Excuse me, but your sitting in my Chair

We human beings are territorial creatures as evidenced by our preoccupation with where we sit.
Last week, the instructor of the Senior Strength class told us she had been reading about how senior citizens (the man at my house calls us senile citizens) can exercise their brains by challenging the "other" side of the brain. Try brushing your teeth with the "other hand" or putting the "other" leg into your pants first or sitting in "other" places. So she instructed us to sit in a different chair during the next class.
Seems like a simple brain exercise, doesn't it? Wrong! You haven't heard such grumbling and fussing since first grade when seats were assigned. Remember when you were told "get back to YOUR seat", or "Do not get out of YOUR seats", or asked, "What are you doing in Mary's chair"?
One of the oldsters in our class moved back only one chair and when the tattle tales in the class reported a woman in the front row who hadn't moved at all, the woman firmly announced she didn't plan to move.
Unlike a study that showed that mental patients were much less likely to shout out when sitting in a different chair, the senior exercisers grumbled or giggled about their discomfort and a few who were used to hiding behind a larger participant complained of being exposed.
A study at the University of Georgia revealed that individuals who usually sat at the end of a row of seats were more likely to claim the spot as theirs while students in the middle rows didn't display that territorial behavior. On the other hand, female students were more likely to claim a place as their own.
One wonders if those results would be the same if the study were done in a church. Pastors, priest and busybodies, need only scan the sanctuary to discover who is not in their church on a given day. Sometimes family's claim an entire pew through continual use over the years. I wouldn't dream of sitting in someone place at church and the parishioners know that the Son does not sit on the left hand of their Father in heaven.
Even in our homes we have assigned seating. Everyone in the family knows where to sit at the table, even those who haven't been home since the last holiday. Although Archie Bunker doesn't live there, any man of the house can claim his recliner with a certain look.
From car seat to booster seat to selected head phones, kids sit in the same place in the family car until the enter driver's ed.
There seems to be all kinds of chairs and some are coveted like thrones and endowed chairs at universities. Others are dreaded like dentist chairs, or "the" chair in death row.
Maybe we shouldn't mess around with seating arrangements. After all even a bear could tell when "somebody has been sitting in my chair" even if the chair was just right for Goldie Locks.