Your first "research-oriented" special interests

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How old were you when you first started to have special interests that involved active research (by you) of some kind... ie, you were interested in (no, make that obsessed with) something, and you actively sought out books or other sources of information about it? I've been trying to catalog most of mine going back over the years, and I was doing well up to the point when I got back to third grade. Then I hit a brick wall.

I know I didn't just spontaneously wake up one morning in third grade and start having special interests out of the blue, but I'm drawing blanks about everything before that point. What's doubly weird is the fact that I have no trouble at all enumerating special interests after that point. All I can think of is that somehow, that was approximately the point where I went from tormenting the adults around me by asking millions of questions to discovering that I could more efficiently dig up the information myself.

I don't know whether it's entirely a coincidence, but that IS approximately the point where I gained the ability to go to the library without parental assistance or oversight -- a new library branch was literally opened a block and a half away from my house, and I started to spend lots of time there. More importantly, it was the first time I'd been allowed to go to a library and explore it freely, including the "adult" section, without constantly getting steered back to the "kids" section and its boring "The Sad Puppy and his Friend the Turtle" books. My school library, in contrast, was useless... the most advanced books it had were fifth-grade level, and books written for kids never really interested me very much.

How about you?

I don't remember my age, probably around 4-5. I was extremely obsessed with weather, especially tornadoes. My mom told me I used to have notebooks full of tornado/weather pictures I drew. Anytime we got to research something in school? Tornadoes. Went to the school library? Borrowed tornado books.

By the time I got to age 7 I became obsessed with math. My grandmother would by me workbooks to do math and I also had one of those kid laptops you would get from ToysRUs and by the time I was in the forth grade I was able to do ratios and fractions.

I'm not exactly sure what happened the last couple of years though. I've been obsessed with language learning, but for some reason I haven't been able to concentrate on anything.

You know, this is pretty fascinating. I don't think i've considered cataloguing my interests before. I'm not actually certain, I can't remember before ten in enough verifiable detail to be absolutely certain so i'm having to look up dates etc to create a coherent timeline for my own far more detailed version. I think i've just developed another obsession. Fortunately, this is date stamped so it can't become recursive!

I was certainly obsessed with lego before I started school, so that's under 5. Probably 3 or 4. I used to build entire towns and highly complex models at a very early age. I had a great collection of lego instruction manuals I was collecting and using before I could read. (hey, you don't need to read them, they were step by step pictures!)

I was obsessed with aircraft from an early age, possibly from seeing dad playing F19 stealth fighter on the computer. I borrowed the manual (which in those days was a weighty tome comprising enough info to let you fly a real aircraft) and I don't think he ever got it back. Biggles books, and books in general came next at a very early age, mostly revolving around military fighter aircraft and aviation generally.

That obsession was definitely my longest, lasting at least ten years. I wanted to learn to fly and be a pilot. I think everybody tried to talk me down to something more "realistic"

I had the last laugh, I'd done it by 14.

Venture Adventure! I loved the Air Cadets, while I didn't know I was autistic at the time, it's possibly the ideal developing environment for an autistic kid in general, and one obsessed with aircraft in particular. Technically speaking I was just flying under instruction and I didn't ever try and get a private pilots license, but at that point I knew going further would be expensive and a skill without useful application.

I then took up shooting and a study of ballistics etc. (no, bullets do not travel in a strait line!) I've got a nice little collection of shiny medals and have had to many dammed silver cups and plates, which has put me off taking part any further in shooting. Silver tarnishes in days, and finding things that are meant to be shiny looking like they have been left outside to rust for 20 years drives me crazy. I think i might be a bit OCD there or something.

Following that, back to military history, and the British Navy during the age of sail. I have a huge collection of research material on the subject, and I have been learning to sail on someone's yacht. He was desperate to talk about sailing at work, I was the only person interested in sailing and he needed another person to play with his toy. I love it.

