Today, I got lost right around my own neighborhood.
I always wondered why my mom was such an excellent navigator, whereas I could get lost “just going around the block” as the saying goes. She always used to say she could find any place again if she’d been there once. Or, after studying a map for five minutes, she drove my sister and I all the way down to Florida without further direction.
When I was much younger, I remember wondering when my mind would “learn” how to get from place to place. IE: How we got from my grandparents’ house to my house, or how to get to the store, or where the pet store was.
As I reached 16 and started to drive, I still had no sense of direction. If I didn’t follow a set path exactly as I knew it, I would be lost. I can barely even tell you where my place of work is in relation to my house, and I live right across the street from it.
Of note, I also get completely lost in open-world video game environments. Fuck you, WoW.
Today I ran into construction and made the decision to turn right instead of left. And suddenly I had no idea where in space I was.
The discovery that there are certain very specialized cells in your brain that allow you to navigate is a recent one. They’re called place cells, and they’re one of the structures in the hippocampus that contain memory of place. That feeling of “I’ve been here before.” Meanwhile, grid cells enable us to remember where we are in relation to where we started. Lastly, head cells are our instinctive compass and help is visualize north, south, east, and west. These cells are all found in the entorhinal cortex.
ANYWAY, the point is that these cells occasionally misfire or don’t fire at all, especially (but not limited to) people with ASD and ADHD.
So the next time someone tells you that you couldn’t find your way around the block, you can tell them to fuck off, then promptly get lost as you storm off in a huff.
Additional resources: 1. 2.Three competing thoughts here:
1. Wait, what? That’s a symptom?
2. Neuroscience is so cool.
3. Waaaaaaaaitasec. “Place cells not firing but everything else is” sounds exactly like the start of a derealization episode. The knowledge that you’re in the right spot and it should be familiar, but This Is Not Right.This… could be big.
(via zephuckyr)
