Of mice and...homing pigeons?

This article, "Always lost? It may be in your genes," on MSNBC.com was really interesting for me. The first line immediately caught my attention: "When it comes to navigation skills, some of us are homing pigeons. Others are mice in a maze." My mom and Shannon are pigeons; I'm definitely a mouse.

Everyone knows that I have a terrible sense of direction when it comes to me getting places. If you can believe it, I think I'm actually worse if I've followed directions to a new place and then I have to refer to the directions backwards to get home. Nine times out of ten, I'll end up lost.

Now, when it comes to giving directions, I'm very good, which can also be a bad thing. I tend to give detailed instructions and if you're alone while navigating, you really don't have time to look away from the road long enough to read, "About a half-mile ahead, there's a shopping center on your right. You'll turn left at that light onto ABC Road."

The article mentions Williams syndrome, a genetic disorder where one of the characteristics is trouble reorienting oneself. I'm not generally a hypochondriac, but when I read, "Individuals with Williams syndrome have strong language skills and are extremely social, but they have trouble with tasks like doing puzzles or copying patterns or navigating their bodies through the physical world," I'll admit I was worried that I had it. I mean, I'm pretty good in the language skills department and I know how to interact with people, but there are some puzzles that I just can't do, geometry was NOT my forte, and I've already admitted to my tendency for getting lost. Gulp.

In reading more of the features of Williams syndrome, though, I'm pretty sure I don't have it. I just suffer from a good ol' fashioned bad sense of direction. Phew!

Laura Lakusta, a psychology professor, led a study about how genes play a part in figuring out where you are:

In the study, Lakusta and her team challenged individuals with Williams syndrome to find a hidden toy in a rectangular room. The room had two long walls and two short walls and was covered in black felt. The Williams syndrome individuals were shown the toy and where it was hidden in one corner of a room. They were asked to close their eyes and were rotated for a few seconds. Then they were asked to find the toy.

When looking for the object, the Williams syndrome individuals — who were both male and female ranging from age 9 to 27, "searched all the corners randomly," Lakusta said, as if they had never before seen the overall geometry of the room or the lengths of the walls and their geometric relation to each other.

When testing a group of college students and a group of 3- and 4-year-olds who did not have Williams syndrome, Lakusta and her team found a more typical pattern of responding.

"If we hid the toy left of the short wall and right of the long wall, they could mentally construct an image of the room and find it, even if they became disoriented. They would tend to search the geometrically appropriate corner. They could figure out that there are two corners where the toy could be. This is the geometric pattern of responding," Lakusta said.

"The Williams syndrome subjects could not construct a mental map of the geometry of the environment," she said.

I would really like to see how I'd do in this kind of experiment. Just because I'm pretty sure I don't have Williams syndrome doesn't mean I wouldn't have trouble finding my way around a box.

I guess I'm glad to know that my genes are probably somewhat responsible for my navigational issues.

And for those C's in geometry.