From the oft-amended grocery list within the “Shopping Lists” spiral notebook to the “Things To Do” list in my purse-sized dayplanner, my brain simply functions more efficiently when I am able to tick things off and sigh happily from the completion of a task. And I would probably never write another book if I didn’t have a notebook filled with ideas and insertions at my side as I type.

Hopefully the readers of this column are a bit more tidy in their paperwork wrangling than I because I have occasionally found myself in a full-blown moaning frenzy when I lost one of my MANY in-progress lists amongst the piles of predatory, list-eating paper-stacks that blossom and grow on my desk and coffee table.

Italian writer Umberto Eco, author of the much-beloved book The Name of the Rose and many other books and scholarly articles, also has a fascination with lists and he is curating an exhibit on that very subject.

This article in the German publication SPIEGEL discusses the new exhibition at the Louvre which gives us a glimpse into the lists made by well know writers and artists through the ages.

As Eco states to the journalist, “The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often.”

The Louvre exhibition lists give glimpses into the thought processes of those long gone in many cases. But an even more trendy version of list mania is currently unfolding in the world of social media as Twitter Lists emerge online. Whether it is your own closest friends or simply curious strangers, anyone can now have a clear indication of who you think is worth watching on Twitter and how you categorise them. It’s a fascinating bit of ‘mind perv’ into the thought process of other Twitterers. And the lists concept has caught on like the proverbial wildfire around the world.

Eco’s curation of this new exhibit at the Louvre may only examine list-makers from the past, but he has also tapped into the zeitgeist of our current fascination with the lists of other people and our tendency to be armchair psychologists about the motivation for adding each item.

Do we learn anything from the lists of others? Do these small glimpses into the lives of others serve a constructive purpose? Are we engaging that ‘inner perv’ that resides within so many of us — the one which makes some people think that it is acceptable to have a wee glimpse into the contents of your medicine cabinet when they go to the loo at your house? Or are we simply allowing ourselves to indulge in a tiny bit of harmless human nature — a normal curiousity about whether other people do their organising differently, better, more creatively, more happily than we do.

Questions, questions — and perhaps the beginning of another list with ideas to discuss in future articles. We DO LOVE our lists!