It’s one thing that separates us from animals. We are masters of our biology, not the other way around. Yet there is something animal about OCD, something atavistic and primitive. Videos surface from time to time on the Internet of people engaged in compulsive behaviour: postmen dip in and out of a box to check for letters with the same jerky repetitive movements that a wading bird uses when it ducks for fish.* Drivers who return to check they locked their cars patrol the doors in the way that a bear lumbers around the perimeter of its territory. Just like humans, animals show common patterns of behaviour and ritual. They stop at the same places to eat, bathe and sleep. Some of this behaviour can appear compulsive. In 1952, the Nobel Prize–winning Austrian zoologist Konrad Lorenz described how water shrews would travel along set paths ‘strictly bound to them as a railway engine to its tracks’. He saw how the shrews would jump over a stone that blocked their way, and how, when the stone was removed, they continued to jump.
What do You think about The Man Who Couldn’t Stop?
