Collecting

Via Tyler Cowen, I just stumbled across a 1941 study that correlated children's hobbies with their measured IQs. The group with the lowest IQ was children with "no hobbies;" the groups with the highest IQs were those into "reading nonfiction" and "collecting." None of these effects were very large, with the average IQ for all groups falling between 97 and 105.

But anyway this gives me an excuse to ponder the phenomenon of "collecting," which I don't get and have never gotten. Why do so many smart people love to assemble sets of things?

I have occastionally collected little objects related to particular places and events that have been important in my own life. When I was at Knossos I swiped a potsherd from their discard pile, because Knossos was a major fascination of mine when I was about 13. I once had a a set of four dinosaur stamps, honoring my childhood fascination with paleontology; a sea urchin from Maine; shark's teeth from Florida; a broken flint pebble from England; and my name tag ("Bones Jones") from the goofy amateur movie I acted in. But these were all things connected to my life, and, here's the other thing, at the moment I couldn't tell you where most of them are. Physical objects have trouble holding my attention.

Even with books, the things I own by far the most of, I have an ambivalent relationship, and in recent years I have discarded hundreds.

I have thought from time to time that collecting something would be fun, and it would give me something else to think about. But there isn't anything that interests me enough, and I'm sure that if I ever started I would soon forget about it. 

So, anyway, collecting is just one of those things about human life I don't get, and when it trends into obsession, like 500 barbie dolls, or all the editions of Great Expectations, I find it to be a great mystery.