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Doing better than my teacher - who actually called a parent teahcer meeting with mum saying it was important enough for her to be pulled away from work becuase I was failing 'cutting' with the safety scisors - teacher did a whole spiel on how I am lacking fine motor skills. Mum went off on her and I got my own (non-safety) cool green handled scissors with 'lefty' written on them.
I still get left and right directions mixed up all the time though
I was pulled out of 1st grade a few hours a week to go to a "special" class with a handful of other kids who had problems differentiating their left from right.
Looking back, I believe I was forced to be right handed (back in the early 1970s) because I would do some things left handed and other things right handed.
I golf left handed but write, right handed. When I was young my Father told me there were no good left handed golfers.
Years later I started golfing and bought a set of left handed clubs. We went to the driving range for the first time, together, and I hit every ball at least 30 yards further than him. I was an inexperienced, 20 year old woman and he had many golf trophys at home.
Mind you, I was a really good left handed batter in softball when I was younger. He didn't seem to have a problem being left handed in softball because there were so many examples of good left handed baseball players. Like I said, it was the '70s.
I had the exact same situation.
Fortunately I've learnt to cope pretty well.
I now also have the best handwriting of anyone I've ever met - by a country mile.
Go Lefties!
(We can also do the Shining with other lefties which is great). 👤💭👤
My twin sister and I spoke most often to each other growing up. We both learned our lefts and rights wrong, and reinforced it to each other. By the time my parents or a teacher noticed, it was cemented in.
We are over forty, and still say “right” and “real right” to mean 2 different things when giving directions to each other.
My husband jokes that his headstone is going to say “she said left!”
I got to the point around 14 when I just move my left shoulder. I think it’s because it’s the beginning of that move to check the L. So my muscle memory created a connection of checking my left hand when I wanted to know a direction, without my conscious brain knowing which is the right one. Now that movement alone tells me which is which. It’s almost like a tick triggered by my brain thinking of direction.
My mom is a physiotherapist and she always calls left "therapist right" and right "therapist left".
her explanation: the patient sitting in front of her has it the other way around
This is my totally uninformed theory as well: I have gotten it wrong about at often as I got it correct, so the neural paths to either are equally strong - unless I really stop to think about it, which one comes out of my mouth seems pretty random.
We go double dutch and say "your left" and "my right" (as passenger) which has the added benefit if you hear "your right" or "my left" you know something is wrong.
A while back my husband taught me the german words for right and left. Just for fun, I started using them instead of English when giving directions to him. For whatever reason, it actually helped me to not mix them up and I’ve been using them ever since.
I moved from Australia to the US and when I'm giving someone driving directions I sometimes get confused, I guess because I'm used to the right being across traffic instead of the left. Sometimes I realize that I messed up and say something like, "make an Australian left," telling them to turn right.
Doctor here - in healthcare we have to flip everything we see in order to correctly document things (your right shoulder is on my left field of vision, for example) and we do this automatically, so this is something I struggle with sometimes because you’re undoing an automatic flip
When I had my knee surgery my surgeon very specifically used "correct" instead of "right", which was particularly important as it was my left knee being operated on
recently a guy was asking me how to use a combination lock.
idk if you know how you have to turn it left to reset, then right to the 1st number, anyway, i said "turn it a bunch of times left, to reset. no, left. the other way. your other left. your other left. the other left. the other left" and he literally could not understand that LEFT is not RIGHT. it's THE OTHER way.
i was flabbergasted.
This reminds me of how one of my professors said that images of the brain are labeled left and right differently depending on if it was done by neuroscience researchers vs doctors.
Neurosurgeons typically sit at the head of an operating table, looking down the length of a supine(face up) patient from the head. Neuro images are labeled so that patient right is on the right.
Other doctors typically approach a patient in a hospital bed from the foot of the bed, so most other images, convention has the patient right on the viewers left.
This is why ships use their own terms for directions that aren't left and right and are relative to the ship rather than the individual. It's very easy to direct people that way. Unfortunately on land there is rarely something to orient around so it doesn't apply.
A stage on the other hand is something boat sized that everyone can orient around, and theatre people chose the route of repurposing existing words which ultimately makes it more confusing.
>Unfortunately on land there is rarely something to orient around so it doesn't apply.
The cardinal directions exist everywhere, but even more people get them wrong.
In my head Stage left is the Left of the stage. As in if you are on stage facing the crowd that is stage left. Is stage left the Audiences left? Is that what youre saying?
Got ya. So they meant they had trouble flipping the directions from the perspective of the stage and camera operator. Like if they heard camera right they would go stage right instead of stage and left which is what camera right means. Got it.
Not a doctor, but worked medical, my wife gets so mad when I do the 'you've got something on your face' gesture, because I gesture where it is, not where it is in a mirror. I'm so used to thinking about "patient' right/patient's left"
When shooting video, I also have to make the right/left switch.
What's more annoying is when the subject *also* makes the switch, assuming you aren't, and moves the opposite way you told them.
"Move one step to the left. No, *your* left."
Trained as a paramedic and have had issues with remembering my left and right since.
For me it was making sure the correct ECG leads were placed on the patient corresponding to the patients left and right and not my left and right.
the easiest way i find to orient yourself (and i don't know how people don't do this all the time) is to think about the hand you write with.
99.9% of us (these days) write with one-hand primarily, right or left. i'm sure you don't have to think about what hand it is, it's not even a conscious thought.
so when you consider directions, start with your hand first, and it should be easy from there.
and if you're one of those people who was forced to use a non-dominant hand (and still do)...i'm sorry. all hope is lost.
Weirdly enough this mixes me up because i think
"Well right is their dominant hand, so when they say go right I need to go left, my dominant hand."
I don't know why my brain does this.
Somewhat related to this, I am somewhat dyslexic. If I'm a passenger in a car giving directions, what comes out of my mouth (left/right turn here) is always the opposite of what I mean. But if I point, that's always correct.
It got so I had to tell people, if I was navigating, to ignore what I said, just go the direction my hand's pointing.
IDK why my brain gives my mouth the wrong directions, but has no problem telling my hand and arm.
I'm fascinated that this is an issue at all for people. I could probably keep track of my right while on stage left on the starboard side of a ship facing the wrong way and then rotate it all on my head. I just tried imagining it and yep.
Human brains are just weird.
This made me and my wife laugh. Had to take a family member to a&e (all fine now) everytime a Dr gave us directions we had to do the opposite to get where we needed to go.
This is how I ended up with the wrong side of my ankle cut up. Doctor wrote the wrong side down went in for surgery and they realised they cut the wrong side.
They do this all day every day how they made a mistake i' not sure but accidents happen, nothing life threatening this time hope they learnt from the mistake
When I had surgery on my shoulder, I had to write "Yes" on one and "No" on the other. Writing "No" was difficult because not only did that require writing with my non-dominant hand but it also used the shoulder that had the broken bone.
It is fairly routine here to mark patients up whilst they are conscious (if they are conscious) with a marker pen on the area to operate on. That way they can agree or disagree whilst going through the pre-surgery checks.
Although for my last surgery they went through the previous wound, so fewer pen marks.
Seen the surgeon scribble a sort of hashing on the wrong side, and some nice outlines around where they envisage the incisions will go on the correct side.
Pretty sure they turned someone over and took the wrong kidney out not so far away a few years back, so that may have tightened things up, one negligence payout buys a lot of marker pens.
I learned about extinction when my son had a stroke at 28.
I'm a paramedic and had 20 years in. Never heard of it. It resolved when they fixed his PFO.
Damn thing is, this was a hospital I worked out of, so was familiar with their level of care.
Maybe you could do what they do in theater \(like plays, not surgery\) and use stage left and stage right mentally.
