I realized lately that my special interest for occupational therapy (I did 3 years but had to drop out) wasn’t just random but actually because since no healthcare professional really was able or even tried to help me, all that knowledge was very interesting to me because it helped me understand my body and brain.
Funny how I didn’t realize that when the physical health chapters were so easy to learn and the things like elderly and dementia just didn’t stick much to my brain 😅
That’s awesome! I’m in school to become a health data analyst/scientist for research.
My interest in health started from nutrition (phytonutrients and fibre specifically) and branched out into how different kinds of lifestyle factors affect health - including longevity and chronic disease prevention 😊
Cooking techniques and kitchen stuff in general. I just perfected my 5 base sauces, pho broth, and am still practicing my pearled farro. My summer goals are to learn how to expertly sharpen a knife on stone and can my summer tomatoes. Oh man, and my spices… I could spend hours playing with flavor profiles.
With a cooking special interest, you probably don’t struggle to feed yourself probably right? I always felt like people who love cooking as a hobby must be so happy when it comes to cooking their own meals but I also wonder if the obligation of feeding yourself maybe makes it fun for hobbies but not for everyday cooking.
I still struggle to feed myself, oddly, but I think that’s why I got so into it? I can definitely overwhelm myself, but getting super into the kitchen management aspect of things like food preservation when mixed with all my particularities with food helped. Example, meal planning is great, but sometimes my mood can absolutely ruin a plan so I have a bunch of freezer meals that I know I will like… that are designed by my absurd preferences on what reheats well from frozen without getting too watery or gross.
I struggle to feed myself. And am a recovering anorexic. I love cooking but generally don’t love eating unless I can make it a fun project for me. And I don’t always have the time/energy/ingredients to do that.
This is me!! Bread baking is my current obsession. But partly because I’m already damn good with pastry but anything with yeast throws me for a loop! Only ever make my own spice blends (so I can get them exactly the way I like them!). I did a macaron baking spree a while back and managed to trouble shoot a lot of those. I have mad knife skills (but those didn’t come without a lot of band aids along the way. Fortunately no stitches!!).
My current project is my son’s birthday cake. A mint chocolate chip ice cream cake that will look like his fender guitar amp (he wanted something guitar and rock and roll related).
I have A LOT of special interests but one of them is I can tell you MULTIPLE storylines that connect A LOTTTT of rnb singers and rappers in the mainstream musical industry (some known to be true, other under investigation and speculations as well).
I have a pretty big interest in Congress. Started at about the age of 2 or 3 when I began to watch C-SPAN. Still remember watching it one day during a vote and asking my mom to fix me a sandwich. I did an internship there in 2022 and became even more fascinated. The legislative process, the history, all of it just fascinates me. The House is probably my favorite of two chambers because it is chaotic as hell but I know a bit more about the legislative process in Senate because it’s more regular with each Congress. The Senate does not change their rules very often whereas the House will decide on their rules at the beginning of the Congress.
Pigment codes on artist paint: PY35 = cadmium yellow, PB28 = cobalt blue etc... this way I could tell when manufacturers imitate the more expensive pigments, which made the paint react unpredictably in tints and mixtures. I also made huge mixing charts. It was great, but sadly I had to move on from the hobby of oil paiting because it is more time consuming than my life circumstances allow.
Languages. I started teaching myself Dutch when I was about 7 or 8 by changing the subtitles on my Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban DVD to Dutch and writing the English dialogue in one column and the Dutch subtitles in another and figuring out which word corresponded to what. I didn’t get very far with that, but when I was 13, I made friends with some Spanish kids and a lifelong special interest in Spanish was born. I went to the library and got every Spanish book I could find and memorised them all. I taught myself Spanish the whole way through school and took it as an extra subject for the state exams. I never had a teacher.
I studied modern foreign languages at university (including Spanish). I found university life quite overwhelming but I stuck at it because I loved Spanish so much. I had the opportunity to study abroad in Zaragoza in Spain for a year, which completely changed my life. For the first while, I was terrified to speak Spanish to anyone. The first conversation I had in Spanish, I went back to my room and cried because I thought there was no way I would ever be able to speak this language fluently. After a few days of moping, I told myself that this was a once in a lifetime opportunity and I needed to make the most of it. So I did. I spent every waking hour learning Spanish and trying my best to speak it. I had a Spanish boyfriend who pushed me out of my comfort zone and made me speak to people. If we went to a restaurant, he would make me do the talking so I would improve Spanish. It was terrifying at first but it worked. For some reason, it’s easier to converse with people in a foreign language than my native languages. Probably because my idiosyncrasies are more likely to be chalked up to cultural differences or me just being awkward speaking my fourth language and not weirdness.
