my saying so, very socially-adept, funny, involved and engaged."

I'm not sure how she gets socially-adept, but that's a compliment. She hasn't really seen me interact with others enough to realize that what she's seeing is me being polite and non-confrontational when interacting with others. Funny, I think, is her seeing jokes I wasn't making. This happens to me a lot: I'll say something completely seriously and everyone starts laughing and telling me I'm so funny. Involved and engaged is easy: I signed up for the class because I'm very interested in the topic.

But the thing that got me thinking was "extensive interests" as an indicator that I wouldn't be on the spectrum. See, the thing is, I have not really had a single, life-long perseverative special interest. I have a deep and long-term interest in language that has carried me into all sorts of investigations. I love symbols and numbers -- probably an offshoot of the language interest. But I also get hyperfocused on particular topics and bury myself in them for months at a time, often neglecting everything else, including food and bathing, until the interest burns itself out (sometimes what happens is that no matter how much research I do, I keep finding the same information everywhere after a while and then I'm "done with it." At least until some new information comes out.)

I also have a pretty good memory, so if I was super-obsessed with something when I was twelve, I can still discuss it, if the subject comes up, in pretty good detail. So maybe it looks like I have extensive interests, but really I don't multi-task and I just drill down into one interest at a time, very heavily.

So . . . my question . . . do others here have "extensive interests?" If so, does it follow the pattern I described of getting really involved in one topic at a time or do you find yourself digging into everything you can find, all at once?

It's a little irksome because the professor is assuring me that she is extremely well-versed in autism and wrote in an e-mail, " I do need to assure you, though, that I understand the disorder completely," to which I couldn't resist responding "Almost completely; you didn't recognize me. :-)" And, of course, I just exhibited a sense of humor so she's going to say again that I'm not looking very asperger's. Which is irksome to me because why did I go through all that mental poking and prodding of getting diagnosed if not to be recognized for who and what I am and to understand myself so that I could make my life better. So it's almost as if what she's really saying is that the doctors who diagnosed me are quacks and I really know nothing about myself. *sigh*

And I thought it might be a *good* thing to come out to a professor who had come out about her child having high functioning autism.

Anyway -- extensive interests -- who here has them?

Sparrow

I've just got four or five interests in my whole life. Dinosaurs - ancient egypt - pokemon... They stay during several years and a new one comes slowly. I think AS have few interests just because we're more comfortable sticking to our habits. If you don't need that, well, maybe you don't belong to this category. Anyway, little boxes...

Sounds like me. Different interests, but one at a time, not so many (though an interest in writing has led me to research all kinds of diverse things in order to write stories) and they last a long time and I come back to old interests again and again.



Meaning if I'm interested in too many things maybe I don't have asperger's? You sound like my professor!

I have AS and also have a plethora of interests. History, literature, philosophy, nature, science, videogames, movies and TV to name just a few. These are all co-extensive interests and most of them (except philosophy) I've had since I was a child. I actually find it difficult at times to find time for work with all of these interests.

Even with focusing on one interest at a time, I find it difficult to keep up with responsibilities. For example, to get funding for school, I have to attend full time. That means I'm in three or more classes at one time. But I'm having a hard time keeping up with my classes because I've gotten hyperfocused on one project that REALLY caught my interest because it's researching the history of one city in Britain and it happens to be the city my father's people came from and one of my super-interests is my family's genealogy so I'm thrilled to be digging in to the history of the place my people came from but I'm having a hard time tearing myself away from it to do the other reading and research I'm supposed to be doing this semester.

Certainly it's a myth that being on the autism spectrum negates the possibility of extensive interests. While many of us do have relatively limited strong interests, the underlying characteristic seems to be the depth of focus or perseverance with our interests. I would say an interest of mine is better understanding people - which means better understanding psychology, sociology, public policy, politics, education, neuroscience, law, medicine, etc. As a PhD student studying the spectrum (and diagnosed Asperger's myself 11 years ago at age 13), I consider myself a socio-developmental educational psychologist in training. My interests growing up, which remain at lower levels of passion, include animals, rocks and gems, international coins, and basketball, but I applied them all my interest in people (except rocks). Calling interests "special" can sound condescending, and even if they are privately engaged in and not necessarily directly about people, we might be thinking about them in relation to people/the broader social context.

My interests are all relevant to each other. For example, I am interested in the RMS Titanic, RMS Lusitanic and MS Estonia, all of which were boats that sunk killing hundreds of people (yes, I am a little morbid). But, all of these interests can be grouped into 'Passenger Ships:Shipwrecks. However, my other interests are less obsessive (the Holocaust, Science, Abstract Art, Film, Violin and Architecture).

It IS a characteristic of the autism spectrum to have abnormally restricted centres of interest. It is an official symptom.
That doesn't mean that, if you don't have this symptom, you're not on the autism spectrum. But that is a possibility.
I said "anyway, little boxes". I wanted to say that the name of your psychic structure doesn't really matter. Just know yourself.

I don't know what "anyway, little boxes" means.

I just told you it means that the name of your psychic structure doesn't really matter and you should just try to know yourself.
AS is a little box, a category. You put yourself in this box because you recognize yourself in some symptoms. And if you don't recognize in other symptoms, you'll just say "that doesn't mean I don't belong to this box". I think you should'nt try to adapt the box to yourself or adapt yourself to the box, in order to have a name to give to your psychic structure : it's useless. Just say : I'm myself !

But I don't see how you're saying I don't have that symptom. Are you saying it just because my professor said it? Have you read anything that I've said about myself? I don't *want* that symptom, but it's pretty obvious that I have it. It makes my life very difficult, actually, as I'm trying to go to university where I'm expected to work on several different projects every semester but I get dug into the one that matches my interest and neglect the rest. I *wish* I had such "extensive interests" as my professor seems to think I have, but what she's seeing is that I remember information from when I was interested in something else.

Are you saying that people with Asperger's never change their interest their whole life? Or are you saying that when someone with Asperger's changes interests they forget everything they ever knew about previous interests?

I'm not fighting to keep my diagnosis of Asperger's, I'm wondering how on earth you decided that my professor is right and I am wrong when I live my life every day and she has known me for about ten minutes.

I have quite extensive interests.

A few of those I will focus on obsessively for a period of a few weeks or a few months until I finish learning all I care to know about it, and a few of the others are long term "special interests", which I may stop focusing on for a while but come back to.

Your teacher displays the classical narrow thinking common among NT's.

So it's not the ships or ships specifically then but the mechanisms involved in their sinking?

You know, students don't use to get interested by everything they have to study. You'll just have to work...
It's good if you don't care so much of the diagnosis. Your teacher has a point of view and you have yours, maybe his could be interesting too. We cannot be objective about ourselves. And you just said you don't really have a single perseverative interest.