When I woke up one morning and suddenly found my twenties coming to a precipitous close, I decided to embark upon a spiritual quest of sorts: I went around the country visiting a number of contemporary American spiritual communities. I visited the Sufi community, The Abode of the Message. It was founded by Pir Vilayat Khan in an old Shaker settlement in New Lebanon, New York. I also visited Odiyan, a Buddhist center at Sea Ranch, California; Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophical Camp Hill Village for developmentally disabled young adults in Copake, New York; and the Woodcrest Bruderhof in Rifton, New York. I visited a number of other communities as well. Unexpectedly, those visits ended up becoming an integral part of my doctoral dissertation research.
One thing struck me profoundly about each of these communities; and it let me instinctively know that I would not be a good fit for any of them: each community paid painstaking attention to the physical environment. Extreme, caring attention to order and detail was evident everywhere: A place for beautiful things and all beautiful things in their place (What’s interesting, ironic and makes total sense from a brain growth and development perspective, is that many years later, with Ph.D. in hand, I made the “crazy” decision to take a job as the maintenance man for a Think Tank at Stanford, charged with bringing a similar detailed level of order and functionality to that environment!).
Hyperthymesia, Oh Wherefore Art Thou?
I’m writing about this now in response to the program aired on 60 Minutes last Sunday about Super Autobiographical Memory. On the show Leslie Stahl presented six people who can recall details from every single day of their lives! Pick a date – July 27, 1986 – they can tell you the exact day of the week it fell upon and what happened in pointed detail with 99.9% accuracy. When placed in a functional MRI scanner by Professor Jim McGaugh at the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at UC Irvine, the brains of these folks displayed some very specific anomalies – two areas were seven standard deviations larger than normal. These were the temporal lobes and the caudate nucleus. Compared to height in our culture, these parts of their brains would make them the equivalent of being ten feet tall!
McGaugh is the world’s leading researcher on hyperthymesia – the scientific name for super autobiographical memory – and he’s curious about a chicken/egg problem. Do these people have such larger areas because they’ve used them a lot, or were these areas larger to begin with? I would argue for both possibilities, since we know from apoptosis studies that with brain neurons it’s either use it or lose it. So, those areas probably started out larger than most initially and increased their neuron numbers and connections going forward.
This chicken/egg problem becomes an interesting research question, particularly when we consider the larger caudate nucleus. This part of the brain has been implicated in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. In people afflicted with this condition researchers have found significantly increased volumes of gray matter. What was interesting to me on the 60 Minutes segment was when they showed hyperthymesic TV star Marilu Henner at home in her bedroom closet. Every skirt and dress was hung in its “proper place.” Blouses were placed together in color groupings. Each pair of shoes was housed in its own individual cubby, with one toe in and one toe out. Her organization and order were off the charts. One primary difference between Marilu though, and someone suffering from OCD, is that she seems to have a meta-awareness of this compulsion such that she’s able to laugh about it.
A Certain Buddhist Calm
Being in beautifully organized environments brings a certain Buddhist calm. It’s not an accident that healthy spiritual communities pay attention to such things. As someone who has made many home visits to the poor and the emotionally disturbed, I can tell you that one thing that’s hard not to notice is the amount of clutter and chaos in their living space. Apparently, as within, so without.
But I also suspect that by beginning early, and making a game of being neat and organized, we can grow the caudate nucleus in our children’s brains such that order and beauty are something that simply unfolds as a matter of course. And with it also, perhaps by introducing a nightly ritual of a Day Review, help them develop an increasing ability to more easily recall many more days of their lives. It certainly seems like an experiment worth pursuing, yes?
Hi Mark, While my closet is ordered (and I am able to laugh about it), a colleague once said of my handwriting that if that was all he’d known about me he would have imagined that I was retarded. I’m of the notion that the universe is perfectly shattered and that we must integrate the opposites within ourselves—sort of like appreciating English Gardens with the flair for the natural and French Gardens with a leaning toward order… and the untouched forest with a predilection for perfect.
Whether ordered or chaotic, here’s to all good wishes for the New Year and a great 2011.
Hi Mark, I suspect that the closer we are to our source, Nature/God/Goddess/Divine, the more organized and perfect we become naturally.
In my experience as a mental health nurse, I could see that neatness and organization played a role with the mentally ill. They were scattered and disorganized except for the OCD…the theory is that they attempted to control themselves and their environment by being super organized. Maybe so but there is more to the story.
On the 60 minutes episode and I saw mentally healthy people with OCD tendencies. They didn’t seem to be bothered too much with the obsession and compulsion of order….they probably had good parenting and learned to live with their low serotonin personalities. To make a long story short, they didn’t have personality disorders overlay-ed into the OCD tendencies. (Their stories would be different if they had problems like character disorders.)
Anyway, for those of us without OCD tendencies (which adds another dimension) I suspect you can measure our mental health by the way we keep our homes. Order and neatness makes everyone feel better. The Chinese Feng Shui is about the aligning ourselves with the heavens or to put it in a more contemporary mode, it is about the psychology of placement. (There is so much dogma in this after centuries of people putting in their own two cents, that you really should follow your own intuition rather than rely on any of the books I have read regarding this practice.) After all of this, I can see that a neatness assessment is valuable when understanding the whole person. We are what we eat and we are what we express. Best wishes for the New Year, Toni
Being one who absolutely needs order to function well, I was most interested in this week’s blog. My husband on the other hand seems to need (?) chaos as he has no ability to organize and creates clutter wherever he goes. I have always wondered about such differences in how we all function. I gave up trying to organize him quite awhile ago trying to not make it a right and wrong issue..rather personal preferences. And then there is the OCD piece that I do know I can move into very easily when given the opportunity. It is a good thing to keep in perspective and laugh at indeed. Lucky for me, he can laugh with me as well. I appreciate your insights into the why and how of order, it certainly puts things in place. May your work continue to help us all understand our complex brains. Many thanks Mark.
I just received the greatest compliment from my daughter and SIL. They are with his parents at present.
“We are so glad you let us be the parents and never undermine us. You spoil them notoriously but never beyond the limits of reason. They always think they’re getting away with something when you’re with them and haven’t figured out you’ve already told us where you are and what “dastardly” thing you’re doing. When we say no or time to stop you accept our judgment and back us.”
For someone who lives in the moment it is fun to see that my children understand that there really is method and order behind my madness. I’ve always referred to it as unconditional love.
I enjoy your blogs.
With a strong belief in a higher power, I believe that creation is so “neatly” ordered!! Wherever you look there is order and everything has its place!! Interesting. My surroundings at home and at work are usually neat but on ocassion it is wise not to open a closet door or a drawer because it looks like my yard in the fall after a wind storm!!But, bottom line, I do not function without neat and tidy?? So now I would love to take a peek @ my temporal lobes and the caudate nucleus…. I really thought my neatness was just a way to cope?
Oh dear if neatness counts I just rated a major negative and if I straighten out all my books or papers I’d never find anything.
Probably an excellent parenting technique. At least my parents believed it so and my 2 siblings seemed to totally catch the message. But, while taking the acceptable amount of the vacuuming my room (with my foot moving the vacuum) I read a book.
As a parent my only real neatness thing had to do with the public areas of our and the bathrooms. Children bedroom and playroom doors could so easily be closed. Worked! The respected my wishes and respected their personal chaos.
Hi Mark
Been a while since we’ve communicated 🙂 I just read this entry and all i could say was “really?” – wow guess i missed the boat i live in organised chaos.
Hope you are doing real well and keep up the amazing work you are doing i love it, so much food for thought.
((((hugs))))