Getting Lost Easily? Here is the Solution

We all get lost sometimes. Some of us have the problem more often
than
others. Kim Painter writes in USA TODAY (October 19 edition) about an
interesting approach using virtual-world training sessions.

Sharon Roseman, 61, of Littleton, Colo., has a different story: Each
morning, she wakes up in a house where all the doors and hallways
seem
to have moved overnight.

If she stands and spins around, the room rights itself. She can then
make her way through her house and drive to work along a well-
rehearsed route. But if she takes a detour, especially on a curving
or
diagonal street, she can become lost in an instant. Once, an icy hill
forced her to turn around and seek a new path out of her
neighborhood.
She spent 40 miserable minutes driving in circles before she
recognized her front door, gave up and went inside.

As a child, Roseman says, "I spent all of my time being lost." Just
two months ago, she learned her problem has a name: developmental
topographical disorientation — a profound lack of navigational skill,
probably rooted in early brain development.

BETTER LIFE: More news for healthy living

That makes her part of an increasingly recognized group: people with
normal intelligence and no obvious brain injuries, but with extreme,
lifelong difficulty in some skill most of us take for granted.

For some, it's remembering faces (prosopagnosia), naming colors
(color
agnosia) or recognizing pieces of music (amusia). For Roseman and one
Canadian woman recently described in a scientific journal, it is
finding their way through the world.

"All of these are things that you might see in people with a brain
injury," says Brad Duchaine, a researcher at the University College
of
London and an expert on prosopagnosia (also known as face-blindness).
But these "selective developmental deficits" show up in otherwise
typical, healthy people.

"It's like a little black hole," Duchaine says.

Dependent on routine, family members

The woman described in the journal Neuropsychologia has an especially
severe, lifelong history of getting lost. She, like Roseman, can get
to work along a long-practiced path — but sometimes gets lost walking
home from her bus stop, say researcher Giuseppe Iaria and his
colleagues at the University of British Columbia and Vancouver
General
Hospital. She goes nowhere else alone. At 43, she lives with her
father, does not drive and "does not have a nice social life," Iaria
says.

In a series of tests, the researchers found that the woman has an
inability to create mental maps of the environment. When shown a
simple virtual neighborhood on a computer, she can eventually learn a
route — but what takes typical people one to five minutes takes her
more than half an hour.

The root of her difficulties, Iaria says, most likely lies in a part
of the brain called the hippocampus.

The researchers are trying to help the woman through virtual-world
training sessions. They also are looking for more lost souls through
a
new website: gettinglost.ca. More than 80 people already have
responded, Iaria says.

A site set up by face-blindness researchers (faceblind.org) has
produced 3,000 responses from people who believe they have
prosopagnosia, Duchaine says. Some cannot recognize their own
spouses;
others have milder cases. Interestingly, about 25% also have
navigational difficulties.

Duchaine referred Roseman, who has no trouble with faces, to the
Vancouver researchers. Roseman says she plans to go to Vancouver soon
to see if they can help her. "I have hope," she says. But, above
that,
she says, she feels relief — because now she knows that while she may
be lost, she is not alone.

Source: http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/painter/2008-10-19-your-health_N.htm
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