Origins of Special Interests

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Hello everyone,

I've been curious lately about special interests. I'm finding a lot of material lately about how they can be good, useful, and can lead to great careers, etc... I am not finding any information on the origins of special interests. I am not so much trying to figure out why we have them, but more interested in how we came to the ones we have.

So I'm curious, how were you introduced to your current special interest(s)?
How long have you been into it?
Is it related to other or old special interests you have?
Has it/how has it benefited your life?

So I have a few special interests, but my main one right now is autism and autistic/NeuroTypical relationships.
This special interest took me by storm. I have always felt that my wife and I had a fantastic relationship, which we do. I was surprised however to find out that my wife was unhappy in our relationship for the last several years. This greatly surprised and bothered me. Around the same time she mentioned she thought I was autistic. Well, I began immediately researching both autism and ways to help our relationship and those things have been dominating most of my "free time" since.

This special interest does intersect a bit with other special interests I have (kink related) which my wife and I have been trying to utilize as rewards and motivators. The idea being to help me towards the changes she needs to feel happier. For the record she is not trying to force me to change, I want to do things to help her be happier. My main issue is realizing that things need to be done and being motivated to do them.

So far this special interest has benefitted my life because we've identified several techniques which have helped us communicate better. Also, we have been more open when miscommunications happen and when we think we understand something but are not sure. As for the autism diagnosis, it has confirmed my research is on the right path and helped steer me toward resources that are more relevant to my current circumstances.


I'd love to hear about your special interests. I'm really curious if there are any patterns for how the interests are selected or originate. I've got a few things I'd love to pick up as special interests but my brain just doesn't seem to want to lock onto them in that way.

When I was in Kindergarten, my teacher made me sit in a dark corner for failing to complete a work assignment in time while the rest of the class watched a Disney film strip. I joke that this was the origin of my obsession with Disney.

Really, my mother introduced me to Disney and she herself enjoyed watching Walt Disney on his Sunday night TV show when she was a child. I think the "Making of..." behind-the-scenes specials that aired on TV when I was a child had as much to do with my obsession as the actual films.

The city I grew up in being, frankly, boring, encouraged my interest in Disneyland, which I have a much stronger sentimental connection to than my hometown. It was far away enough to seem just out of reach and but close enough to visit a couple times a year. To this day, I still have recurring dreams about trying to get to Disneyland.

My obsession with anthropomorphic animal characters is related to the Disney/animation-in-general obsession. If something has an anthro animal character in it, I'll almost always be most interested in that character. I think that with my relatively non-confrontational personality, some of my more aggressive side was sublimated into my particular interest in large, muscular, superpowered anthro animal characters.

My stepfather introduced me to Broadway musicals when I was a teenager. This also bridges over from the Disney obsession, since theater composers and lyricists like Alan Menken and Tim Rice wrote scores for Disney movies. I became obsessed with Sondheim musicals in particular after watching a performance of the song "A Weekend In the Country" on PBS, which I was immediately impressed by. Now, after years of hearing me obsesses over these musicals, my stepfather says he hates them. When I remind him he was the one who introduced me to them, he says, "That was a mistake!"

I also think that certain people, such as my stepfather, attempting to discourage my obsessions led me to be more obsessed with them.

Vividgroovy. Thanks for the reply. When I was thinking through my special interests before doing to the doctor, I also noticed how they evolved from one topic to another. I never really lost interest in that old ones but they grow a bit. As a kid I loved board games ( chess. Stratego, checkers, monopoly) then I evolved to playing cards to magic cards to dungeons and dragons... Now I'm making my own table top rpg system. It's was kinda fun thinking back over all of that in my life. That serious of special interests, however is in there background at the moment with my focus more on the one I mentioned above. I think that is because the one above has a more pressing and important to me emotional anchor.

I was walking past a school when I was about 10 years old, and I heard a pop group practising. From that moment on, I wanted to be in such a band. Unfortunately, as a 10-year-old schoolboy with no money or connections, it was a lofty ambition, and I spent the next 10 years or so trying to make do with a cheap tape recorder, a piano, and various boxes (for drums), and eventually a cheap, nasty electric guitar. I was always messing about with electronics trying to figure out how to make a guitar amplifier. Eventually after leaving school I was earning enough to get some serious equipment, and I'd started jamming with some friends. I built a multi-track tape recorder and was finally able to record songs on which I played all the instruments. Over the following decades I got closer to my goal, and these days I suppose I'm a fairly well-respected amateur musician.

I think special interests can be started by very small events. I often feel hostile to new ideas and tasks, but if I once apply myself to a task, I start to adopt the responsibility of seeing it through no matter what. So I'll either do a thing well, or want nothing to do with it.

When I got my diagnosis I questioned the Psychologist about memory. I noted that I'd read that Autistics have good memories and I didn't. She responded that they have good memories for things that interest them. (I know there are exceptions to that, but I'm not one of them.)

