can your special interest change?

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so, does anyone have a different special interest to the one they had as a child? i do. i was just starting to become obsessed with stones, when i discovered my love for horses. then i think the horses took up too much room in my brain and the stones got left behind. i still love stones, i just dont know all the names and stuff that i had started to learn.

I don't see why you couldn't get different special intense interests as life moves on. For me, when I was in grade school it was all about roller coasters and music (electronic synths, organs, etc.). Today, it's still roller coasters and music. But there have been some things I have become really interested in, but not enough to call "intense," such as magic tricks and ancient Indian earthworks. One interest I had growing up was HO scale model trains. I still work with those---but because I am building an amusement park with roller coasters on the layout---so it all goes back to roller coasters again. The model train layout is just a way in order for me to showcase the roller coasters.

I want to add that I began a fascination with house plans when I was in middle school to high school age. I collected many house plan books. Today, I still love those. The model train layout is also a good place to showcase model houses I have collected and/or built.

Mine has shifted many times over the course of my life. The first ones I remember were dinosaurs, which extended to an interest in asteroids and their impacts. In third grade, when I got my Gameboy and Pokémon Blue (three days until Pokémon Black & White aaaaaaahhh!) that shifted to Pokémon. I was far and away the best battler out of all of my friends; in fact, I never lost a battle. I then shifted to astronomy and, in ninth grade, relativity. Then I took biology the next year and my obsession would turn to evolution for the next three-four years. My freshman year of college I became obsessed with college football, which I still am. In March 2009 (when Pokémon Platinum was released), my obsession with Pokémon was rekindled, and now I understand the inner workings of the game completely as well. Towards the end of last July, I became obsessed with music and music theory. I have absolutely no idea what triggered it, and no idea why it didn't trigger earlier (I did band in middle school but quit before high school because I was uninterested). Since then, I have 'acquired' a vast amount of music software and have taught myself how to use it. In January, I purchased a Casio CTX-3000 keyboard on Amazon (no mod wheel, but oh well, it was a great deal) and I've been teaching myself how to play since then (along with the help of some lessons I downloaded). Progress is slow, as I have school to attend to, but hopefully I'll pick up the pace during the summer.

I see the college football obsession and the music obsession as ones that will last the rest of my life. I absolutely love Georgia Tech, as I have my whole life, and that will drive me to continue attending and analyzing as many games as I can. My ultimate goal for the music obsession is to create my own songs, and the satisfaction I receive from listening to even something like a four-measure melody I have made is so great I don't see how it will ever fade.

In addition to these major ones, I often get more short-term or situational ones. For example, when I received my unofficial diagnosis in December 2008, I became very obsessed with learning about autism and Asperger's. This semester I am obsessed with memorizing body language signals and becoming more proficient at noticing and analyzing them in day-to-day situations (an endeavor which is going very well, I might add). However, my Asperger's obsession faded as I made sense of the majority of my thought processes and behaviors, and the body language obsession will fade as I become more proficient at reading it.

Yes. I've got a string of abandoned special interests......Doctor Who, The Beatles, building multi-track tape recorders......I'm still interested in those things but my nerd-alarm goes off if I spend too much time on them. I've been living without special interests for a while, I guess I've learned to keep them at bay because I don't want to disappear up my own existence. And I'm a lot more likely to work towards a particular goal and then let go of the techniques once I've achieved it.

My special interests have changed many, many times over the course of my life. Here is a brief rundown:

Age 3 - 5: Dinosaurs
Age 5 - 12: Balto and wolves in general
Age 8 - 12: Pokemon
Age 11 - 12: Hamtaro
Age 12 - 14: Rurouni Kenshin and Inuyasha
Age 14 - 16: Naruto and One Piece
Age 16 - 19: Hellsing and Trinity Blood
Age 19 - 20: Tim Burton movies

I'm currently transitioning out of my Tim Burton special interest. I think I may have found something to take its place, but I'm not entirely sure yet because I still have to watch it. It is another movie and I'm waiting for Netflix to deliver it to my house.

Yes.

Aspie obsessions change all the time, that's the only bad thing about them IMO. You can't really do anything with an interest which you know will disappear sometime soon.

From what I recall my major interest has only changed when I've been really depressed. Like I reach the point where nothing matters to me any more and then I latch onto something new (the first 'interesting' concept I come across?) and use that to build myself back up to some level of functionality. As I progress the obsession then spreads out into further more distantly related areas and it becomes a kind of filter to how I see the world.

Age:
5-13: Time travel (science fiction, science esp. physics, engineering, electronics etc.)
14-16: Hmm, well I think at about this time I tried to be interested in things that I thought other people were interested in so I watched soaps and listened to the charts and spent a lot of time just messing around on the computer (pre-internet access) etc. Not that any of it actually helped me much, I can't believe how clueless I was.
16-18: Robots/VirtualReality (computer hardware, electronics, some basic programming, some other stuff that I won't mention)
19-27: Software Development (languages, techniques, operating systems, frameworks, history etc.)
27-... : Psychology (AS, autism, neuroscience, psychotherapy, diet, cultural anthropology, etc.
heh, that's why I'm here I guess)

Now I understand this I wish I had some sort of technique for taking control and directing it in a more useful and productive direction so that I do actually achieve something rather than just waste loads of time reading about stuff, or I can switch to something else without having to get so miserable first.

It can probably be done through meditation or something, but I haven't quite worked it out yet, so investigations continue.

