The Mindful Migraine

People getting lost in their own home is a real thing. It’s a condition called Developmental Topographical Disorientation (DTD). It’s not the “where am I?” kind of moment that happens when you wake up from a Nanna-Nap and can’t remember how you got on the sun-lounger. It’s also not the sort of desperate “what is this place?” confusion that comes from advanced Alzheimer’s disease. It’s also not the migraine-induced panic of “why is my bed soooo far away from the front door when all I want to do is lie down?”

DTD is more generalized; “OK home, remind me again which way I need to walk to get to the bedroom.”

[Head’s up – my migraine brain does NOT make me spatially confused in this way. I DO often experience Aphasia (read more here) where I forget individual words, and I DO occasionally lose motor-skills such as the ability to walk, but I’m yet to misplace my bedroom.]

Our brains are glitchy-weird-wonderful things.

There’s a recent post I wrote about how people’s brains can glitch due to a stroke or chronic migraine and people wake up to discover they talk differently: When migraines give you a foreign accent.

I’ve also written before about a diagnosis called Alice In Wonderland Syndrome where people feel as if they are too big, or too small, for the space they find themselves in.

Scientists don’t really understand what is going on, or why, in either case, only that it is often found in people with migraines.

DTD is a similar “huh?” moment initiated by the brain being unusual.

The condition of DTD came to my attention through my morning news read. Once upon a time, I used to buy the BIG paper on a Saturday morning and spend the whole weekend flipping through the pages, one section at a time; local news, world news, crosswords, real estate, business if I was up to it… sports if I was really keen to continue reading as an excuse to keep my feet up…

Nowadays, it’s a quick scan through the digital news every morning. That’s where I found this news article:

The condition that causes people to get lost in their own home – ABC News

According to the article, some estimates suggest up to one in 30 people may be affected by DTD and get lost many times a week, every week, since childhood… even in their own homes, or other familiar surroundings.

They note: “DTD is not caused by a brain injury, a neurological disease or a psychiatric condition. As far as researchers can tell, this is just simply how their internal navigation system has always worked.”

Like so many diagnoses, this seems to be a spectrum condition. Some people just accept they’re “bad at following directions” [that’s me], but others can’t create a ‘cognitive map’ at all. They might remember what landmarks exist, but they can’t mentally picture the spatial relationship between them.

“This means they might know their home is somewhere near the station, and that the shops are somewhere near home — but the pieces stay as separate facts rather than fusing into a single layout they can mentally rise above and read. So the moment a familiar route is interrupted (a closed road, a wrong turn or approaching a building from an unexpected side) there’s no map to fall back on.”

[When I think of my home’s location relative to other facilities, such as the shops, library, or my daughter’s school, I can visualize something that looks like the offspring of a street directory’s line drawing merged with a Google Earth drone photo… I can’t however guarantee it’s to scale, or completely accurate, but I know roughly which route I would take to get from one location to the other, road closures or not.

Bigger distances, however, get harder to hold in my head. Being a nervous-driver due to migraine-pain always hovering just off my shoulder and waiting to pounce and crash my car, I don’t love it when my route gets interrupted and I have to think on the go. I usually pull over and do a course-correction if my car’s satnav doesn’t do it for me… or ask my husband to drive me… just in case.]

One person who was interviewed for DTD research put it simply: “I am always in one place in my head.”

[Always the center of the universe as it were – which is how we all feel – given that we are central to everything we do and think and feel – except that for many of us, our world stretches out into the wider space around us.]

These people are not silly or lazy, their brain simply works in a different way to other brains. BUT – researchers do say that we can train our brains to be better at visualizing locations: “The next time you reach for your phone to follow directions, it might be worth a moment’s pause” – it seems like the old adage of ‘use it or lose it‘ holds true in this situation.

Ahhh… the brain is such a ‘last frontier’ in terms of human discovery!

Since science is still sorting itself out on this subject, there’s no activities to take home and try today. This post is just another glance into the you-nique way we are all wired…

…and a different take on the notion that we’re all just trying to find our way in the world, one way or another!

Take care taking care out there… wherever you find yourself… or lose yourself,

Linda xox

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PS – if you want to learn more, here’s some journal articles that give you more information:

“Where am I?” A snapshot of the developmental topographical disorientation among young Italian adults (2022) – which found 3% of 1,698 Italian participants aged between 18 and 35 years had DTD (and whilst “males use more complex navigational strategies than females, […] DTD is more prevalent in males than in females”).

A case of developmental topographical disorientation: impact on diagnostic trajectory and everyday life (2025) – which suggests that this is a condition which is “misdiagnosed repeatedly.”

The most recent paper is May reducing driving-related phobia recover developmental topographical disorientation? A case report (2026) – which explores the relationship between DTD and driving-related fear (DRF) – noting the reasons people might struggle to hold a map in their head might have a variety of causes [as per my migraine-pain note above].

And lastly, a paper from 2010 which seems to be the beginning of the condition’s recognition: Developmental topographical disorientation: a newly discovered cognitive disorder – they studied 120 people they thought had DTD and noted that their inability to create a cognitive map was the only behavioral or neurological difference to ‘normal’ people.

Have a great weekend peeps xx