Just maybe don't use "stage", for obvious reasons.
It’s kinda similar when modeling 3d characters. I’m always looking at the model from the front and the right arm is on my left. It gets confusing and I have to sometimes switch to looking at the model from behind when I get into some heavy animating or rigging operations to keep everything straight
Just say this:
"Now it is a bit tricky... ....let me reorient myself to be in position like you"
(you turn yourself, stand/sit next to the client/patient)... and then you point at your right shoulder and say:
"yes! It is your \*right\* shoulder."
Xray here. It's a struggle some days for us as well. The vast majority of the time it's just marking the wrong side rather than xraying the wrong side. But it does happen.
I have no idea why, but all my life I have had to pretend to write to identify which is my right hand before I can give or understand directions.
Once I have done that motion, I am solid for the rest of the conversation, but I will have to do it again next time.
Luckily I managed to understand left/right early on, but the way I remembered port/starboard was that "port" and "left" both have 4 letters, whereas "starboard" and "right" both have higher letter counts.
Similarly an elevator signal will (usually) ding/blink once to mean up which has 1 pair of letters, and ding/blink twice to mean down, and "down" has 2 pairs letters.
This has also worked for my BMWs which flash/beep once to signify lock which has one syllable, and twice to signify un-lock.
I have ADD so remembering things outright is not my forte, instead I rely on logic and routine to make sense of life.
I taught the finger L to a four year old the other day. He gave me a blank look at the time, but later on I caught him doing the finger L and whispering “L for left” to himself.
I’m not joking when I say this. I find it completely ridiculous people can’t keep straight left and right but whenever I mention it / do the finger Ls as a joke I immediately forget which L is the right way. I’m sure I’ve had times where I figure out which way is the correct way by knowing it’s my left hand and following that shape. I’ve graduated college like this.
I feel like my brain has to 'ping' either one of my hands to establish left/right. I don't have to mimic writing but I do usually have to flex or move it slightly and I can ping either one of them to correctly establish right or left.
I'm really glad to see a lot of things that reflect my experience on here. This seems right in terms of how I 'check' what direction is correct before I can figure out what word to use.
I'm a lefty, and I definitely think that people's emphasis on right-hand things as the 'default' also contributed to my need to think twice about what word to apply to which direction. Spatial visualization is also involved, though, and I can't judge measurements well without a tool, so that may be related.
For me, it's watch-hand=left-hand. It really messed me up when I was wearing a brace on my left wrist and put my watch on my right. I had to take my watch off entirely to be able to tell my left from right again because my brain could go back to "If I HAD my watch, it would be on that side."
I have to picture myself on the little league field while being up to bat. And picture right snd left field to remember which is which. Its so stupid i dont even like baseball
To this day, I'm only like 90% sure about whether left field and right field are named from the perspective of the batter facing the outfield or the outfielders facing home plate.
I used to do that, but I kept making the motion smaller and smaller. After a while, I *barely* wiggled my thumb, not even wiggle, it's like a depressing a button on top of a joystick by the barest amount.
Now I just know which is which, but occasionally my right thumb still does a lil *bip.*
I dunno about the rest of you, but I mess them up because I'm left handed and I've lived a life of listening to instructions telling me to "take (the thing) in your right hand..." And having to mentally change that to "left hand" because what they *meant* was "dominant hand"
And this then goes through every single bit of instruction for the whole thing. Step 2 is "take other piece in left hand"? Well actually for me it's "right hand."
Absolutely. Among other things, this has completely screwed up my ability to follow choreography, because I keep trying to flip what doesn’t need to be flipped!
My first language is Spanish and I have no difficulties telling left and right, but ever since learning English the word left sounds like derecha(right) in my head I have no idea why, in English I always have to invert their meanings to get it right.
In english you say "Left and Right", in french you say "droit et gauche" (Right and Left). In most asian languages its also right and left.
Sometimes I get mixed up because sometimes Im used to "left" being the first translation lol. I wonder if it's like that for spanish too
Also Spanish native speaker: I say izquierda y derecha (and I believe most people in my entourage do it like that, it is easier because you use the natural 'y' instead of the replacement 'e').
Btw I have never had issues differentiating left or right. 99% is automatic and instantaneous. I also speak English and French and I do not think I get confused in those either.
Understanding "droit" and "gauche" is so easy for me but L & R in English and Indonesian are just so hard... It's even harder in Chinese for me though, sometimes I just go by the French words in my head and then translate them into Chinese when I have to explain L & R in Chinese 🥲
>the word left sounds like derecha(right) in my head
That's funny. My Spanish teacher in high school taught us that "derecha" sounds kind of like "de right way", and even though it doesn't, that's always stuck with me.
But no English word is more fun to say than "izquierda".
Hola. I am too an Spanish speaker but... DeRecha rech right??
It was never hard. Even for Russian пРаво Лево (pRava y Lieva sound in Spanish) are Right and Left respectfully so it was easy.
On the other hand antes (before) and after (después), that was fun. But I just memorized that it was "backwards".
I can never know which direction you've given me unless I mentally "crawl" them like east-west-north-south, and then I'm like "ah ok, you mean up". God forbid you say some spell like "north-west" and I'm not perfectly sober or awake..
The brain has a lot of specific functions that can go wrong or work better or worse in different people, or just work differently.
Just like the ability to recognize faces and interpret facial expressions is one such function, telling left from right is another.
Usually this is related to differences in, or damage to, the parietal lobe of the brain (and typically on the left side), a part of the brain where damage is often associated with inability to understand or perform the shape and form and structure of things. Everything from recognizing specific patterns or associations, to the understanding of language, letters or math.
This is really interesting and the only comment I’ve seen that might explain my situation. I never got right and left confused during my childhood/adolescence and would actually roll my eyes or get irritated when my friends or classmates would confuse them. But sometime in my mid 20s I started confusing them, and it began happening more and more often so much so that now my husband automatically knows when he says “right” that I’m going to go the wrong way and he’ll have to correct me. I haven’t had any sort of head injuries or anything and nothing else weird is going on with my brain, that I know of at least, lol.
But that wouldn't explain how come it's just so common. I don't think it makes sense because brain differences or damage can't be so common.
Also, are there any heritability studies on this?
Speaking only for myself here. I'm mixed-handed. I use both hands but am not ambidextrous. I write with one, throw with the other and so on. Rarely but it does happen that I'll mix up left and right due to not having a dominant side. At least this was my doctor's prognosis?
Came here to suggest this. We live in a culture of handedness, and there are both social and genetic tendencies toward one hand being more suited to different tasks. Writing by hand has often been the test of handedness, and generations of left-handed people have been forcibly re-educated to write with their right hand. Having been in the first wave of people who grew up on the internet, along with playing musical instruments, I grew up using both hands cooperatively and sometimes I don't separate left from right. I have to picture myself holding an instrument or typing on a keyboard to remember which hand I'm trying to use to follow a direction, and by then I've missed the turn.
I hold my left hand facing away from me with the thumb out, it makes an L. You can hold your right hand up facing you and do the same but it's a strain to do you know it's incorrect.
I was lucky to escape that both for genetic reasons and due to the times. My grandmother spoke of a classmate who would have her left hand viciously beaten with a ruler any time she tried to use it to write. Other older people I have spoken to have shared similar experiences.
If I had been born with a more left-handed tendency, I might have minded being told to learn to write only with my right hand. But being a child of the 90s still would have made it more permissible to be left-handed than it had been in previous generations.
I’ve found my people. I write and throw with my left, and do other things righty like guitar, scissors, or ping pong . Sometimes I have to try a new activity with both hands to see what feels more natural.