Because of my generally poor memory I ask my medical providers to give me stuff in writing because my memory is so poor. If I elaborate on it I say that I'm Autistic and my memory only works on things that interest me, and I don't get to choose what interests me.

But I'll admit I don't really know why I am interested in the things I am interested in.

In some cases I there is a correlation between what I am interested in and what I am good at, but I don't know which came first, interest or aptitude.

And in other cases I can think of absolutely no reason for my interest. (Why the heck did I collect matchbook covers when I was little?! I didn't try to learn anything about them, I just accumulated them. And eventually I grew past that interest and tossed them.)

Sensory.

The smell of books. The feel of the pages.
The sound of church bells or the colour of stained glass.
The smell of my baby dolls (vanilla and baby powder).
The calming effect of Christmas lights.
The repetitive tradition of certain Christmas songs.
The smooth feel of steel knitting needles, or the little click they made.

Oh yes the collecting. I collected bubble gum cards of football teams when I was about 9, though I've never in my life been able to follow a game of football, I know so little about it. The craze didn't last long either, probably because I couldn't afford enough gum to make good progress.

I amasses a huge collection of VCR tapes of movies and TV series. I didn't like to re-use the tapes because it was expensive or impossible to get those shows in those days once they'd aired, so I just kept on buying blanks and keeping everything I recorded for me and my son, and the collection grew.

These days I still collect movies and TV series but they're much easier to store and retrieve because they're computer files. I enjoy seeing some of it again, but I'll probably never want to see most of it. So again it's my reluctance to delete or throw anything away that's causing a collection to grow. It's the same with music. I've got tons of mp3s, most of which I doubt I'll ever want to hear again, but I don't like throwing music away.

I don't especially like these collections, and only do the minimum to maintain them in some kind of order. I get overwhelmed by their size.

I tried to write my origins, but it got too long. Here is my attempt at summarizing it.
General outline: Horror Movies -> Surrealist Painting -> Computer Graphics -> Computer programming -> Retirement.

1963, four year old me remembers watching the weekly creature feature, Son of Chiller (IMDB link). I loved the mysterious and scary for my whole childhood. Still lover the mysterious scary.
I watched Dark Shadows daily, until they changed the time, and I couldn't get home from school fast enough.
In the late 1960s, I found TWO creature feature shows. One was Mr. Mummy's Movie Time (IMDB link). I watched every Saturday night.
We moved ( ) and I found another creature feature, called Creature Feature (IMDB link).
Because I talked a lot about monster movies, a kid in the neighborhood showed me a book called Terrors of the Screen (Internet Archive link). This changed my life. I finally got a library card and I checked out this book as much as I could, looking at the pictures. Plus, I read it, which was not easy. I am not a speedy reader. I started drawing pictures from the book because I wanted a picture of The Phantom of the Opera or the Frankenstein Monster.

I realized that more general books on film history had sections about the actors and their films. If it had a section on Lon Chaney Sr., I checked it out. If it had photos, BONUS!

For a long time, Lon Chaney Sr. was my special interest, and it was really, really HARD finding anything about him. That would be true until the 1980s, when I found Faces, Forms, Films: The Artistry of Lon Chaney (Internet Archive link) at the local library in Iowa.
As mentioned, drawing LOTs of monster pictures, and in the seventh grade, a guy introduces me to Famous Monsters of Filmland (Internet Archive link to the specific issue).
I found a store that sold Famous Monsters of Filmland. I visited it every day, and then every week because I had no concept that magazines were released on a schedule.

I took art in junior high (grades 7-8) so I could get better at drawing. That continued in high school (grades 9 - 12), but hit a wall because the class was Art, not Monster Art. Then I was introduced to...SALVADOR DALI (Printrest picture of the book. Cannot find an online copy ).

So, horror movies lead to Lon Chaney, then branched to silent films, branching to film history, broadening my tastes in films to this day. Because I did not have pictures of monsters, I started drawing monsters, which led to Renaissance art because they were technically good draftsmen, which lead to Dali because poor eyesight plus attempting to realistically draw stuff equal weird looking. I also liked long cast shadows and expressive light, like the German Expressionist films or Film Noir. Dali and Georgio de Chirico had that too. I still liked the look of the mysterious.

In college, I majored in art. I was going to be an impoverish painter, probably working in a hospital kitchen to support myself. I saw that as a workable plan. College expanded my range of art knowledge, and film knowledge, while dropping me into a hole of despair because my brain does not branch to concepts professors want to see. College was very depressing.

My future wife's dad had an Apple II+ computer (48k RAM). This was a fork to my next special interest. I taught myself programming by finding books on programming that "connected" with me (that was really hard). I also became interested in TTL and CMOS electronics. It was all linked by computer graphics.

There was a 36 year chunk of time where my brain was occupied by what my computer programming job required. I retired early. I've edited section down to the two sentences.

