Friends coming over for dinner, and we want another two seats available at the table? I’d better make her clear off that table because otherwise there’ll be another round of “NOOOO, you moved stuff, now I’ll never be able to find anything again”.
“Sweetie, it’s all on the side table. I moved the stuff pile by pile, didn’t mix the piles”
“It’s forever gone!”
Not taking sides here, but something we never think about in situations like this, “we” including ADHD people who create these expanses of piles AND the people who suffer them because they love the shit out of the ADHD people making the piles all over the place, is that our memory is much more linked to space than we think.
The reason we forget what we are doing when we go from one room to the other so often is because our memory, our cognition, our conceptualization of what our current quest is… is often intimately connected IN OUR BRAINS to the spatial context we are doing and thinking about those things in.
I remember a study that showed how rats actually have certain neurons devoted to certain spaces and units of space, the study wasn’t overly concerned with identifying how those mechanism worked because obviously it is super complicated, rather the study was focused on proving there was a literal relationship between certain neurons in a particular rat’s brain and the spaces they had spent time in and memorized.
In otherwords, the study proved rats have a map in their brain even though we don’t know how that map precisely works. It is reasonable to conclude our minds have some degree of that same intimacy between cognition and space especially because of how often people talk about experiencing losing their train of thought when they move from one space to another even though the thought process wasn’t necessarily spatial nor even had to do with the particular space they were in.
here is one, I don’t know if this was the original one I read an article about or not but it is in the same vein at least
None of this long rant is to excuse the piles OR the pilemaker, but maybe to give some context to why it is such a point of friction… there is more energy being exerted across that conflict point than is visible on the surface. Moving the piles actually disrupts your girlfriends internal mental conception of those things even if you preserve the physical ordering of the piles, their very location in a known space was part of the way your girlfriend’s brain was cognitively encoding and interfacing with them and now that has been erased in some small way.
If your girlfriend moves the piles herself, even if the end result is precisely the same as if you had done it, her brain has had the chance to do the mental translation work of transferring the important bits to neurons that aren’t associated JUST with that particular spatial arrangement in a known space.
Think of piles placed in specific places (usually inconveniently RIGHT in the center of things I know lol) as the natural and necessary anodyne inverse to taking a walk to refresh one’s mind and escape a confining mental context. One action tears away mental scaffolding, the other shores it up. Both are necessary to cognition and problem solving.
TL;DR It is weird but memory and space aren’t seperate things for the human brain and people who struggle with executive function often exploit the ability to leverage spatial neurons/“maps” in their brain to encode and process information in order to solve complex problems that require remembering key information over medium and short periods of time.
That’s soo my wife.
Friends coming over for dinner, and we want another two seats available at the table? I’d better make her clear off that table because otherwise there’ll be another round of “NOOOO, you moved stuff, now I’ll never be able to find anything again”. “Sweetie, it’s all on the side table. I moved the stuff pile by pile, didn’t mix the piles” “It’s forever gone!”
long response
Not taking sides here, but something we never think about in situations like this, “we” including ADHD people who create these expanses of piles AND the people who suffer them because they love the shit out of the ADHD people making the piles all over the place, is that our memory is much more linked to space than we think.
The reason we forget what we are doing when we go from one room to the other so often is because our memory, our cognition, our conceptualization of what our current quest is… is often intimately connected IN OUR BRAINS to the spatial context we are doing and thinking about those things in.
I remember a study that showed how rats actually have certain neurons devoted to certain spaces and units of space, the study wasn’t overly concerned with identifying how those mechanism worked because obviously it is super complicated, rather the study was focused on proving there was a literal relationship between certain neurons in a particular rat’s brain and the spaces they had spent time in and memorized.
In otherwords, the study proved rats have a map in their brain even though we don’t know how that map precisely works. It is reasonable to conclude our minds have some degree of that same intimacy between cognition and space especially because of how often people talk about experiencing losing their train of thought when they move from one space to another even though the thought process wasn’t necessarily spatial nor even had to do with the particular space they were in.
here is one, I don’t know if this was the original one I read an article about or not but it is in the same vein at least
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-14611-7
None of this long rant is to excuse the piles OR the pilemaker, but maybe to give some context to why it is such a point of friction… there is more energy being exerted across that conflict point than is visible on the surface. Moving the piles actually disrupts your girlfriends internal mental conception of those things even if you preserve the physical ordering of the piles, their very location in a known space was part of the way your girlfriend’s brain was cognitively encoding and interfacing with them and now that has been erased in some small way.
If your girlfriend moves the piles herself, even if the end result is precisely the same as if you had done it, her brain has had the chance to do the mental translation work of transferring the important bits to neurons that aren’t associated JUST with that particular spatial arrangement in a known space.
Think of piles placed in specific places (usually inconveniently RIGHT in the center of things I know lol) as the natural and necessary anodyne inverse to taking a walk to refresh one’s mind and escape a confining mental context. One action tears away mental scaffolding, the other shores it up. Both are necessary to cognition and problem solving.
TL;DR It is weird but memory and space aren’t seperate things for the human brain and people who struggle with executive function often exploit the ability to leverage spatial neurons/“maps” in their brain to encode and process information in order to solve complex problems that require remembering key information over medium and short periods of time.
Yep, that’s pretty close to what I’ve assumed is going on, and I’m doing what I can to accommodate.