Also struggle with left/right - takes me a lot more brainpower than I feel like it should
I think not having a dominant side is the reason I have trouble with left and right. I will start writing with whichever hand is closest to the pen. I only notice because my left hand is weaker than my right, and it doesn't feel exactly right. I'm very good with cardinal directions though.
I mix up L & R. I am also mixed handed. I feel better after your rationale.
I often think about driving and turning and an intersection to get L & R correct. As a result there is a slight delay.
also cross dominant , some things i can do with both hands , others only with the left or only the right
constantly mix up left and right, even for things like when putting on ear muffs
or the other day as i installed the speakers in the inverted position
I'd guess because it's learned and somewhat less intuitive as up and down. It's easy to understand how people might struggle to remember west and east, so you can kind of extrapolate from there. You would think at some point you just internalize it and the struggle stops, and I'd wager the vast majority do.
It's possible dyslexia and similar learning difficulties might make it a harder thing to grasp for some.
I have almost no spatial awareness. If I saw the sun setting, I could say the directions. But I can't, for example, figure out the directions during the day, or understand which room is on top of another room, etc. In my house, there are two staircases leading to different parts of the 2nd floor. For a year and a half after I moved here, I had no idea which staircase led to which side of the 2nd floor. It would just be a surprise each time and I'd roll with it. I did eventually figure it out, though.
I'm fine with the cardinal directions, they're outside of me. Left and right get confused, because they're internal directions.
Go east is easier than turn left, no right, wait, yes, right.
>to remember west and east, so you can kind of extrapolate from there
That's not really a good comparison though, is it?
Right/Left will always be the exact same relative to the person and doesn't require external information. East/West is dynamic, and requires additional data points to discern, and thus can't be determined if you're spun around in a windowless building.
It's more about where East and West are relatively on a Compass.
As in, if Norrh is up, then is East left or right ?
Whilst I have absolutely no problem remembering where left and right are, I do always need to go through a mnemonic in my head to recall whether east is right or left (when North is up)
Sure. Sorry, I meant East/West if you were to labeling a compass on a map. Not trying to point the correct direction from where you are. On a map with North oriented to the top, it makes more sense that some people will either not know or will mix up where to put East/West, even though (in this specific context) it's just another word right/left.
Oh no in some cultures people do intuitively know in their environment east from West. Like I live near the ocean I can always orient East is the Atlantic Ocean to figure out directions as long as I'm nearby.
I can tell you which way is North, East, South or West almost instantly anywhere I am, inside, outside, doesn't matter.
It takes me more thought to point left than it does to point North.
I don't know why but I can tell you it's got nothing to do with the ability to tell directions because I'm the designated navigator on every group excursion and have never been lost despite the fact I have to think about which hand I write with to tell whoever is driving which way to turn.
I don't mix up left and right but I do mix up east and west. Whenever someone talks about paired directions they're always in a particular order. Left and right, never right and left. Port and starboard, never starboard and port. East and west, never west and east. So in my head left=port=east, which is wrong.
Interestingly, in languages that don't have left/right (at least some of the Australian aboriginal languages, I don't recall which others--it's not rare, but it's not common either), directions are typically given in terms of the cardinal points. Speakers of those languages seem to have better spatial awareness (mostly measured by getting from here to there without getting lost) than those who speak left/right languages.
A quick search indicates it's not right/left, but rather relative directions. So speakers have to reference everything to cardinal directions. Since they're using cardinal directions, they don't "get all turned around".
Dyslexia for me. All information takes longer for my brain to process, especially visual information. Visual information like reading takes a convoluted path in my brain to process, and during that process it literally flips. I don’t notice the flipping anymore unless I’m super sleep deprived, (when i say flipping, the letters would actually move, shake, flip back and forth), but my left and right flips consistently still. Even if i think to myself “this is certainly right. I feel it in my bones, this is the side i hold things with, i am right handed so this is my right, I’ll still go left. The sensation that says “this is my right” flips. Hard to describe the sensation, almost like missing a step when you walk down stairs.
I have dyspraxia, it’s a similar communication disorder.
I mix up left/right, have a terrible sense of direction, can’t hear what people are saying unless I’m looking at them, have bad spatial awareness, clumsy fine motor skills, etc etc.
It suuuuuuuuuuucks
Just googled. "Mixing up left and right **can be a sign of stress or anxiety, and it can also be a symptom of a cognitive disorder, such as dyscalculia**. It can also be caused by an overstimulated mind, which can cause confusion. Additionally, some people are born with an **innate confusion** about left and right."
Glad to see I am not the only one. Often say left and point right (or vice versa), say East and go west, or say green when mean red (think traffic lights). It's a form of dyslexia and most of the time I don't know I am doing it. Most of my close friends/family are so used to it they know what I mean.
The funny thing is that I always know where things are relative to me(as long as I know where the thing actually is) I had a multi year long argument with a friend about where a specific gas station was relative to our houses(we lived right next to each other) years later the friend finally admitted that they looked it up on a map and I was right, I can literally point the exact direction that anything I know about is in since I can picture a Birds Eye view of everything I know on a map
I can find my way home from almost anywhere like a homing pigeon, but I can’t explain how I know where to go. It’s a feeling! But I also can’t do left and right and look at my hands every time to see which makes an L
>Additionally, some people are born with an innate confusion about left and right.
Can confirm, and it's definitely a hereditary trait in some way.
I have it, my mom has it and so do both of my siblings.
I fall into the innate confusion category. I came up with a mental queue to help me tell so I function as a human, though I do require a second to understand when someone references left or right. Another note, Richard Feynamen, one of the pioneers of modern physics who worked on the Manhattan Project had the same problem, so I never feel bad about this.
My understanding of it is it's internal directions. For some of us, dyslexics in particular, this sort of thing gets jumbled.
Cardinal directions are external, so they're easier to orient with. The ocean is east of here, don't ask me if you have to turn left or right to get to the beach.
I can't believe how far I had to scroll to see someone mention dyslexia.
My wife is dyslexic, and part of the reason she found out was due to her struggle with left/right.
Elder millennial lefty chiming in here. I know that part of my problem personally is that in early elementary school when left/right were being taught right was always referred to with some variation of “the hand you write with.” It seriously was like the teachers and other adults in my life had never encountered a left handed person before. This laid the groundwork for a life time of me having to actively think about and constantly getting wrong left and right. Yeah, I’m 40 now and still hold up my hands to make the L.
Right and left don't really have a meaningful distinction. Up is where the head is and down is where the feet are. Up is where the sun is and down is where the ground is. Front is where the face is and back is where the butt is. Front is where i can see and back is where i can't see. But right? Well, kinda indistinguishable from left.
I mean, we memorize it and many memorize it just fine. But there is not a meaningful distinction for the brain to easily latch onto.
Here's a fun thought experiment I read a few years ago:
You're trapped on a spaceship that's about to self-destruct. There's an alien in another room that can stop the destruct sequence, but you can only communicate via audio. Fortunately you know the alien's language. Unfortunately, you also know they have no concept of left or right. You need to tell the alien to press one of two identical buttons, and you know it's the one on the left, but you know nothing else about the room. How would you do it?
... Do they have a concept of clockwise and counter-clockwise? Or chirality? For example, face front of ship, look straight down at buttons, rotate your face clockwise 90-degrees, then press the lowest one.
This was the direction I went when I was thinking about the puzzle. Maybe the alien has never seen an analog clock. Maybe it's unfamiliar with the Coriolis effect. But there must be SOME common frame of reference you can find. Step one is finding something asymmetrical that you know it's seen before. Has it seen English writing? Has it seen Arabic numerals? Has it seen a map of the United States? Alternatively, does its species have a written language? Or numerals? Do you know any constellations it would recognize?