I still revisit old passions. I've found the Internet Archive has Famous Monsters of Filmland as PDFs The PDFs are compressed to the point of making the pictures unviewable. However, it has better quality JPegs of the magazines. So, I manually downloaded ALL the JPegs, renamed the titles for standardization, and wrote a program to process them into cleaner PDFs. Now I have a nearly complete collection of Famous Monsters of Filmland. It took just over a week or so to do this.

Retirement, for me, is pursuing those old roots of special interest, major and minor, and waiting for the next major fork to pop up, leading to a new special interest. I have LOTS of mini interests, everyday. I try not to go overboard on the "Recent movies watched" and "Recent television shows watched" threads.
Confession: I feel guilty when I post several things in a row because I feel like I'm hogging the thread. So I try not to post for a periods of time.

So the short answer: four years old, creature feature show in Kansas City, MO in 1963. I remember watching Son of Frankenstein, as well as one mysterious scary skit. That was the origin. Sigh. Sorry. It still got really long. If I were you, I could not read through this. Too long.

I see Double Retired has posted and mentions

Very true. It is also true for how quickly I can read through something.

Today I watch Svengoolie on MeTV and Horror Hotel on the Horror Hotel web site. Warning: The site for the show has a loud blast of thunder.

thank you all for your great answers. I too have a poor memory except for things that interest me. It is one of the reasons I went for a diagnosis I was hoping they could give me some good advice to improve memory. (that didn't work out for me)


I've also noticed a pattern of one interest evolving into another.

Reading through everyone's posts it seems to be largely related to what catches our interest. I am able to hyper-fixate on many things that catch my interest, but there needs to be some challenge/room to explore, benefit, and opportunity for it to really blossom into a full-blown special interest for me. The stronger the initial interest and the benefit and the greater the depth to explore the more likely it seems to evolve into a special interest for me.

A few years ago was when I decided to compile a list of all the well-known symphonies and famous symphonic composers to see if somewhere in there, were composers I had never known of but whose music I'd find fantastic. I've always loved classical or classical sounding music, but only from a vew select composers.

Systematically I went down the list I compiled.

And then I got to SHOSTAKOVICH. Damn, I was so blown to the moon that I had to read what inspired his symphonies (15 total, but there's only eight I listen to). I then began recognizing the unfolding of "Oh no, not another one." This refers to a fixation.

I began feeling a fixation develop on the topic of the Nazi invasion of Leningrad, Russia; how the Russians eventually defeated the Nazis; and what Russia was like under pre-WWII's Stalin.

At this time in my life, I had a lot of things going on, and I had to force myself to stop this thing from unfolding before it took ahold of me and made me spend too much time on the Internet reading up on these topics (for which there's a SH*T-TON of content -- which would've been a huge problem because for previous fixations, there was limited content, and I felt more in control because of that).

So I forced myself to just let it go and be satisfied with the basic info I knew on these topics.

At that time in 2020 I didn't know I was autistic. Had I already known, I would've recognized, "A new special interest has been born!" and totally ran with it.

I regret that I put the breaks on. By the time I got my diagnosis last year, what was a burgeoning new special interest fizzled out! I'm unable to resurrect it. I wish I could!

Elgee

That is really interesting. I think I have had similar experiences. Something interests me and I feel it could develop into a special interest but a lack of opportunity to do it or not doing it for other reasons makes the opportunity go by. It is rare, but I think I have experienced that

i think alot of my special interests are related to my grandmother being a teacher.

ive always been fascinated by history and she always encouraged that and gave me more material to study.

its the same with books when she realized how much i enjoyed reading she went out of her way to provide me with books. i have a lot of interest in story telling in different media especially books. my sister also shares this special interest.

she also encouraged an interest in cooking. teaching me family recipes and encouraging me to go to culinary school.

my life long interest in religion (the study of not being a member of) i feel also came from the same source she gave books about classical mythology as a child and i became fascinated by the diversity of belief in the world.

i think having someone really care about what i am interested in helps alot. especially since my parents are less than supportive of them and think its odd at best.

Winters gate,

Sounds like you had an amazing grandmother. My grandmother was also a teacher but we loved in different parts of the country so I didn't get to see her frequently.

It is really nice having someone to talk with about your special interests. Many of mine have healed me build and maintain friendships. My wife has a history degree

yeah she is pretty awesome.

it stinks that you werent able to see her often. i was really lucky that my grandmother lived fairly close.

its neat that your wife has a history degree. does she have a particular time period she is interested in?

I don't think she has a specific area of interest. She wants to be a teacher when our kids are all old enough to be in school. Right now she is a stay at home mom (Hardest job in the world in my opinion)

My special interests have always existed. I am an information sponge, and I will soak up every single bit of information on a topic of interest until there is nothing new to learn. When I've learned everything about a topic, I move on to a new interest. Sometimes special interest will last a lifetime while others will only last a few weeks or months.

Like many of the things I'm learning about autism, I thought everyone had special interests, I called them hobbies, but I've recently discovered that I'm the only one I know that switches between "hobbies" frequently, and takes such a deep dive into them.

It explains why people think I'm an expert at so many things. It just looks like that from the outside.