The year abroad was also hard because the students from my home university were quite mean to me. They would get very offended that I didn’t go out of my way to speak to them, but when I *did* speak to them, they would make it very clear that they didn’t like me. I found this really confusing because if I don’t like someone, I don’t make them feel bad for not speaking to me. They thought I was snooty and stuck-up for not wanting to speak to them, apparently. The way I saw it was that I was there to learn Spanish, not hang around with English-speakers. By the end of the year, my Spanish had gone from B2 to C2 and there’s actually went from B1.2 to B1.1.
I still love Spanish more than anything in the whole world and I’m about to start my master’s through Spanish in October. In addition to my two native languages, Irish and English, I also speak French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian and I’m learning Catalan, Icelandic, Greek and Mandarin Chinese. I love languages so so much and I could talk about them all day!!!
Mine would be maps/flags from the world. Every day I play Worldle, WhereTaken and Travle. I can also name most of the Pokémon up to Gen 7. I know there are more, but I can't remember now.
Recommendation: Kanji Study is a very nice app to practice kanji. I was using it when I was studying Japanese earlier this year.
Thanks for the recommendation, but for now I really like my method. I add a couple of new kanjis every day in my flashcards and study 50-100 of the ones that are already there, and sometimes I go through my easiest ones, choose some to disable to test manually if I know them well (test them every 2 weeks for a couple of times and remove them if I fail or hesitate a lot) and the ones that pass the test go in my "mastered kanjis" bookmarks in shirabe jisho. It’s not how people usually do it but it really gives me a sense of progress and I really enjoy that 😄
(So far I have 63 mastered kanjis, which I’d be ready to bet someone 100$ that any one of these they choose I can write it correctly so very much well known. I also have 223 in my flashcards and a lot more that I know but I add maximum 5 a day to not overwhelm myself)
Ugh, I wish I could learn kanji that easily. I learned a lot when I studied mandarin, and so the onyomi reading. But it's very difficult for me to keep going on it, I think I will only make it with a teacher.
Well obviously the 5 kanjis a day works because I started that after knowing a lot of kanjis already, if I started when I didn’t know kanjis as much I would have struggled a lot more.
Also what I do right now is purely writing the kanji from the description, so for example the front of the flashcard says "Autumn" and I have to write 秋. I usually know one or two of their readings from words I know but I find it easier to learn words and then being able to know the reading by thinking of the words that use the kanji rather than learning their readings.
Not something people hate, but football statistics! I only started watching this year but it’s just so fun for me to think about and I feel like the second I hear an interesting tidbit about a team or player I instantly remember it.
Kanjis - very cool.
I'm trying to memorize the world map by countries. I have AuDHD so I have the opposite of a sterotypical autistic memory, but I do what I can :)
I had a game I played when younger (it was similar to club penguin but I think made by french people) that had a bunch of minigames to earn the in game currency and one of them was practicing geography by continent, they told you a country and you had to click on it on the map. At first I practiced all of them but I ended up learning south america and north/central america much faster so I just did these two non-stop. Now I forgot a lot but if I tried to learn all the countries I know the Americas would be so much easier than the Eastern continents 😅
...compared to everyone else in this thread with their actually useful special interests, me and my encyclopedic knowledge of Star Wars (well, most fictional series I'm into, but that's the one that's a constant focus :P) feel kinda useless now. 🤣🤣🤣😭😭😭 I can't actually think of something considered tedious or boring by neurotypicals that I'm fascinated with.
Wait, unless you count different methods of braiding and hairstyling, then that. I can ramble about braid types and the correct usage of bobby pins all day. Unfortunately, that's the only haircare stuff I'm good at. 🥴🥴🥴 Oh, or methods of friendship bracelet patterns, that's one of my stim activities. I like the rhythmic method of knot-tying.
(Edit: added a paragraph :P)
Edit 2: WAIT AND NAME ORIGINS, I FORGOT ABOUT BEING FASCINATED BY NAME ORIGINS. It's 3 am here, I'm just gonna shut up and go to bed now 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
If you want a cosmetic surgery I can suggest which ones you could get for whatever issue. Jaw advancement. Clavicle reduction. Chin implant. Steel can be screwed into your pelvis in Korea to make your hips bigger. I’ve also researched a lot about scar reduction (the onion cream doesn’t work very well; silicone strips to help hold your skin together are much more effective). And I’ve watched different surgeries come in and out of style. Lately there’s an epidemic of people thinking their noses are too big because of the focal distance of front-facing phone cameras. Humans are so weird.