So four distinct obsessions up until now. (i'm 26) How many have other people had?

Don't recall exact age, but it was in First Grade.
Dinosaurs. Drove the teacher nuts because I already knew more than she did! LOL

Sincerely,
Matt

Art.

From second to fourth grade( it was my primary interest); i was decent at drawing people, faces in particularly. i remember sitting down in front of the kitchen table and drawing on the back on an old brown paper bag from kroger's store. I was drawing the profile of a cowboy in an advertisement for a drawing contest.

My parents couldn't believe it. The only reasons, they had to accept i did it, were because there was no way i could trace the image through a brown paper bag and my drawing was a larger detailed version of what was shown in the newspaper.

They praised me for IT but it was never encouraged.

So, i began to dabble in ART. My seventh grade teacher took me aside and told me i had talent and should think about pursuing it, seriously.... based on facial portraits and pottery i did in class. As a consequence, i started to research 'how to draw books'. The problem was i could do the things taught in the books BUT in a different way. After leaving elementary school and graduating to high school; art became a hobby because it was no longer a mandatory course in my high school curriculum.

I still dabble in it, now and again. I can pick up a pencil without having drawn for years and not miss a step.

TheSunAlsoRises

I was 11 1/2, and it was when my special interest in roller coasters and Cedar Point specifically became a full-blown obsession. This is also around the time when I first got the Internet and was able to research on my own. I read books on science special interests as a child, but I never actively sought out information every day at such a degree until around age 12. Interestingly, Cedar Point/roller coasters also was my first "rambling" obsession where I'd drone on with monologues. My field of neuropsychiatry began with self-research when I was almost 16. Most of what I know is from self-research throughout the years.

For me around 5-6 and my interest at that time was animals :p what species, which country they come from, from lots other details. There used to be a collectors folder thing where you used to buy pages of info from every week and i used to get them for some weird reason and put them in this folder :p wish i still had them seeing as it took ages to finish >.>

Creepy Crawlers around the age of 8-9, no doubt, was my first obsession. I would spend hours in the basement (that's where my mother kept all my toys) making Creepy Crawlers.

Since then, it seems that when I find something new that interests me, I obsess over it for a while until something new gets my attention.

Research-related obsession, the one and only, was on fluoride. It started when someone emailed me a link to a documentary that I thought was a crock. I started to research the "evidence" and a year later I was convinced that it is worse than I could have ever imagined. I had to force myself to stop because the truth was just too scary for me to deal with.

I'd have to say that since having access to the Internet, I am able to satify my curiosity and obsess over an infinite number of topics.

After dinosaurs, it was UFOs. I still research both topics. Any questions about the Roswell Incident? Ask me, I'll give you the TRUE answer. LOL

Sincerely,
Matthew

Meerkats. I learned how to use the internet via looking up meerkats. Apparently I learned everything there is to know about them because everything I find about them is stuff I already know. One thing I never understood though is when people would tell me I needed to be more like meerkats and be more social with people. WTF? Meerkats aren't social with people (unless they are someone's pet or something), they are social with other meerkats.

First I was obsessed with cartoons and trains mimicking their sounds during play. Once I learned how to read I was all about dinosaurs (memorizing the names of species was important) and it has been one thing or another since then changing around every 2 years.

Bison

I think it would be space exploration and the solar system, at 7 years old. I finally get good at reading thanks to that.

According to my parents I may have been interested in it at only 3 years old; I can't remenber that far though.

I never had a research-oriented special interests & I'm 29 now & doubt I ever will

The first research-oriented interest I can recall was when I developed an interest in holocaust accounts, and read as many as I could get my hands on at the time.

Prior to that my obsessive behavior was always art. I'd draw the same thing over and over and over again, trying to get the proportions perfect. I recall seeing drawings of Aubrey Beardsley's (specifically the Hercules illustrations) and trying to emulate that aesthetic for a long time. It's still often apparent in the work I do today.