Bojana Danilovic – The Woman Who Sees Everything Upside Down
Bojana Danilovic, a young woman from Serbia, suffers from a strange condition that has left both doctors and scientists baffled. The 28-year economics graduate sees everything upside down.
Experts from Harvard University and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who examined Bojana Danilovic say she suffers from a rare brain condition called ’spatial orientation phenomenon’. In layman’s terms that means her eyes see things the right way, but for some reason her brain changes them. Although there have been some similar cases recorded in history, Bojana’s case is truly unique. Everything in her life has been backwards, even the way she came into this world – feet first. Her parents remember that when she first started crawling, she would always move backwards, and when she began to walk, she did it in reverse. The remarkable young woman says her mother had to take a leave from her job in order to teach her to walk like all the other children. It took a lot of practice, but she finally managed to walk forward. Only this was only the beginning of a very unusual life.
Bojana’s bizarre problems continued when she started writing. She would turn the blank piece of paper upside down, start from the lower right corner and finish in the upper left corner. Her teachers and classmates all tried to help her correct her style, but it was all in vain. It was the only way letters made sense to her. Later, she got a job at the municipal administration, in her home town of Uzice, where her colleagues were left flabbergasted after she turned the keyboard and monitor of her computer upside down, so she could make sense of her work. At home, she has to turn the TV on its head to watch her favorite show, while her family has to use another one. She always holds her mobile phone and newspaper upside down, and often gets approached by people who tell her she’s reading it wrong.
Bojana Danilovic’s bizarre condition first attracted the attention of American scientists a few years ago. After subjecting her to several tests they established her brain is perfectly healthy, but has a different field of view than most people’s. Although they haven’t yet come up with an explanation for Bojana’s unique brain configuration, they offered to make her job easier by creating a special software so she wouldn’t have to turn the monitor upside down all the time.
“It may look incredible to other people but to me it’s completely normal,” the young Serbian told local reporters. ”I was born that way. It’s just the way I see the world.” Her biggest regret is she can’t get a driver’s license.
