Mixing special interests and camouflage

Via a friend’s twittering, I recently saw a link to a new digital camera that was coming out. I clicked through and took a very brief look. The page I saw was this.

I’m not a photography fanatic, but I do like gadgets. I quickly took in the big facts – it’s one of those ‘cross over’ cameras that looks like an SLR, but doesn’t have interchangeable lenses. It has a 24x zoom – goodness that’s a lot. It wasn’t much cheaper to buy than an entry level SLR. I didn’t read the full article, and in 30 seconds, the page was closed, and I was on to something else.

I mention this, because a week or so later this camera was to make a re-appearance in my life.

I was sitting at home chatting with my wife. Our conversation was about nothing in particular, but at one point it touched on some photographs we’d taken recently.

Ding!

My brain had made a connection back to the camera I’d seen a week earlier. Compulsion overtook me. I had to tell my wife about this new camera that was coming out with the amazing zoom lens on it. So I did – badly. I butted in with something like, “There’s a new camera coming out soon, Pentax I think it is, with a 20 something zoom lens on it”. My wife takes this sort of interruption in her stride these days, because I make them frequently.

She made a dismissive comment such as “oh that’s nice”, and then carried on with whatever the conversation was about at that time. I couldn’t tell you what we were actually talking about, because my brain was still off at a tangent about the camera.

How big was that zoom? I knew it was 20 something, but I couldn’t remember what. Was it a Pentax? I think it was, but I can’t be sure. What if I’ve told my wife the wrong make? Our current camera isn’t very good. Maybe we should think about buying one of these. Or maybe a proper SLR – they aren’t much more expensive. Then the kids could use our not-very-good compact – they’d enjoy that.

In and amongst these thoughts I held the conversation with my wife going. My camouflage saw to that pretty much automatically. I bet my input wasn’t scintilating though.

This is very typical of how I work. Much is made in AS literature about how we have ‘Special Interests’ that we can talk about for hours on end. Much is also made of how we use a social camouflage where we use a pattern match mechanism to give a canned response to a given situation or line of questioning.

I think my behaviour in the above scenario is basically a combination of both of these things, and kind of a back-firing of the camouflage mechanism at the same time.

The moment of pattern match and subsequent response is the camouflage mechanism working. The talk about photographs triggered the response about the camera I’d recently read about. The compulsion to speak and the thoughts that followed are special interest.

But cameras aren’t one of my special interests, despite the response being very typically special interest. I guess these two mechanisms are so deeply ingrained into how I work that my brain decided that this combination was the correct response to the situation. Even as I was saying it, I knew it wasn’t, but the compulsion was too strong to ignore.

Do any of you experience this combination of traits?

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