Few people possess a perfect sense of direction. Some need a GPS just to find their wits. Then there's Patient 1.
Patient 1, as Giuseppe Iaria and his colleagues refer to her in an online article in Neuropsychologia(doi:10.1016/
j.neuropsychologia
.2008.08.021), doesn't even try to drive because she gets turned around in her own neighborhood. Family and friends accompany her almost everywhere, and she only ventures out alone when heading by bus to her job in downtown Vancouver. Even the short walk from the bus stop to her office has been painstakingly memorized; the slightest deviation leaves her hopelessly lost. Now 43, she has suffered this impairment since childhood. Yet in every other regard, she is normal and healthy. "She's smart," says Iaria, a University of British Columbia neuroscientist who spent a year assessing her cognitive functions. "She just doesn't get oriented."
Since 1876, when English neurologist John Hughlings Jackson described a glioma ...