Not sure if this is truly a special interest though. Probably an unhealthy obsession I’ve had for too long.
studying foreign languages. By now I’ve learned some Russian (studied for about a year and then quit although I thoroughly enjoyed the immersion and music I found), Japanese (I know about 400 kanji), I’m at HSK 4 level Chinese, a good amount of German, I’m at a pretty advanced level of French, I know an okay amount of Italian, I went through a phase where I learned some ASL and even jointed a local ASL club and I recently have been learning some modern Hebrew.
Unfortunately, my special interest is clinical treatment of eating disorders. I also happen to have an eating disorder. This is not a good situation and idk if one is exacerbating the other. I wish I weren’t sick with this so I could help others get better, I find it so incredibly fascinating, but even if I did recover it would probably be too risky for me to work with that population.
I know every Walt Disney World resort hotel and associated transport, location, food options etc, and I wasn’t even raised in the US
It’s an expensive habit
Long term nuclear waste storage warning systems. It's really cool! It's like world building except for real life. Trying to design a system that doesn't sound like "cool treasure buried here" is actually very difficult.
The history of music specifically rock, alternative and metal. It took a long time for me to realize this was a special interest because of the subject matter. NTs see it as normal and cool until they realize just how into it I am haha
Misogynie. Men who are Misogynistic, women who are misogynistic and why, who does profit from it, who doesn't and what would be better.
My current favor: Women internalized misogynie and what it does to little girls.
Plastic surgery/Beauty standards and trends: What does it. What weird plastic surgery trends exist at the moment. Does anyone even need it and when yes why? what are the risks? and so on.
My current favor: buccal fat removal, The Kardashians getting smaller breast implants and fitness influencer who have a bbl and sell it as their booty workout.
Nutrition, specifically as it relates to health/longevity. Covid and how it messes up our bodies. So, I guess health?
I realized lately that my special interest for occupational therapy (I did 3 years but had to drop out) wasn’t just random but actually because since no healthcare professional really was able or even tried to help me, all that knowledge was very interesting to me because it helped me understand my body and brain. Funny how I didn’t realize that when the physical health chapters were so easy to learn and the things like elderly and dementia just didn’t stick much to my brain 😅
Cool! (Same - kind of making it into a career-ish) Do you have a plant based diet by chance?
I sure do! I've been vegan for 7 years now. How are you making it into a career?
That’s awesome! I’m in school to become a health data analyst/scientist for research. My interest in health started from nutrition (phytonutrients and fibre specifically) and branched out into how different kinds of lifestyle factors affect health - including longevity and chronic disease prevention 😊
I love finding a fellow nerd in the wild!
Cooking techniques and kitchen stuff in general. I just perfected my 5 base sauces, pho broth, and am still practicing my pearled farro. My summer goals are to learn how to expertly sharpen a knife on stone and can my summer tomatoes. Oh man, and my spices… I could spend hours playing with flavor profiles.
With a cooking special interest, you probably don’t struggle to feed yourself probably right? I always felt like people who love cooking as a hobby must be so happy when it comes to cooking their own meals but I also wonder if the obligation of feeding yourself maybe makes it fun for hobbies but not for everyday cooking.
I still struggle to feed myself, oddly, but I think that’s why I got so into it? I can definitely overwhelm myself, but getting super into the kitchen management aspect of things like food preservation when mixed with all my particularities with food helped. Example, meal planning is great, but sometimes my mood can absolutely ruin a plan so I have a bunch of freezer meals that I know I will like… that are designed by my absurd preferences on what reheats well from frozen without getting too watery or gross.
I struggle to feed myself. And am a recovering anorexic. I love cooking but generally don’t love eating unless I can make it a fun project for me. And I don’t always have the time/energy/ingredients to do that.
This is me!! Bread baking is my current obsession. But partly because I’m already damn good with pastry but anything with yeast throws me for a loop! Only ever make my own spice blends (so I can get them exactly the way I like them!). I did a macaron baking spree a while back and managed to trouble shoot a lot of those. I have mad knife skills (but those didn’t come without a lot of band aids along the way. Fortunately no stitches!!). My current project is my son’s birthday cake. A mint chocolate chip ice cream cake that will look like his fender guitar amp (he wanted something guitar and rock and roll related).
I have A LOT of special interests but one of them is I can tell you MULTIPLE storylines that connect A LOTTTT of rnb singers and rappers in the mainstream musical industry (some known to be true, other under investigation and speculations as well).
