One of the things I like most about science is that you learn about new things literally several times a day…
So here’s one of my latest examples, one that I find quite scary:
As you know I’m studying the impact of how well people know a neighborhood on how they find their way from A to B. Imagine you are approaching home after an 8 hrs drive. Clearly, the area around the place you call home is very familiar to you – you know it well (at least when you not have just moved in very recently). You know what the houses look like, whether streets are hilly or curvy, it’s distance to the freeway, to the ocean – you name it…
Now imagine all that knowledge would have been gone out of the sudden. This is what happened to a taxi driver I read about in a paper. He was doing that job for several years. One day, on his way home he would call his wife telling her that he could not find their home – in fact he was less than half a mile away from home.
And no he did not have a stroke or the like, his long and short term memory was working just fine – but he would not recognize his own neighborhood any more. Luckily enough, after several weeks, this condition disappeared!