This was discovered when her school administered the Iowa Test and she scored very low. One section of ... Open Access J
Editorial Lost in Space Sidney Groffman, OD, MA, FCOVD Pooh looked at his two paws. He knew that one of them was the right and he knew that when you had decided which one of them was the right, then the other was the left, but he could never remember where to begin. — A.A. Milne
Sloane had to shift her eyes from the question and shade in the corresponding choice in a horizontal line of bubbles. As she puts it, “This, much like reading a map, playing cards, or telling time on an analog clock, was an impossibility for me.” The schools made her take an IQ test that consist Keywords: lost in space, Sloane Crosley, visuo- ed of two parts, a verbal section and a math section. spatial relationships After getting gold stars on the first part of the test she spectacularly failed the math section. The psychologist Sloane Crosley is a young writer who writes informed her parents that she had rarely seen such a brilliant essays about her experiences in coping right-left brain discrepancy and diagnosed her with a with the many dilemmas facing a young woman in severe temporal-spatial deficit. This made her feel like the modern world. She is a “genius trapped forever in intelligent, funny, observant, ... a genius trapped forever in an idiot’s body”. Her chance and charming. In her second of ever achieving a nonan idiot’s body …” book, “How Did You Get embarrassing level of math This Number,”1 she writes ability was considered remote. about her being told as a child she had a “learning By age twelve, she started wearing a bracelet on her disability that means I have zero spatial relations.” She left wrist that helped her know left from right. At age was literarily “lost in space”. sixteen she discovered it would take her twice as long This was discovered when her school administered as her peers to drive anywhere, because of her spatial the Iowa Test and she scored very low. One section of disorientation. Interestingly, her visual memory was the test required matching a series of everyday objects excellent. “I could sketch the details of my locker in with their proper names and filling in the bubbles on a accurate detail—I just couldn’t find it.” Throughout Scantron sheet. She got nineteen out of thirty wrong, high school she was permitted to circle answers directly a really low score. She feels that the reason she scored on the test papers, thus forgoing the dreaded Scantron so poorly was that the questions were multiple choice sheets. When she was allowed to take the SAT’s orally, and presented vertically. After deciding on an answer she was able to be admitted to college. It became a little better as an adult. She managed to learn right from left and up from down. Her math skills are still atrocious, however. ”Even now, I do Correspondence regarding this editorial should be emailed to Dr. all public counting with one fist under the table, Sidney Groffman at
[email protected] or sent to Dr. Sidney Groffman at 525 Crossfields Lane, Somerset, NJ 08873. All statements are preferably in a jacket pocket. If there is no pocket to be the author’s personal opinion and may not reflect the opinions of the College had, I twitch my knuckles instead of fully extending of Optometrists in Vision Development, Optometry & Vision Development my fingers. And I still can’t tell time on analog clocks. or any institution or organization to which the author may be affiliated. Or, rather, I can, but it takes me ten minutes, a time Permission to use reprints of this article must be obtained from the editor. Copyright 2012 College of Optometrists in Vision Development. OVD is lapse that defeats the purpose of the exercise. My indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. Online access is available terrible sense of direction also remains. Living in New at http://www.covd.org. York City is to never be able to meet someone on the northeast corner. It is to never, ever make a smooth Groffman S. Lost in space. Optom Vis Dev 2012;43(1):11-12. entrance, always getting caught looking lost on the Volume 43/Number 1/2012
11
street. The only subway I can exit and begin striding with confidence is the one by my home, as there is a gigantic park on the right side. And I know I don’t live in the trees with the pigeons and the butterflies. She has never outgrown that feeling of disorientation. Her description of the indignity she feels on getting lost, and being unable to find her way out in a sprawling supermarket is heartrending. She once heard that you can find your way out of any maze by keeping your hand on the left side of the wall, but like Winnie the Pooh, she laments, “Great, but which side was left?” Spatial deficits affect her in many ways and he writes “It’s not a disability, it is life.”
12
On reading Ms Crosley’s tale of spatial and directionality woes, I, like most developmental optometrists thought, “Oh, if she was only my patient when she was a child, she would not have been ‘lost in space.’ ” I wonder, though, how many of the 5-7% of the population who suffer from visuospatial deficits and its symptoms are ever seen and treated by developmental optometrists. References 1. Crosley S. How did you get this number? New York, NY: Penguin group (USA), 2010.
Optometry & Vision Development
