(Sorry…but…do I know you?)

When I learned about my brain’s inability to map, the world reordered itself almost instantly. I didn’t stop losing my way, but I did stop blaming myself. Everything else stayed the same; the emotional edge softened into a shrug.

Being chronically lost, however, is not the only way Developmental Topographical Dysfunction can mess up your life. DTD goes hand in hand with face blindness. If you’ve ever run into someone you know you know, but have no clue who that person is, you might be a little bit face blind.

Neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote about rare neurological disorders. His best-known book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, is mainly about face blindness. Oliver Sacks was seriously face blind. He also had a crippling case of DTD.

I have to wonder how DTD and face blindness are connected. I don’t know how they’re linked, but they are.

Is reading a face like reading a map?

My DTD is relatively mild: I can recognize my street and my house, drive to the nearest supermarket and to neighboring towns. Manhattan, with its easy-to-navigate grid layout, is usually ok, too, so long as I turn to the right when leaving my building. I still have where-am-I moments, but knowing what is happening makes it easier to cope.

My face blindness isn’t extreme, but it’s much harder to manage than my inability to map. For one thing, DTD is easier to hide. If I’m lost, unless I let people in on the secret, no one knows but me. Not recognizing someone I’ve known for years is harder to conceal.

Shortly after learning about my own DTD and accompanying face blindness, I heard Oliver Sacks talk about both in a public radio interview.

At the end of the interview, Dr. Sacks took questions, including the one we all wanted to ask: What can be done to fix these deficits?” His answer: “Nothing. It’s how the brain is wired.”

Knowing that I can’t change either deficit somehow makes them easier to bear.

Face blindness is inconvenient and embarrassing, but DTD can be downright dangerous.

Five years ago we moved from a large but simply laid out farmhouse in the country to a smaller, much more complicated, house in town. I knew about my mapping deficit and was determined to learn my way around.

The house has two staircases, one to the second floor bedrooms and a back stair to a big room above the garage—connected by a hallway with its own set of stairs and a lockable door to keep the two sets separate.

I concentrated on the stairs leading to our bedroom: Seven steps up to a landing and a left hand U-turn, seven more steps to the top of the stairs, and another left U-turn to the bedroom. For extra safety, I plugged in a nightlight right before at the last U-turn.

Then I practiced. Every time I went up the stairs, I said the directions out loud to force the map memory to stick.

After about two weeks of successful stair management, the dog woke me in the middle of the night and asked to go out. I left the bedroom, went straight instead of turning right, and, in pitch darkness, fell down the uncarpeted stairs at the end of the corridor. I’m lucky I didn’t break my neck.

Why didn’t all my stair practice work? I can point to a few obvious reasons: The nightlight had been moved, so the hallway was black. I was three quarters asleep and wasn’t paying attention to the route. The door in the corridor, normally closed, was open. I had practiced going up the stairs, not down.

All true. All irrelevant. I fell down the stairs because my brain cannot map.

It didn’t matter how much effort went into memorizing the turns. I couldn’t keep the picture in my mind.

The moral to this story? Don’t take chances in the dark. Turn on the damn lights.

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Here’s my favorite question from the Oliver Sacks interview: You’re in the elevator with your next-door neighbor. Do you recognize him?

Sack’s answer was perfect: “No. But if his dog was with him, I’d recognize the dog.”

Lobsters anyone?

I’d love to hear from you. Leave comments about DTD—or anything else—in the box below

Lost…in…Space! Part 2