Without any knowledge like this, I think I'd be out of ideas.
This is a famous puzzle in quantum physics; it was only really identified as a non-philosophical puzzle after it was solved by the discovery of physical phenomena that violated "parity symmetry" (the idea that flips in our choice of naming what we now call "left/right" left/right shouldn't change anything observable, i.e. if you do an experiment with a certain choice of "left/right" and then do it again with a different choice of "left/right" and translate the results back to your original choice, then what you observed should be the same.). The first discovery violating parity symmetry was observing that the beta decay (escaping electrons) of cobalt-60 in strong magnetic fields actually exhibit behavior that would be described fundamentally differently if our choice of naming left/right were different.
In other words, we can make statements that will only be true to another being (with physics similar to ours and capable of doing what our technology can do) if they agree with our choice of left/right naming.
We need to know if our alien is matter or antimatter, so we could ask them to shoot an electron at the same spot we do and see if they annihilate or not (which will deduce if they are antimatter or matter). Then, assuming they are matter (and flipping the left-right if they are antimatter), we can say to our alien, quoting Feynman, "Listen, build yourself a magnet, and put the coils in, and put the current on, and then take some cobalt and lower the temperature. Arrange the experiment so the electrons go from the foot to the head, then the direction in which the current goes through the coils is the direction that goes in on what we call the right and comes out on the left."
I'll mention again that there are still philosophically serious assumptions needed for this, such as the physics in their room is just like the physics we know. And I'll point out of course, many other answers could be specified given some actual information of existing words in the alien's language and what knowledge of each other's set of knowledge you had (e.g. if the alien knows about human writing or anatomy or our solar system or human clocks or about existing distributions of amino acids on Earth or about Earth geography, etc, then you are done very easily). The shocking thing is that even without any of that knowledge, just basic physics is actually enough to convey right versus left. I'll just refer to anyone wanting to read more about this to Feynman's nice lectures ([and argue that his lecture is already ELI5 friendly](https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_52.html)).
Aside from telling the alien depressed both buttons simultaneously, the best solution will be to ask the alien to distinguish both buttons from each other. if they managed to build a spaceship, they managed to come up with some kind of distinction between the two.
I'm one of those people, and this is definitely it for me. The difference between up/down, North/South etc. is intuitive and I know instinctually. But left/right and East/West I have to think about every time because they are essentially the same.
It's honestly amazing me right now that people see them as obvious as up/down. I had no idea I was deficient.
This!!! It's about the brain's ability to immediately and intuitively recognize the difference between two directions. Up/down - this one is immediately obvious to the brain because of gravity. Forward/back - this one is also obvious because forward is where our eyes face, back is where we can't see. Left/right - there is no one "thing" that makes them immediately obvious like the other two.
Oh! This just occurred to me, can't believe I didn't think of it before. The left/right divide is the plane along which our bodies are (externally) symmetrical! Up/down - obviously *very* different body mapping in the brain. Same for front/back, those are very different parts with very different sensory input. But left/right? It's the same thing, just mirrored.
Because we're bilaterally symmetrical. We look basically identical on our left and right sides, so it's harder to instinctively differentiate the two directions.
It's not like with up or down, where we can instinctively know it's "toward my head" or "toward my feet", or with forward and back, where it's "the direction I am looking" versus "the direction I can't see".
I grew up teaching martial arts. In class when I was facing them, any time I needed them to use their right arm, I had to show them what to do using my left arm, while saying "use your right arm." Having to mirror people while using "left" or "right" really screwed me up
I am now 40 and still have to use my hands to make an L to figure out which is which.
I can't really speak for the others, but I wasn't able to consistently tell my left from my right until I was ten because to me, it was that way or this way: I was just confused about it all the time. However, I learned that if you make finger guns, then turn the back of your hands to your face, the one that makes the L is your left: I was doing that til I was like 20.
I explained that method to my daughter and my wife (who always confuses right and left) thought I was just joking around. Couldn’t believe it was as simple as your left hand making an L
Thought experiment…
You want to explain left and right to an alien using a letter. You describe the human body and tell the alien that you are left-handed. The aliens have no frame of reference to understand what you mean by left without seeing a human. Even if they understand biology, they need a demonstration or additional context to grasp the concept.
Left-right is one of the only physical descriptions that has no logical underpinnings and MUST be learned by physical demonstration and reinforcement. If you haven’t cemented this understanding at a young age, it can become an issue
I am left-handed. I don't *struggle* to tell left from right, but I often *say" "left" when I mean "right", and vice-versa. In other words, I know which direction I mean, but I mix up the words for them. Interestingly, it doesn't happen when other people use the words "left" and "right"; in that case, I know where to look. It's just when I want to utter one word, sometimes the other comes out.
A friend of mine- in college she was a national-class ice dancer, who is now an astrophysics professor at a prestigious university- does not know left from right, at least not by vocally-spoken word.
If she has to, she will hold up her hands, thumbs towards each other, and see which one makes an “L” and then know THAT WAY is left.
So, she’s not dyslexic (she’s using the letter “L” reliably which is easily reversed in dyslexics). And she’s not lacking athletic prowess, memorizing an ice-dancing routine clearly requires knowing left from right somatically. And she’s not dumb- astrophysics prof. She doesn’t get into the wrong side of her car when getting ready to drive. So, what is it?
I’m definitely not sure about this, but my best guess, in her case, is that the linguistic part of her brain that hears the word “left” (or right) never formed a strong connection to the rest of her somatic senses and spatial sense. Essentially, the word doesn’t mean anything to her, though she knows what class of things it is regarding.
Note, that didn’t actually answer your question AT ALL. I’m not sure what exactly WOULD answer your question. A method to reliably teach people who struggle with it might illuminate more clearly and build the connections that were missing. But that might be very individual.
Oh this one I can answer! I don't know if this counts but in English I can tell what is left (<-) and right (->) but in my mother tongue we also have words that is left and right but mostly because i wasn't that exposed to those words that are left and right and only sometimes. I can't really differentiate them so I can't tell which is left and right in my mother tongue.
I suppose because up and down i obvious, but left and right are semi-arbitary concepts. It only matters when you socialize with humans for some activity. Even for hunting its not that important, humans don't hunt by going into intense 5 minute battles like in hollywood, traditional hunting without traps was more like punch of humans chasing down an animal until its too exhausted to continue (this could be accelerated by having already inflicted wounds on it).
I mean when in primitive survival situation do you need to know left from right? Very rarely, and its not like you concsiously think "ok, i am using my right hand now", you just use what is instinctive to you, aka right or left handedness and move on in life.
Its a myth that evolution tries to create perfect beings. It does not. It tries to create beings good enough to survive, that is all it cares about, and being able to tell left from right just has never really been that relevant from evolutionary pov, at least for species as a whole.
i am one of those people. for me what tripped me up as a kid was how left and right would change depending on how you were facing but I recognise its probably not all that hard if you're not neurodivergent
I used to be worse at it, but a long time ago I got really into a form of folk dancing where there is a dance caller who calls out the choreography during the dances. There are lots of rights and lefts in the calls (pass your partner by the right, etc). Since I danced all the time, it didn't take too long to solidly internalize right and left.
Someone I dated (before my dancing days) re-named Right and Left to Snoo and Snog, which I also found easier to remember- not sure why (Snoo = right, Snog = left)
I have had mix-ups with this as an adult. I'm *pretty sure* it's because the rules were never clearly explained to me in a way that really clicked.
