Constantly getting lost in new places? You could have bewildering DTD...

WHEN in a new place, do you find yourself wandering around puzzled, as if in a never-ending maze, unable to find your way back to your starting point, or completely at a loss if you’ve arranged to meet a friend outside some landmark building?

That’s my usual form. It came to the fore a couple of weeks ago when I was on holidays in Sofia.

It was my first time in the Bulgarian capital and the friend (I’ll call her Anna to spare her blushes) I was staying with did what everyone has to do when they’re with me – that is, take the lead.

Anna had been in Sofia for nearly a month when I joined her so she had some handle on the city. She claims to have a poor sense of direction but it’s nothing compared to mine and at least she can read a map and seems more keen on following the grid than consulting Google Maps.

I was that annoying thing – passive, quietly seething with myself for being so stupid, and trying very hard to get my bearings.

The landmark building of the city is the golden-domed Alexander Nevsky Orthodox Cathedral, among the ten largest Eastern Orthodox Church buildings in the world. But that didn’t quite cut the mustard with me.

Yes, it was comforting to know that it’s near the apartment we were staying in. But it seemed at times that no matter where I looked, it was poking up into the sky. I couldn’t establish where the front of the stunning building was unless I was standing in front of it.

One day, we took a train to Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s second city. Because we left it a bit late, we were basically taking a three hour train journey to have lunch in a highly recommended Turkish restaurant.

As Anna marched purposefully in front of me (she walks faster than me, the humiliations just pile up), I had little faith that she would find the eatery.

In between consulting a map, Anna stopped a few people for directions, but they were infuriatingly vague, telling us we were going in the right direction but looking blank about the location of the restaurant.

Eventually, I spotted the restaurant. But I can’t take much credit because it was Anna’s doggedness that meant we were in the right district. I just spotted the name above a door.

Still, it was a minor victory for someone with ‘direction dyslexia’. And the kebabs were very tasty.

It turns out that I must have Developmental Topographical Disorientation (DTD), which affects up to 2% of the population. But it doesn’t mean I’m stupid (although some would argue otherwise).

Those of us with DTD suffer from our navigational skills being impaired or lacking. But most people who have the directional disorder have no cognitive disabilities.

I’ve had DTD since I was a child, often insisting on taking a route that later turned out to be the ‘wrong way’.

I once got the then number 7 bus to Montenotte instead of Douglas because I picked it up on the wrong side of the street. I was very young. A kindly woman, seeing me despair, took me under her wing, brought me to her house, gave me grapes and got me to ring home.

Anecdotally, having no sense of direction is a source of friction on holidays. Another friend, whose DTD is as bad as mine, made me laugh last summer when she rang me from Valencia to say she had ended up walking to the same roundabout for the third time in the Spanish city. She relayed this news to me live.

I commiserated with her for having the affliction of the lost and bewildered. Worryingly, she was on her own for the last few days of her holiday. But heck, she made it home.

A Canada-based professor, Giuseppe Iaria, a cognitive neuroscientist, first identified the condition of DTD. People with the disorder “live perfectly ordinary lives and often have no discernible memory of attention issues,” he says.

“The problem is that they have an absolute inability to create mental maps of their environment, something that most people do without even thinking about it.

Normally, people can recreate a pictorial representation of their route in their mind, but people with DTD don’t have this ability.”

And, says the professor, there should be no shame associated with DTD (as opposed to having the DTs).

But it’s quite debilitating. A team of Canadian researchers have created a set of online diagnostic tests and are working on a virtual reality programme to help people with the condition.

Of course, there are other reasons why people get lost, such as severe attention problems and age-related memory loss.

But for those of us with DTD, the world is always a maze.