Age 2-3: Bunnies
Age 4-6: Spider Man
Age 7-9: The Dukes of Hazard
Age 10: The United States of America
Age 11: Expo 86 and futuristic things
Age 12-15: The Beatles
Age 16-18: Anything to do with hippies and their lifestyle
Age 19-22: The Kinks
Age 22-29: Austin Powers
Age 29-31: Routemasters
Age 32-35: The UK 70s Punk Movement
Age 35 - the future: The Kinks

ooh thanks guys. i felt like i was breaking the rules

I didn't even have special interests until I was 12+, it was mostly object attachments when I was a kid.

I've had so many of them. Some have stayed and others are a memory of the past.


--I liked studying sea creatures when I was little, particularly saw fish.
--The movie Alice in Wonderland. I liked to eat sweethearts candy when she would eat the eat me cakes to grow taller or smaller and I have a big collection of every Alice book, movie, figurine, and quite a few of the dolls.
--I loved learning about foreign countries and would write facts about them and had my aunt buy me coins from around the world off of ebay and when I played with my friend I l made a fake passport and little clay sculptures ( a kangaroo for Australia, a block of cheese for switzerland) and I pretended they were souvenirs.More recently I've liked studying the culture of India, because I like their art and foods.
---I liked making movies, particularly about my interests, like Pokemon and puppets.
--- In third and fourth grade it was puppets. Then I liked the Wizard of Oz and had to have the toys and dolls of it.
--- I loved learning about all kinds of animals and still enjoy this. I've liked geckoes, hyenas, umbrella birds, foxes, cats particularly Maine Coons.
--Pokemon was a big interest to me for about 4 years. I still love the games but I'm not obsessed with it anymore.
--the Colonial time period.
--Egyptians.
--Scooby Doo.
--Penelope, Pepe Le Pew's girfriend.
-- whatever person I had a crush on, I'd draw pictures of them and write all that I knew about them.
--collecting those reflector pictures, where the image changes when you turn it.
--collecting jewels, like rhinestones and faux gemstones, and rocks and crystals.
--In 2nd to 4th I would go outside and dig holes looking for crystals, and my mom would get mad at the dent in the yard. I'd also take her hammer and break open stones hoping it would be sparkly like a geode.
--Horses, when I copied a girl that I admired in 4th grade.
--Mcdonald's toys. ( I still enjoy collecting these )
--Spice Girls ( 5th to 6th grade for a while even though their band was broke up by then, my mom got me dolls of them when I was really little by the time I had an interest in music they werent a band anymore, but I had fun reading their books and collecting over 24 dolls of them, and making clay sculptures of them from Sculpey.
-- specific celebrities, like once it was Jennifer Love Hewitt and the Olsen Twins.
--Barbie.This was a back and forth interest.
---Nascar and hotwheels cars because I was copying an ex ( 7th and 8th grade)
-- sexuality
--particular girl cartoon characters, especially Shego and Jessica Rabbit.
--Hannah Montana
--Song Lyrics
-- Monkeys, particularly Bobby Jack, and the Aeropostale monkey.
--the show Ed, Edd, n Eddy
--Facebook
--there's alot more that I probably can't think of right now.

My "super" special interests that I don't think will ever go away are: Dolls, Jessica Rabbit, Girl Scouts particularly the badges,Fashion, my love interest, Video Games, Music, learning about disorders, art and being creative, taking pictures....
I never seem to stop collecting things either, and I tend to collect objects that pertain to what I'm interested in.

I've had several special interests over the years, and in most cases, older interests fade, but never really go away completely. When I was 10, I was into house plans, and while the interest has faded (i.e. I don't spend hours designing them), I still have a fascination with them when I see them. In high school it was roller coasters, and while I'm nowhere near as obsessed as I was (though it peaked again slightly a few years ago), I still like to take the occasional road trip to visit amusement parks.

Other interests have included trains (since I was very little. One of my favourite toys was my Duplo train, which my parents still have most of the parts for), the human body (peaked around the age of 7, but has since faded, though not gone completely), photography (started around 1999, picked up in 2006, and I finally got a DSLR in 2009), aviation (picked up in late 2009)

preschool and kindergarten
- numbers (incessantly counting by different numbers up to thousands and rote memorized primes)
- stuffed monkeys (huge collection -had to arrange them in a circle and stand in the middle)

early elementary school
- ages (asking people repeatedly how old they were) and obsession with certain ages (7 years old and 12 years old then 21 years old ).....I would ask incessant questions about what you do at these ages and then go around pretending to "be" the ages
- cephalopods most especially octopi
- my imaginary world which included alternate universes
- probably others but don't remember all

late elementary school/middle school
- gymnastics
-wanting to be an actress/model
- being "average"....I actually looked up the most common girls name and most common hair style, face shape, family income etc. and then pretended to be the statistically average or normal girl
- babysitters club books
- my imaginary world which included imaginary friends at this age

Early High school
- the Simpson’s
- sit coms like Seinfeld

Late high school
- evolution/primateology-/chimpanzees
-early human origins and the first civilizations
- animal rights

adulthood - the last 8 years
- the nightmare before Christmas
- harry potter and fantasy literature
-cannabis culture ( this was not a good preoccupation for my life and only lasted a year)
- Sephardic jewish/middle eastern culture (i am an Ashkenazi jew for anyone who knows what this means)
- neuropsychology and autism

Yes, I've had interests that have lasted days, months, and years.