When the World Flips: Understanding Spatial Orientation Disorder

I’m sure we’ve all been in a situation where we felt like everything was going wrong, like our world was turned upside down. But have you ever thought about what it would be like if the world actually flipped upside down ? Well, you’d be surprised to learn that there’s a disorder like this, and scientists call it SPATIAL ORIENTATION DISORDER or SPATIAL DISORIENTATION. This disorder happens when something goes wrong in the brain, which is the control Centre of our body and decisions.

“Spatial disorientation” is quite a unique phenomenon caused due to the dysfunctionality in the brain. Well yes the brain! Where it all starts from and ends at, “the centre of our nervous system”, the decision maker of our bodies and our lives! Spatial refers to space around us, and Orientation refers to the position or direction of things, like a person or an object. In spatial disorientation, a person's visual senses are messed up, and they see everything as upside down.

A 28-year-old woman from Serbia, Bojana Danilovic, has been living with this disorder since birth. Due to her condition, she needs to see objects in an upside-down way in order to understand them. Whether she’s watching TV, reading, or working, everything has to be flipped for her to process it correctly. Doctors say her eyes see things normally, but her brain flips the images for some unknown reason. Experts from the University of Massachusetts and Harvard University have confirmed that she has spatial disorientation.

This disorder might be connected to something called "perceptual adaptation," where the brain adjusts to changes in the visual field. For example, if you turn your view by 45 degrees, the brain notices the change and helps you adapt.

A study by Professor Theodor Erismann showed that a person can get used to seeing things upside down. His assistant, Ivo Kohler, was able to adjust to an upside-down world in just 10 days, and to him, it felt completely normal. This suggests that most people can adapt to changes in their visual world, as the brain learns to interpret what it sees.

There’s also another study linking spatial disorientation with "agoraphobia" which is the fear of places where escape is difficult, like crowded areas or being outside alone. Agoraphobia often involves panic or anxiety attacks and usually starts around age 25. It's more common in women than in men, but the causes are still unknown. Scientists are still working to figure out why these disorders happen, but some believe they could be related to problems with the occipital lobe in the brain, which is responsible for processing visual information. If something goes wrong in this area, it could lead to vision problems or even conditions like blindness or difficulty writing.

These disorders could be due to genetic causes or maybe it didn’t develop fully at the time of birth. This area of our brain called occipital lobe basically deals with and fashions visual information, it interprets and translocate it to other areas of our brain for recognition. And if something goes wrong with this lobe, the consequences could be drastic leading to blindness (alexia) or even deterioration in writing potential (agraphia). Well these are all the assumptions that we can make by whacking our brain cells, until the scientists could come up with some concrete evidences for the same.

Nonetheless, going back to the Bojana Danilovic’s story, I believe her way of living life reflects a lot about her and imparts a very meaningful message to all of us. It’s a commendable job on her side to work diligently and not let her infirmity become an obstacle on her path. That’s called living life, understanding its value and appreciating it the way it is, as a gift to each one of us!