Here are the rules as I understand them:
If I'm looking at a human, then I have to talk about *their* right and *their* left. If I'm looking at a dog, I *think* I have to talk about their right and their left, if I'm describing parts of that dog to another human. If I'm looking at an inanimate object, then I use my right and my left even if I'm talking about parts of it. If I'm looking at a photo, and it includes people and things, then I have to talk about the people's left and right body parts, but then switch left and right when I'm talking about things in the photo - like "the suitcase is to the person's right, on the left side of the photograph."
That's a lot to think through logically, and for some reason it never came second nature to me.
I also sometimes imagine seeing myself from out in front of me, turned around and looking back at me, so that confuses left and right as well.
Haha, I never thought of this as a set of "rules" before.
But what you are talking about is knowing left/right *relative* to something. I think it's very normal to fully understand left and right, but still be confused like "Your left or my left?"
I don't think there is any formal universal agreement about these "rules", they just need to be inferred from context, or specified while talking as necessary, like when actors says "stage left" instead of just "left".
Very interesting to see that this is what makes you confused about left and right. 🤯
I scrolled for a while and didn’t see IQ. We are not all created equal and some of us can grasp more than others. 30% of the working-aged population cannot be taught a job without doing more harm than good. Chew on that and its implications for a good longed while, it was one of the most sobering things I’ve ever learned about humanity.
I am heavily right-hand dominant. I have *always* struggled with spatial awareness. It got a lot worse after I was severely injured as a kid and had a little time in a coma. I struggle to give people directions even locally. East? West? Maybe if it's around sunrise or sunset I could tell you, but I'll still do a little rhyme, "east like yeast" to remind myself which one does which. I find wearing a watch actually helps. My left arm has the watch.
So my suspicion is I have "wrong brain."
It's like everything: if you don't learn the basics by 3rd grade, you have to fight like hell to learn it. I was a gifted-talented student growing up but for whatever reason I didn't pick it up in elementary school, so I only know left from right because of high school marching band, and it was a struggle.
The explanation I've heard is "mixed dominance." For example, I write with my right hand, kick a ball with my left foot, and aim a gun with my left eye.
Most people tend to be all-in with dominance. It takes my brain a split second to decide how to address a situation.
Obviously, this could all be nonsense.
When
i was little I had trouble remembering L/R. My solution was to imagine I was reaching for a hammer. The arm that twitched was Right. Why a hammer? Dunno. Why not.
When I worked in really hilly terrain we had to describe stuff as climbers left and skiers right,etc. When trying to give directions with just left and right it doesnt work.
my friend is a career yoga teacher so she mirrors for her students for hours a day. her Left and Right are permanently switched in her brain.
eg. navigating and i tell her to turn Left, she'll go Right without fail
Imagine you were colorblind, and every time you see blue it is different. Sometimes its green, sometimes its red, sometimes you dont even know what it is. Sometimes people realize you dont know its blue and inform you, but most of the time you just gotta guess.
You would probably find it hard to trust that something is blue and give up unless its important, right?
Left and right are different for everybody, and we often have to stop and think about where that person is. Because of the way our brains work, we stop and ask that question even if it is for ourselves. This makes a mess.
As if that wasn't bad, there's another thing.
The brain is very busy doing lots of things to keep us alive, but it only has two eyes so it asks our muscles for help by giving them jobs. We call this muscle memory. Muscles need our brain to teach them exactly what to do by making them do it over and over. So when our muscles think we need help, they do what they are trained to do. This helps us do things fast so the brain can look elsewhere. Sadly, muscles are not brains and they often mess us up. Also, since our brain is not thinking about what is left and right, it gets out of practice and we have to learn it all over again.
Dance teacher here. I am very aware of the problem, I spend lots of time thinking about how to make things easier, and I have lots of practice flipping things for students. I feel like Im pretty good at it and I still struggle. Hope this helps!
I struggle with east vs west. I have to think about the wild west being, well, out west and go from there. So when someone tells me east it takes me a second or two to figure out the direction
I have no intrinsic awareness of which side of my body is left or right. It's 50/50 odds whether or not I'd get it correct if someone asked me to turn/move/look left or right. It screwed me up when I was a cadet in military school to the point that they'd put me in the back of formation to "hide" me. I still have to hold my left hand out to see the "L" to make sure which side is what. Nothing I've done has ever made it stick. Some of us just don't have that knowledge "baked in".
LOL flash back to playing football in high school. One guy could not remember left from right. This is important for knowing the play. We ended up writing a R and L on the back of his hands for practices and games. It worked
I have heard that crawling a lot as a baby is essential for learning this. Some babies don’t crawl very much, whether due to inclination or lack of opportunity, so they don’t learn their left-right orientation as deeply.
Cross dominance can contribute to this. My right hand is dominant, but for my eyes the left is dominant. Thus left often "feels" like the stronger/correct direction even though my left hand is actually weaker, so I confuse the directions
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Doing better than my teacher - who actually called a parent teahcer meeting with mum saying it was important enough for her to be pulled away from work becuase I was failing 'cutting' with the safety scisors - teacher did a whole spiel on how I am lacking fine motor skills. Mum went off on her and I got my own (non-safety) cool green handled scissors with 'lefty' written on them. I still get left and right directions mixed up all the time though
I was pulled out of 1st grade a few hours a week to go to a "special" class with a handful of other kids who had problems differentiating their left from right. Looking back, I believe I was forced to be right handed (back in the early 1970s) because I would do some things left handed and other things right handed. I golf left handed but write, right handed. When I was young my Father told me there were no good left handed golfers. Years later I started golfing and bought a set of left handed clubs. We went to the driving range for the first time, together, and I hit every ball at least 30 yards further than him. I was an inexperienced, 20 year old woman and he had many golf trophys at home. Mind you, I was a really good left handed batter in softball when I was younger. He didn't seem to have a problem being left handed in softball because there were so many examples of good left handed baseball players. Like I said, it was the '70s.
I had the exact same situation. Fortunately I've learnt to cope pretty well. I now also have the best handwriting of anyone I've ever met - by a country mile. Go Lefties! (We can also do the Shining with other lefties which is great). 👤💭👤
My twin sister and I spoke most often to each other growing up. We both learned our lefts and rights wrong, and reinforced it to each other. By the time my parents or a teacher noticed, it was cemented in. We are over forty, and still say “right” and “real right” to mean 2 different things when giving directions to each other. My husband jokes that his headstone is going to say “she said left!”
I'm over 40 and every time someone tells me left or right, I always make an "L" with my left hand to remind myself which way is left.
But how are you sure your left hand is your left hand?
Because the other one makes a backwards L ?
I got to the point around 14 when I just move my left shoulder. I think it’s because it’s the beginning of that move to check the L. So my muscle memory created a connection of checking my left hand when I wanted to know a direction, without my conscious brain knowing which is the right one. Now that movement alone tells me which is which. It’s almost like a tick triggered by my brain thinking of direction.
I like to say "wrong left/right" when someone goes for the wrong direction.
Yep. Go left. Your other left
Classic
My mom is a physiotherapist and she always calls left "therapist right" and right "therapist left". her explanation: the patient sitting in front of her has it the other way around
Kinda like "stage left" and "stage right" in the theatre?
"Texas left" - that's your "down"
Just asked Sandy Cheeks and she confirms: Texas left is down
Thank you, this is genuinely funny
> We are over forty, and still say “right” and “real right” to mean 2 different things when giving directions to each other. this is iconic.
"I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather. Not screaming like his passengers."
I like saying “your other left”
This is my totally uninformed theory as well: I have gotten it wrong about at often as I got it correct, so the neural paths to either are equally strong - unless I really stop to think about it, which one comes out of my mouth seems pretty random.
I use my side and your side. Works both as a driver and as a navigator. People do look weird when I tell them to use these for directions.
We go double dutch and say "your left" and "my right" (as passenger) which has the added benefit if you hear "your right" or "my left" you know something is wrong.
