Broad instead of narrow?

Post Reply New Topic

I onced was told that with ASD you do not have to be narrow in your interests at all. Wait a minute! What about the diagbosyoc criteria!
I was told that the interests can in fact be broad but you will always be narrow in some aspects of it.
What does being narrow even refer to?
I guess it refers to only focus on one aspect of something. If you like trains than you may only be interested in watching trains pass by but never care about driving one.
I hear people say that ASD can make you too broad in your interest. Perhaps you'reinterested in all the aspects of trains. Sounds like too much.
Perhaps the narrow thing is that only focusing on all aspects exists.

What do you experts say?

I think by narrow they just mean focussed. This kind of description is perhaps typical:

http://www.rainbowsofautism.com/narrow- ... in-autism/

ASD is of course a spectrum disorder. Many of us have fairly broad interests, and some of us have a lot of very different interests, so I think any stereotype of us having one highly restricted and specific field of interest is rarely correct.

The obsessions I've ever had have always centered around people, never objects or facts. I used to be obsessed with bus-drivers, and the bus service they drove that I'd regularly board, but I didn't exactly know the bus schedule off by heart and I wasn't interested in the mechanical stuff. I was just interested in getting to know the drivers and flirting with the male ones and being friends with the female ones. They all just either fascinated me or sexually aroused me. But I wasn't a "busspotter" and I hardly knew anything about buses really. I just became a pest and I wish I was the sort of Aspie to get indulged in something where I wouldn't be pestering anybody.

It was obsession, rather than special interest. And it was mostly based on fascination and impulse. I wanted to be them.

A special interest is something you're more likely to enjoy and can get indulged in it and focus and learn.

An obsession chooses you more than you choose it, and it overtakes your mind and is usually pursued compulsively. Obsessions can be annoying and can even make you do things out of character.

Special interests are much healthier.

I just wrote a post about interests, it's called 'How Long Do Your Obsessions Last?' which is basically about our interests and if they are broad or narrow. Well that was discussed too. If you want to read that too.

I'm not an expert, but...

Perhaps Isaac Asimov partially illustrates the issue you mention.
<=>- Some folk believe he was likely on the Spectrum. (For instance, see this.)
<=>- Yet he published books in almost all parts of the Dewey Decimal system! (See this.)
What little I know about Asimov as a person is consistent with him being Autistic...except I thought he had written books in so many different topics that he must not have had narrow interests!

Then, after reading more about him, I realized he did have a narrow interest: getting published!

I have trouble focusing on the interests I do have. I'm really into writing, and I have written 5 books that I so badly want to get published (all books are handwritten and I wrote a few pages at a time, sometimes weeks between each bit of writing but I actually managed to complete them). But to publish they have to be typed up on a computer, and I'm having trouble with focusing on typing every book word for word on to the computer. It's very tedious and will probably take an extremely long time. I started typing out one book but it took me nearly an hour just to do about 5 pages, and I have about 300 pages to go or more for each book! Writing them out was fun, and reading them is fun too, but retyping them is really boring and I can't focus, no matter how desperate I am of self-publishing.

You could say that I have a narrow interest in efficiency, but follow it all over. It took over a thousand years for bridge builders to borrow a trick from shipwrights. Now, I'm trying to get the ship builders to use some engineering that is well known in aviation to improve their mileage by 20%. So, I have again branched out in trying to understand their refusal, a very different field, but still following the original track.

Do we have a definition of broad and narrow?
In psychiatry/psychology do they define these terms?
My understanding is that being too broad is less talked about. Has anyone had some experience with it?

^ Asimov, by his own admission, loved writing more than anything else and, by extension, getting published. He has a witty quote about whether he liked writing better than sex and he said something to the effect of, well, he could write 12 hours a day…..

Well...obviously Isaac Asimov loved to write, as noted in Quora's "What was a 'secret' to Isaac Asimov's prolific writing?", but I think there are some indications he considered getting published to be an essential part of the writing process.