Normal intelligence, no apparent brain injuries but certain deficiencies
October 20th 2008 09:55
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From: USAToday
By Kim Painter, USA TODAY
We all get lost sometimes. Some of us have the problem more often than others.
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.
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.
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