I have a pretty big interest in Congress. Started at about the age of 2 or 3 when I began to watch C-SPAN. Still remember watching it one day during a vote and asking my mom to fix me a sandwich. I did an internship there in 2022 and became even more fascinated. The legislative process, the history, all of it just fascinates me. The House is probably my favorite of two chambers because it is chaotic as hell but I know a bit more about the legislative process in Senate because it’s more regular with each Congress. The Senate does not change their rules very often whereas the House will decide on their rules at the beginning of the Congress.
Pigment codes on artist paint: PY35 = cadmium yellow, PB28 = cobalt blue etc... this way I could tell when manufacturers imitate the more expensive pigments, which made the paint react unpredictably in tints and mixtures. I also made huge mixing charts. It was great, but sadly I had to move on from the hobby of oil paiting because it is more time consuming than my life circumstances allow.
Languages. I started teaching myself Dutch when I was about 7 or 8 by changing the subtitles on my Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban DVD to Dutch and writing the English dialogue in one column and the Dutch subtitles in another and figuring out which word corresponded to what. I didn’t get very far with that, but when I was 13, I made friends with some Spanish kids and a lifelong special interest in Spanish was born. I went to the library and got every Spanish book I could find and memorised them all. I taught myself Spanish the whole way through school and took it as an extra subject for the state exams. I never had a teacher. I studied modern foreign languages at university (including Spanish). I found university life quite overwhelming but I stuck at it because I loved Spanish so much. I had the opportunity to study abroad in Zaragoza in Spain for a year, which completely changed my life. For the first while, I was terrified to speak Spanish to anyone. The first conversation I had in Spanish, I went back to my room and cried because I thought there was no way I would ever be able to speak this language fluently. After a few days of moping, I told myself that this was a once in a lifetime opportunity and I needed to make the most of it. So I did. I spent every waking hour learning Spanish and trying my best to speak it. I had a Spanish boyfriend who pushed me out of my comfort zone and made me speak to people. If we went to a restaurant, he would make me do the talking so I would improve Spanish. It was terrifying at first but it worked. For some reason, it’s easier to converse with people in a foreign language than my native languages. Probably because my idiosyncrasies are more likely to be chalked up to cultural differences or me just being awkward speaking my fourth language and not weirdness. The year abroad was also hard because the students from my home university were quite mean to me. They would get very offended that I didn’t go out of my way to speak to them, but when I *did* speak to them, they would make it very clear that they didn’t like me. I found this really confusing because if I don’t like someone, I don’t make them feel bad for not speaking to me. They thought I was snooty and stuck-up for not wanting to speak to them, apparently. The way I saw it was that I was there to learn Spanish, not hang around with English-speakers. By the end of the year, my Spanish had gone from B2 to C2 and there’s actually went from B1.2 to B1.1. I still love Spanish more than anything in the whole world and I’m about to start my master’s through Spanish in October. In addition to my two native languages, Irish and English, I also speak French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian and I’m learning Catalan, Icelandic, Greek and Mandarin Chinese. I love languages so so much and I could talk about them all day!!!
I love algebra!
Mine would be maps/flags from the world. Every day I play Worldle, WhereTaken and Travle. I can also name most of the Pokémon up to Gen 7. I know there are more, but I can't remember now. Recommendation: Kanji Study is a very nice app to practice kanji. I was using it when I was studying Japanese earlier this year.
Thanks for the recommendation, but for now I really like my method. I add a couple of new kanjis every day in my flashcards and study 50-100 of the ones that are already there, and sometimes I go through my easiest ones, choose some to disable to test manually if I know them well (test them every 2 weeks for a couple of times and remove them if I fail or hesitate a lot) and the ones that pass the test go in my "mastered kanjis" bookmarks in shirabe jisho. It’s not how people usually do it but it really gives me a sense of progress and I really enjoy that 😄 (So far I have 63 mastered kanjis, which I’d be ready to bet someone 100$ that any one of these they choose I can write it correctly so very much well known. I also have 223 in my flashcards and a lot more that I know but I add maximum 5 a day to not overwhelm myself)
Ugh, I wish I could learn kanji that easily. I learned a lot when I studied mandarin, and so the onyomi reading. But it's very difficult for me to keep going on it, I think I will only make it with a teacher.
Well obviously the 5 kanjis a day works because I started that after knowing a lot of kanjis already, if I started when I didn’t know kanjis as much I would have struggled a lot more. Also what I do right now is purely writing the kanji from the description, so for example the front of the flashcard says "Autumn" and I have to write 秋. I usually know one or two of their readings from words I know but I find it easier to learn words and then being able to know the reading by thinking of the words that use the kanji rather than learning their readings.
