CBC doc looks at those lacking directional sense
When Giuseppe Iaria learns that I self-identify as “directionally challenged,” his scientific senses start tingling.
After a few rapid-fire questions, the assistant professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Calgary determines I’m merely mildly impaired, not dysfunctional. That’s not the case of one of his study subjects, whom viewers meet in Where Am I? —a documentary airing on Thursday’s The Nature of Things with David Suzuki on CBC.
Ann Dodd is definitely directionally challenged, to the point where she gets lost in familiar surroundings, such as the roads leading to her home. She has developmental topographical disorientation, a condition Iaria and his team identified in 2009.
“There are people with a good sense of direction, there are people with soso sense of direction and there are people who are challenged … then there is Ann and people like her,” says Iaria, who is also a member of the U of C’s Hotchkiss Brain Institute. “They are outside of that continuum, like if you get lost in your own place of business after working there for 20 years.”
The one-hour documentary presents a plethora of info, organized into entertaining segments, on how we navigate our surroundings.
For example, it’s amazing that London cabbies can retain knowledge of all the streets within six miles of the city centre. But do they access that information differently from the bus drivers who drive the same streets? And if so, what does that tell us about how our sense of direction?
Then there are the people of the Arctic. In the documentary, Iaria travels to Igloolik, Nunavut, where he meets an Inuit hunter with more than 40 years’ experience navigating a world with few landmarks. Instead, he interprets the ripples in the snow to determine his location.