am i "in your face"?

Setting aside my grave reservations about the more air-fairy aspects of psychology (blame Freud I say), when things go wrong in your brain, some really fascinating things can occur. The nature of these unusual things make one rethink the nature of our everyday experience of being human. However, even the workaday functioning brain can make us do some peculiar things, like the deep aversion we have to violations of our personal space.

A few years ago I avidly read The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by neurologist Oliver Sacks. In each chapter Sacks recounts individuals who have had physical abnormalities or damage to their brains and hence develop existential problems that, while thought provoking to the rest of us, must surely have been distressing to them. For instance the woman who loses he sense of where she is in the world (proprioception) and becomes unable to walk down the street without watching what her feet are doing ; or the man who, through alcohol abuse (Korsakoff's syndrome), loses all long term memory and truly lives 'in the moment'; and the title character who loses the ability to attach words to the objects they represent (aphasia). Sacks id perhaps most well known for the tale of his clinical experience with long-term coma patients popularised in the academy award winning movie Awakenings. The distress of their existential crises, waking up suddenly after 40 years of unconsciousness, was so great that some of them elected to return to unconsciousness.

Peculiar differences in perception often draw the attention of psychological researchers. Recently researchers studying the concept of personal space and the strong aversion we have to strangers violating it, discovered an individual who didn't seem to have one. While the rest of us are scrambling for that empty seat in the bus, leaving at least 67cms between us and others if we can, this individual came far too lose for comfort at 34cm. The researchers (Kennedy etal) came to locate this particular sense of our need for personal space in the amygdala, the ancient and emotional centre of the brain. The woman standing too close turned out to have damage to that part of her brain. While this made her seem friendly, it also caused her to commit many social faux pas

However, the size of an individuals personal space is also cultural. Americans like a lot, the Japanese much less, perhaps indictive of the environmental conditions they find themselves living in.

Personal space is such a fascinating phenomenon to researchers that it has it's own field, proxemics. Proxemics says that personal space goes beyond physical distance to include loud voices, ringing mobiles, eye contact, touching in conversation, even choice of position in a room, elevator or public transport vehicle: anywhere large numbers of people must come together. So important is our need for this unique space that public spaces ae designed with it in mind. Personal space issues have even been linked to road rage. (ref)