After recently being diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, and wondering if I could possibly be AuDHD, I recently started to wonder if, for some of us, our interests are actually stemming from neurospicy sensory needs. I can't think of any one moment growing up that made me really crave tickling (Tickling made me uncomfortable when I was young.), or being attracted to women's feet (I used to HATE feet when I was young!), or wanting to be completely restrained so that I could experience these unbearable sensations and not be able to resist. Has anyone else considered this possibility?
I've seen several people ask this in the past, and while various forms of neurodivergence can play a role in an individual's unique relationship with sensory needs, I think it would be an overshot to extrapolate it as a pattern of significance. There seem to be just as many people in the different neurodivergent subgroups that absolutely
hate being touched or tickled, and as many who love it that are neurotypical. I think most people like to group things in nice orderly boxes, like with personality types, mental health diagnosis, and the various classifications of neurodivergence, and while those are great tools that do often have great personal and clinical significance, it's important to keep the perspective that brains, for all their similarities, are very unique to the individual in many ways. There are people that love and hate tickling from so many different backgrounds: forms of neurodivergence vs. neurotypicalness, personality, disability, race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, political alignment...virtually everything. I think this is a case of something like apophenia, in that those who identify within the scope of neurodivergence, or have some sort of diagnosis might be more inclined to look for specific patterns in their lives that are explained by their neurodivergent state. Understandably so–it can be a very defining element of one's life, explaining a lot of otherwise befuddling phenomena, but with the tendency for some to then view every aspect of their experience through that lens, even if it doesn't necessarily apply.
Hopefully I communicated my thoughts clearly enough on this and that I'm not coming off as dismissive. It's a fascinating topic and I do often wonder what, if any, common aspect of humans there is that triggers or drives this fixation.