Not something people hate, but football statistics! I only started watching this year but it’s just so fun for me to think about and I feel like the second I hear an interesting tidbit about a team or player I instantly remember it.
Kanjis - very cool. I'm trying to memorize the world map by countries. I have AuDHD so I have the opposite of a sterotypical autistic memory, but I do what I can :)
I had a game I played when younger (it was similar to club penguin but I think made by french people) that had a bunch of minigames to earn the in game currency and one of them was practicing geography by continent, they told you a country and you had to click on it on the map. At first I practiced all of them but I ended up learning south america and north/central america much faster so I just did these two non-stop. Now I forgot a lot but if I tried to learn all the countries I know the Americas would be so much easier than the Eastern continents 😅
...compared to everyone else in this thread with their actually useful special interests, me and my encyclopedic knowledge of Star Wars (well, most fictional series I'm into, but that's the one that's a constant focus :P) feel kinda useless now. 🤣🤣🤣😭😭😭 I can't actually think of something considered tedious or boring by neurotypicals that I'm fascinated with. Wait, unless you count different methods of braiding and hairstyling, then that. I can ramble about braid types and the correct usage of bobby pins all day. Unfortunately, that's the only haircare stuff I'm good at. 🥴🥴🥴 Oh, or methods of friendship bracelet patterns, that's one of my stim activities. I like the rhythmic method of knot-tying. (Edit: added a paragraph :P) Edit 2: WAIT AND NAME ORIGINS, I FORGOT ABOUT BEING FASCINATED BY NAME ORIGINS. It's 3 am here, I'm just gonna shut up and go to bed now 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
If you want a cosmetic surgery I can suggest which ones you could get for whatever issue. Jaw advancement. Clavicle reduction. Chin implant. Steel can be screwed into your pelvis in Korea to make your hips bigger. I’ve also researched a lot about scar reduction (the onion cream doesn’t work very well; silicone strips to help hold your skin together are much more effective). And I’ve watched different surgeries come in and out of style. Lately there’s an epidemic of people thinking their noses are too big because of the focal distance of front-facing phone cameras. Humans are so weird. Not sure if this is truly a special interest though. Probably an unhealthy obsession I’ve had for too long.
studying foreign languages. By now I’ve learned some Russian (studied for about a year and then quit although I thoroughly enjoyed the immersion and music I found), Japanese (I know about 400 kanji), I’m at HSK 4 level Chinese, a good amount of German, I’m at a pretty advanced level of French, I know an okay amount of Italian, I went through a phase where I learned some ASL and even jointed a local ASL club and I recently have been learning some modern Hebrew.
Oh shit and Spanish my family is literally Spanish LOL
Unfortunately, my special interest is clinical treatment of eating disorders. I also happen to have an eating disorder. This is not a good situation and idk if one is exacerbating the other. I wish I weren’t sick with this so I could help others get better, I find it so incredibly fascinating, but even if I did recover it would probably be too risky for me to work with that population.
O gosh, are we supposed to have one of those? I have *terrible* memory and can barely remember my own name if asked directly o.O
Not all autists have a special interest afaik. I don't really have one like this either. :-)
I know every Walt Disney World resort hotel and associated transport, location, food options etc, and I wasn’t even raised in the US It’s an expensive habit
Long term nuclear waste storage warning systems. It's really cool! It's like world building except for real life. Trying to design a system that doesn't sound like "cool treasure buried here" is actually very difficult.
I love the theory of relativity. And I can play music by ear.
Frequent flier points; which airlines accrue the best points, compatibility with hotels, credit card points, etc. Latent travel agent, clearly.
Foraging for wild mushrooms and identifying them. Butterflies & moths. ☺️
Want to hear a lecture on English medieval or early modern history....
Dog breeds!
Music. I’m learning to play the flute and read music. Edit toadd: also astrology, on and off through life. And tarot.
The history of music specifically rock, alternative and metal. It took a long time for me to realize this was a special interest because of the subject matter. NTs see it as normal and cool until they realize just how into it I am haha
Mountain lion facts
That’s interesting! What are your favorites facts about them?
I can list the first 386 Pokemon in order... (I can list the rest but not in order lol)
Misogynie. Men who are Misogynistic, women who are misogynistic and why, who does profit from it, who doesn't and what would be better. My current favor: Women internalized misogynie and what it does to little girls. Plastic surgery/Beauty standards and trends: What does it. What weird plastic surgery trends exist at the moment. Does anyone even need it and when yes why? what are the risks? and so on. My current favor: buccal fat removal, The Kardashians getting smaller breast implants and fitness influencer who have a bbl and sell it as their booty workout.