Special Interests and Other Interests

Singularity has a fixed idea that he can only be interested in three things at once. I wanted to try to budge this idea by talking about how there are other things he is still interested in, in varying degrees, and there are also things that he is no longer interested in at all. So, I made little slips of paper, on which we wrote things in which he is/was interested. I could only get him to write the three current special interests. We did this in an ABA session, so his behavioral interventionist, Dmitri (for more on Dmitri, see my earlier post "Perils of Perseveration"), and I made slips for our interests as well. We filed them in categories: 

• Love and think about all of the time
• Like a lot and do almost every day
• Like pretty well and do fairly often
• Still like but do only infrequently
• Used to like and may like again in the future
• I don't think I'll ever like this again
• Never liked

There were so many items in some of the categories that I cut them off in the photos, but you get the idea. For a visual thinker like Singularity, it seems helpful to take in a lot of information in a single visual like this display of interests. 

Singularity seemed to take a bit of a renewed interest in some of the activities he used to enjoy but hadn't thought of lately. Many more things went into the "Still like but do only infrequently" and "Like pretty well and do fairly often" categories than I expected. My interpretation of this is that this exercise did make him a little more flexible about his thinking about his interests. 

The other great thing about doing this exercise with a group is that we found that we had more common interests than we initially thought. For example, we all enjoy bicycling and Spongebob Squarepants. And as each person took their turn in expressing their interests, we heard a lot of "I like that too!" comments, which led to making more little slips of paper. 

I kind of fudged the "Never liked" category for Singularity by putting one of my "I don't think I'll ever like this again" items it -- Barbie dolls. What can I say? I'm a girl child of the 70s.

I think that it would be fun, in the future, to use these slips of paper to create Venn diagrams of common interests.