Watch on YouTube: Hard Proof of 'Hoarding Disorder'.. or just Stress ? | Myth Debunked | fMRI Brain Study Critique
The famous study quoted in Stuff and elsewhere - holding junk mail over a shredder for "hoarders" vs regular people, and observing - purports to demonstrate a neurological manifestation of "hoarding".
Quoting from the book "Stuff" by Frost et al -
> Our colleague Dave Tolin at Hartford Hospital ... deviced one such ingenious experiment. Hoarding patients (sic) and a control group who didn't hoard brought their junk mail to the lab. Their brains were scanned while they watched a monitor showing the experimenter picking up their mail and holding it over a shredder. The subjects were then asked to decide whether the experimenter should shred or save the item. In contrast to what happened when their brains were at rest, hoarders had significantly more activity in areas such as the anterior cingulate cortex than control subjects did when trying to make the decision.
What if I suggested that processes here are not what they are claimed ?
The "regular person", without preference for keeping, has already made the decision to discard all junk mail. They are doing 2 things, extremely quickly and easily -
* pattern recognition ( "is this junk mail ?" )
* application of an existing decision ( "what do we do with junk mail ? we chuck it." )
* = extremely "cheap", low-effort, high-speed process with minimal congitive engagement
"Hoarder", on the other hand, might not have such a pre-made decision, or their policy may expressly require keeping or examining said mail. In this case, they are being asked to make a decision contrary to their policy / preference / usual process. Furthermore, they may be conflicted about this expectation to discard. Thus, a likely conflicting, contradictory decision with insufficient information and while under observation. ( Observer Effect )
So, the "decision making" here is a complete misnomer, and is likely happening in neither case, at least not properly or in the same way. These are completely different processes that have nothing in common, and different brain activation is only natural.
So, contrary to what experts claim it shows, this experiment did not appear to find a "hoarding brain" or "difficulty making decisions".
It found a normal human brain responding to dissonance and coercion, contrasting it with a brain making a simple, congruent decision.
As for "decisions" - it's simply a case of linguistic mislabelling to treat these dissimilar processes as comparable "decisions".