The Woman Who Got Lost at Home
They call him “Dr. WAI,” short for “Where Am I.” A well-educated 29-year-old man without any history of disease or trauma, it took him four tries to produce a semi-accurate map of the house he had lived in for 15 years.1 Another patient, Jennifer, from San Francisco, always feels like she is facing north, regardless of which direction she is actually facing. Judy Bentley had her memory of her physical surroundings suddenly vanish one day in high school. She suddenly had no idea what was beyond the classroom door.
These are just some of the subjects that have been identified by a field that was kicked off with what might be called patient one, whom we’ll call Alice.2 In 2007, Alice approached the neuroscientist Giuseppe Iaria with a peculiar and vexing problem: She had extraordinary difficulty finding her way around. Sometimes she would even get lost in her own house. She had to rely on standardized routes, going from door to door along a carefully memorized path. To get to work she knew when to get off the bus, and how to walk from memorized landmark to memorized landmark until she reached her office building.
But if Alice strayed even