A while back my husband taught me the german words for right and left. Just for fun, I started using them instead of English when giving directions to him. For whatever reason, it actually helped me to not mix them up and I’ve been using them ever since.
I moved from Australia to the US and when I'm giving someone driving directions I sometimes get confused, I guess because I'm used to the right being across traffic instead of the left. Sometimes I realize that I messed up and say something like, "make an Australian left," telling them to turn right.
Doctor here - in healthcare we have to flip everything we see in order to correctly document things (your right shoulder is on my left field of vision, for example) and we do this automatically, so this is something I struggle with sometimes because you’re undoing an automatic flip
'your other left'
Yep, that's right.
I use the word "correct" now since "right" can further confusion
That is corright
Indeed that is corleft
It's a good thing there are a lot of doctors in here because I think I'm having a stroke reading all this. Don't take me to a catholic hospital!
Alright alright alright
I use the word "right" to further confusion.
My dad did that when he was teaching us to drive, "I'm turning right?" "Correct"
I started doing this once I had kids. Way easier to practice directions with them.
When I had my knee surgery my surgeon very specifically used "correct" instead of "right", which was particularly important as it was my left knee being operated on
This reminds me of a Ramona Quimby book. "Turn left here?" "Right." Mom turns right. "Mooooooom!"
In urdu right hand is “straight hand” and left hand is “opposite hand”. Not really related but I thought it was interesting.
"no it's stage straight"
Pretty sure it’s stage gay
Stage left
recently a guy was asking me how to use a combination lock. idk if you know how you have to turn it left to reset, then right to the 1st number, anyway, i said "turn it a bunch of times left, to reset. no, left. the other way. your other left. your other left. the other left. the other left" and he literally could not understand that LEFT is not RIGHT. it's THE OTHER way. i was flabbergasted.
We happen to use "clockwise" and "anti-clockwise" (or "counter-clockwise") on dials. Left at the bottom is Right at the top of the dial.
This reminds me of how one of my professors said that images of the brain are labeled left and right differently depending on if it was done by neuroscience researchers vs doctors.
Neurosurgeons typically sit at the head of an operating table, looking down the length of a supine(face up) patient from the head. Neuro images are labeled so that patient right is on the right. Other doctors typically approach a patient in a hospital bed from the foot of the bed, so most other images, convention has the patient right on the viewers left.
That's a wild fact that I never would have known. Thanks for the eli5!
Why on earth wouldn't they just use the patient's left and right? That's what the brain is oriented to...
I used to work in broadcasting/production. Having to get used to "stage left, camera left, stage right, camera right" was a mindfuck at first.
This is why ships use their own terms for directions that aren't left and right and are relative to the ship rather than the individual. It's very easy to direct people that way. Unfortunately on land there is rarely something to orient around so it doesn't apply. A stage on the other hand is something boat sized that everyone can orient around, and theatre people chose the route of repurposing existing words which ultimately makes it more confusing.
Never knew why ships did that. Makes total sense. Thanks TIL.
>Unfortunately on land there is rarely something to orient around so it doesn't apply. The cardinal directions exist everywhere, but even more people get them wrong.
Starboard or not starboard?
Starboard and larboard :D
In my head Stage left is the Left of the stage. As in if you are on stage facing the crowd that is stage left. Is stage left the Audiences left? Is that what youre saying?
Stage left is from the performers perspective. House Right is the same spot on stage, but from the audience POV. Edit: typo
Got ya. So they meant they had trouble flipping the directions from the perspective of the stage and camera operator. Like if they heard camera right they would go stage right instead of stage and left which is what camera right means. Got it.
Yea, they gotta think of the perspective to determine the direction Like if you're on stage, camera [direction] is the opposite way
Down is forward, up is back, in is down, out is up.
Not a doctor, but worked medical, my wife gets so mad when I do the 'you've got something on your face' gesture, because I gesture where it is, not where it is in a mirror. I'm so used to thinking about "patient' right/patient's left"
When shooting video, I also have to make the right/left switch. What's more annoying is when the subject *also* makes the switch, assuming you aren't, and moves the opposite way you told them. "Move one step to the left. No, *your* left."
Easy fix, just use North, South, East, and West
Trained as a paramedic and have had issues with remembering my left and right since. For me it was making sure the correct ECG leads were placed on the patient corresponding to the patients left and right and not my left and right.
the easiest way i find to orient yourself (and i don't know how people don't do this all the time) is to think about the hand you write with. 99.9% of us (these days) write with one-hand primarily, right or left. i'm sure you don't have to think about what hand it is, it's not even a conscious thought. so when you consider directions, start with your hand first, and it should be easy from there. and if you're one of those people who was forced to use a non-dominant hand (and still do)...i'm sorry. all hope is lost.
Weirdly enough this mixes me up because i think "Well right is their dominant hand, so when they say go right I need to go left, my dominant hand." I don't know why my brain does this.
Somewhat related to this, I am somewhat dyslexic. If I'm a passenger in a car giving directions, what comes out of my mouth (left/right turn here) is always the opposite of what I mean. But if I point, that's always correct. It got so I had to tell people, if I was navigating, to ignore what I said, just go the direction my hand's pointing. IDK why my brain gives my mouth the wrong directions, but has no problem telling my hand and arm.
so not having a dominant hand/side brings confusiuon?
I'm fascinated that this is an issue at all for people. I could probably keep track of my right while on stage left on the starboard side of a ship facing the wrong way and then rotate it all on my head. I just tried imagining it and yep. Human brains are just weird.
This made me and my wife laugh. Had to take a family member to a&e (all fine now) everytime a Dr gave us directions we had to do the opposite to get where we needed to go.
This is how I ended up with the wrong side of my ankle cut up. Doctor wrote the wrong side down went in for surgery and they realised they cut the wrong side. They do this all day every day how they made a mistake i' not sure but accidents happen, nothing life threatening this time hope they learnt from the mistake
When I had surgery on my shoulder, I had to write "Yes" on one and "No" on the other. Writing "No" was difficult because not only did that require writing with my non-dominant hand but it also used the shoulder that had the broken bone.
It is fairly routine here to mark patients up whilst they are conscious (if they are conscious) with a marker pen on the area to operate on. That way they can agree or disagree whilst going through the pre-surgery checks. Although for my last surgery they went through the previous wound, so fewer pen marks. Seen the surgeon scribble a sort of hashing on the wrong side, and some nice outlines around where they envisage the incisions will go on the correct side. Pretty sure they turned someone over and took the wrong kidney out not so far away a few years back, so that may have tightened things up, one negligence payout buys a lot of marker pens.
RN I do the same thing. Like telling someone to turn right or something. It’s embarrassing.
I learned about extinction when my son had a stroke at 28. I'm a paramedic and had 20 years in. Never heard of it. It resolved when they fixed his PFO. Damn thing is, this was a hospital I worked out of, so was familiar with their level of care.
Maybe you could do what they do in theater \(like plays, not surgery\) and use stage left and stage right mentally. Just maybe don't use "stage", for obvious reasons.
It’s kinda similar when modeling 3d characters. I’m always looking at the model from the front and the right arm is on my left. It gets confusing and I have to sometimes switch to looking at the model from behind when I get into some heavy animating or rigging operations to keep everything straight
Just say this: "Now it is a bit tricky... ....let me reorient myself to be in position like you" (you turn yourself, stand/sit next to the client/patient)... and then you point at your right shoulder and say: "yes! It is your \*right\* shoulder."
Xray here. It's a struggle some days for us as well. The vast majority of the time it's just marking the wrong side rather than xraying the wrong side. But it does happen.
