Always, always believe what you read in the Fortean Times

"Steve Angerson of the University of Iowa and his team have studied a group of pathological collectors. They found that damage to the frontal lobes of the brain impaired judgement and caused emotional disturbances. However, only when the injury extended to the right mesial prefrontal cortex, a tiny region of the human prefrontal cortex, did the patients develop a serious collecting habit too, Anderson told a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in New Orleans last November.



"Previous work in rodents shows that more primitive, subcortial brain regions produce the drive to collect food and useless objects. No matter how much they have stashed away, animals will just go on collecting. Anderson maintains we have the same basic drive; but the right mesial prefrontal cortex can normally discriminate between something of value and something useless, and keeps the drive in check. When it is damaged, the more primitive collecting drive comes to the fore. New Scientist, 15 Nov 2003."



Feel free to confess your collections below. Borgesian libraries are excused. I've admitted the typewriters already, but I haven't mentioned my Pez dispensers, my antique kitchen gadgets, or unidentified junkyard machine parts. However, these things all serve a decorative purpose. Right?