"I had to squeeze inside my apartment," he said of his 10-by-10-foot room, which rents for $250 a month. "I don't know how I lived that way. The problem was, I never got a storage space."

In one sense, Frost agreed, space makes the difference between eccentricity and pathology.

"People can collect and not throw things away without it really being a problem if they have the space and can organize it," he said. "It's only a pathology when it interferes with their functioning."

Hoarding related to OCD

Pathological hoarding can affect people of all ages, and it seems to be related to obsessive-compulsive disorder, added Frost, who has researched the problem for a decade and recently received a grant to develop a model treatment to be tested on about 40 subjects at the Institute of Living in Hartford, Conn. and at Boston University.

There are three facets to the problem, he said: enormous emotional difficulty throwing things away; compulsive acquisition -- sometimes by buying things, but often by picking them up for free -- and a high level of disorganization and clutter.

Many of the people afflicted seem to be unusually intelligent, he said. "They see more connections between things, which leads them to value those things much more than the rest of us do."

But they also have difficulty finding conventional categories for the information they collect. Instead, they tend to organize their homes by visual or spatial cues -- they might locate an electric bill, for example, on the left-hand side of a pile six inches deep, rather than where bills are filed.

This taxes their memory, so they tend to want to leave everything out in plain sight, piled in the middle of the room.

"They have to remember where everything is," explained Frost. "The rest of us only have to remember our system."

Equally important is their tendency to attach emotional significance to a wider variety of things. "For some it has to do with identity," he said. "I've had people tell me, 'If I throw too much away, there'll be nothing left of me.' Almost like a Midas touch -- if something comes into my ownership, it's part of me."

Finally, the psychologist said, "throwing something away makes them feel unsafe." The sense of security and comfort that most people feel in the familiar surroundings of home, hoarders may feel only when hemmed in by a nest of debris.

But there was no room for sentiment at the two-story brick apartment building from which police, firefighters and other city emergency workers extracted Moore. A man who would identify himself only as the landlord's brother said that he had bagged Moore's trove of paper in garbage bags and stashed it in a back room for the night.

"Tomorrow is trash day," he said.

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