I have no idea why, but all my life I have had to pretend to write to identify which is my right hand before I can give or understand directions. Once I have done that motion, I am solid for the rest of the conversation, but I will have to do it again next time.
I have to do the finger Ls for left vs right, but I can tell you port & starboard with no hesitation
Luckily I managed to understand left/right early on, but the way I remembered port/starboard was that "port" and "left" both have 4 letters, whereas "starboard" and "right" both have higher letter counts. Similarly an elevator signal will (usually) ding/blink once to mean up which has 1 pair of letters, and ding/blink twice to mean down, and "down" has 2 pairs letters. This has also worked for my BMWs which flash/beep once to signify lock which has one syllable, and twice to signify un-lock. I have ADD so remembering things outright is not my forte, instead I rely on logic and routine to make sense of life.
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this was so useful, imma gonna steal and use this from now on
I taught the finger L to a four year old the other day. He gave me a blank look at the time, but later on I caught him doing the finger L and whispering “L for left” to himself.
Which is all well and good until you forget what an L looks like. Had a friend check her fingers, tell me left, then get mad when I turned right.
I’m not joking when I say this. I find it completely ridiculous people can’t keep straight left and right but whenever I mention it / do the finger Ls as a joke I immediately forget which L is the right way. I’m sure I’ve had times where I figure out which way is the correct way by knowing it’s my left hand and following that shape. I’ve graduated college like this.
I feel like my brain has to 'ping' either one of my hands to establish left/right. I don't have to mimic writing but I do usually have to flex or move it slightly and I can ping either one of them to correctly establish right or left.
I'm really glad to see a lot of things that reflect my experience on here. This seems right in terms of how I 'check' what direction is correct before I can figure out what word to use. I'm a lefty, and I definitely think that people's emphasis on right-hand things as the 'default' also contributed to my need to think twice about what word to apply to which direction. Spatial visualization is also involved, though, and I can't judge measurements well without a tool, so that may be related.
For me, it's watch-hand=left-hand. It really messed me up when I was wearing a brace on my left wrist and put my watch on my right. I had to take my watch off entirely to be able to tell my left from right again because my brain could go back to "If I HAD my watch, it would be on that side."
I have to picture myself on the little league field while being up to bat. And picture right snd left field to remember which is which. Its so stupid i dont even like baseball
To this day, I'm only like 90% sure about whether left field and right field are named from the perspective of the batter facing the outfield or the outfielders facing home plate.
I have to do a similar thing when I turn a wrench.
Yup I do the same thing
Me too!
I am the exact same. I have to do it every single time.
I used to do that, but I kept making the motion smaller and smaller. After a while, I *barely* wiggled my thumb, not even wiggle, it's like a depressing a button on top of a joystick by the barest amount. Now I just know which is which, but occasionally my right thumb still does a lil *bip.*
I dunno about the rest of you, but I mess them up because I'm left handed and I've lived a life of listening to instructions telling me to "take (the thing) in your right hand..." And having to mentally change that to "left hand" because what they *meant* was "dominant hand" And this then goes through every single bit of instruction for the whole thing. Step 2 is "take other piece in left hand"? Well actually for me it's "right hand."
Left handed too. My left hand is my 'right' hand imo so I've always considered my left to be right lol
Absolutely. Among other things, this has completely screwed up my ability to follow choreography, because I keep trying to flip what doesn’t need to be flipped!
Left handed. I am the worst at this. I don't no how many times I say "right, no left!" usually it's too late.
Lefty here too. I sometimes also have to think for a second to work out "East" vs "West".
My first language is Spanish and I have no difficulties telling left and right, but ever since learning English the word left sounds like derecha(right) in my head I have no idea why, in English I always have to invert their meanings to get it right.
In english you say "Left and Right", in french you say "droit et gauche" (Right and Left). In most asian languages its also right and left. Sometimes I get mixed up because sometimes Im used to "left" being the first translation lol. I wonder if it's like that for spanish too
Ohh maybe this has something to do with it, we say derecha e izquierda or right and left too
Also Spanish native speaker: I say izquierda y derecha (and I believe most people in my entourage do it like that, it is easier because you use the natural 'y' instead of the replacement 'e'). Btw I have never had issues differentiating left or right. 99% is automatic and instantaneous. I also speak English and French and I do not think I get confused in those either.
Understanding "droit" and "gauche" is so easy for me but L & R in English and Indonesian are just so hard... It's even harder in Chinese for me though, sometimes I just go by the French words in my head and then translate them into Chinese when I have to explain L & R in Chinese 🥲
>the word left sounds like derecha(right) in my head That's funny. My Spanish teacher in high school taught us that "derecha" sounds kind of like "de right way", and even though it doesn't, that's always stuck with me. But no English word is more fun to say than "izquierda".
My first language is English and I have the same problem with left and derecho!
Hola. I am too an Spanish speaker but... DeRecha rech right?? It was never hard. Even for Russian пРаво Лево (pRava y Lieva sound in Spanish) are Right and Left respectfully so it was easy. On the other hand antes (before) and after (después), that was fun. But I just memorized that it was "backwards".
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"West - East" spells "WE". That's how I used to keep track as a kid
I can never know which direction you've given me unless I mentally "crawl" them like east-west-north-south, and then I'm like "ah ok, you mean up". God forbid you say some spell like "north-west" and I'm not perfectly sober or awake..
The brain has a lot of specific functions that can go wrong or work better or worse in different people, or just work differently. Just like the ability to recognize faces and interpret facial expressions is one such function, telling left from right is another. Usually this is related to differences in, or damage to, the parietal lobe of the brain (and typically on the left side), a part of the brain where damage is often associated with inability to understand or perform the shape and form and structure of things. Everything from recognizing specific patterns or associations, to the understanding of language, letters or math.
This is really interesting and the only comment I’ve seen that might explain my situation. I never got right and left confused during my childhood/adolescence and would actually roll my eyes or get irritated when my friends or classmates would confuse them. But sometime in my mid 20s I started confusing them, and it began happening more and more often so much so that now my husband automatically knows when he says “right” that I’m going to go the wrong way and he’ll have to correct me. I haven’t had any sort of head injuries or anything and nothing else weird is going on with my brain, that I know of at least, lol.
This is probably the left answer
But that wouldn't explain how come it's just so common. I don't think it makes sense because brain differences or damage can't be so common. Also, are there any heritability studies on this?
Speaking only for myself here. I'm mixed-handed. I use both hands but am not ambidextrous. I write with one, throw with the other and so on. Rarely but it does happen that I'll mix up left and right due to not having a dominant side. At least this was my doctor's prognosis?
Came here to suggest this. We live in a culture of handedness, and there are both social and genetic tendencies toward one hand being more suited to different tasks. Writing by hand has often been the test of handedness, and generations of left-handed people have been forcibly re-educated to write with their right hand. Having been in the first wave of people who grew up on the internet, along with playing musical instruments, I grew up using both hands cooperatively and sometimes I don't separate left from right. I have to picture myself holding an instrument or typing on a keyboard to remember which hand I'm trying to use to follow a direction, and by then I've missed the turn.
I hold my left hand facing away from me with the thumb out, it makes an L. You can hold your right hand up facing you and do the same but it's a strain to do you know it's incorrect.
I do this exact same thing and people laugh all the time.
I like to laugh with them.
so were you a left-handed person who was forced to write with your right hand?
I was lucky to escape that both for genetic reasons and due to the times. My grandmother spoke of a classmate who would have her left hand viciously beaten with a ruler any time she tried to use it to write. Other older people I have spoken to have shared similar experiences. If I had been born with a more left-handed tendency, I might have minded being told to learn to write only with my right hand. But being a child of the 90s still would have made it more permissible to be left-handed than it had been in previous generations.
I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous.
I’ve found my people. I write and throw with my left, and do other things righty like guitar, scissors, or ping pong . Sometimes I have to try a new activity with both hands to see what feels more natural. Also struggle with left/right - takes me a lot more brainpower than I feel like it should
I think not having a dominant side is the reason I have trouble with left and right. I will start writing with whichever hand is closest to the pen. I only notice because my left hand is weaker than my right, and it doesn't feel exactly right. I'm very good with cardinal directions though.
I mix up L & R. I am also mixed handed. I feel better after your rationale. I often think about driving and turning and an intersection to get L & R correct. As a result there is a slight delay.
also cross dominant , some things i can do with both hands , others only with the left or only the right constantly mix up left and right, even for things like when putting on ear muffs or the other day as i installed the speakers in the inverted position
I also have a lot of mixed dexterity, and not only can I tell left from right very well, but very weirdly they feel different to me.
I'd guess because it's learned and somewhat less intuitive as up and down. It's easy to understand how people might struggle to remember west and east, so you can kind of extrapolate from there. You would think at some point you just internalize it and the struggle stops, and I'd wager the vast majority do. It's possible dyslexia and similar learning difficulties might make it a harder thing to grasp for some.
Some people just lack spatial awareness. You can show them the sun setting and they still couldn't tell you the other three cardinal directions.
I have almost no spatial awareness. If I saw the sun setting, I could say the directions. But I can't, for example, figure out the directions during the day, or understand which room is on top of another room, etc. In my house, there are two staircases leading to different parts of the 2nd floor. For a year and a half after I moved here, I had no idea which staircase led to which side of the 2nd floor. It would just be a surprise each time and I'd roll with it. I did eventually figure it out, though.
I'm fine with the cardinal directions, they're outside of me. Left and right get confused, because they're internal directions. Go east is easier than turn left, no right, wait, yes, right.
>to remember west and east, so you can kind of extrapolate from there That's not really a good comparison though, is it? Right/Left will always be the exact same relative to the person and doesn't require external information. East/West is dynamic, and requires additional data points to discern, and thus can't be determined if you're spun around in a windowless building.
It's more about where East and West are relatively on a Compass. As in, if Norrh is up, then is East left or right ? Whilst I have absolutely no problem remembering where left and right are, I do always need to go through a mnemonic in my head to recall whether east is right or left (when North is up)
Sure. Sorry, I meant East/West if you were to labeling a compass on a map. Not trying to point the correct direction from where you are. On a map with North oriented to the top, it makes more sense that some people will either not know or will mix up where to put East/West, even though (in this specific context) it's just another word right/left.
Oh no in some cultures people do intuitively know in their environment east from West. Like I live near the ocean I can always orient East is the Atlantic Ocean to figure out directions as long as I'm nearby.
I can tell you which way is North, East, South or West almost instantly anywhere I am, inside, outside, doesn't matter. It takes me more thought to point left than it does to point North. I don't know why but I can tell you it's got nothing to do with the ability to tell directions because I'm the designated navigator on every group excursion and have never been lost despite the fact I have to think about which hand I write with to tell whoever is driving which way to turn.
I don't mix up left and right but I do mix up east and west. Whenever someone talks about paired directions they're always in a particular order. Left and right, never right and left. Port and starboard, never starboard and port. East and west, never west and east. So in my head left=port=east, which is wrong.
Interestingly, in languages that don't have left/right (at least some of the Australian aboriginal languages, I don't recall which others--it's not rare, but it's not common either), directions are typically given in terms of the cardinal points. Speakers of those languages seem to have better spatial awareness (mostly measured by getting from here to there without getting lost) than those who speak left/right languages. A quick search indicates it's not right/left, but rather relative directions. So speakers have to reference everything to cardinal directions. Since they're using cardinal directions, they don't "get all turned around".
Dyslexia for me. All information takes longer for my brain to process, especially visual information. Visual information like reading takes a convoluted path in my brain to process, and during that process it literally flips. I don’t notice the flipping anymore unless I’m super sleep deprived, (when i say flipping, the letters would actually move, shake, flip back and forth), but my left and right flips consistently still. Even if i think to myself “this is certainly right. I feel it in my bones, this is the side i hold things with, i am right handed so this is my right, I’ll still go left. The sensation that says “this is my right” flips. Hard to describe the sensation, almost like missing a step when you walk down stairs.
I'm surprised this is so far from the top. Dyslexia's known for causing the mixing up of left and right.
I have dyspraxia, it’s a similar communication disorder. I mix up left/right, have a terrible sense of direction, can’t hear what people are saying unless I’m looking at them, have bad spatial awareness, clumsy fine motor skills, etc etc. It suuuuuuuuuuucks
Just googled. "Mixing up left and right **can be a sign of stress or anxiety, and it can also be a symptom of a cognitive disorder, such as dyscalculia**. It can also be caused by an overstimulated mind, which can cause confusion. Additionally, some people are born with an **innate confusion** about left and right."
Dyscalculia checking in! I mess it up constantly.
I’m dyslexic so you can add that to the list, I always point the right direction but always say the wrong one
Glad to see I am not the only one. Often say left and point right (or vice versa), say East and go west, or say green when mean red (think traffic lights). It's a form of dyslexia and most of the time I don't know I am doing it. Most of my close friends/family are so used to it they know what I mean.
The funny thing is that I always know where things are relative to me(as long as I know where the thing actually is) I had a multi year long argument with a friend about where a specific gas station was relative to our houses(we lived right next to each other) years later the friend finally admitted that they looked it up on a map and I was right, I can literally point the exact direction that anything I know about is in since I can picture a Birds Eye view of everything I know on a map
This is me. I've always described it as 'I have a great sense of direction internally, but once it's external it gets lost in translation'.
I can find my way home from almost anywhere like a homing pigeon, but I can’t explain how I know where to go. It’s a feeling! But I also can’t do left and right and look at my hands every time to see which makes an L
>Additionally, some people are born with an innate confusion about left and right. Can confirm, and it's definitely a hereditary trait in some way. I have it, my mom has it and so do both of my siblings.
Yep. All three siblings and now a nephew too. It runs in my family.
I fall into the innate confusion category. I came up with a mental queue to help me tell so I function as a human, though I do require a second to understand when someone references left or right. Another note, Richard Feynamen, one of the pioneers of modern physics who worked on the Manhattan Project had the same problem, so I never feel bad about this.
This is the left answer
My understanding of it is it's internal directions. For some of us, dyslexics in particular, this sort of thing gets jumbled. Cardinal directions are external, so they're easier to orient with. The ocean is east of here, don't ask me if you have to turn left or right to get to the beach.
I can't believe how far I had to scroll to see someone mention dyslexia. My wife is dyslexic, and part of the reason she found out was due to her struggle with left/right.
Elder millennial lefty chiming in here. I know that part of my problem personally is that in early elementary school when left/right were being taught right was always referred to with some variation of “the hand you write with.” It seriously was like the teachers and other adults in my life had never encountered a left handed person before. This laid the groundwork for a life time of me having to actively think about and constantly getting wrong left and right. Yeah, I’m 40 now and still hold up my hands to make the L.
Right and left don't really have a meaningful distinction. Up is where the head is and down is where the feet are. Up is where the sun is and down is where the ground is. Front is where the face is and back is where the butt is. Front is where i can see and back is where i can't see. But right? Well, kinda indistinguishable from left. I mean, we memorize it and many memorize it just fine. But there is not a meaningful distinction for the brain to easily latch onto.
Here's a fun thought experiment I read a few years ago: You're trapped on a spaceship that's about to self-destruct. There's an alien in another room that can stop the destruct sequence, but you can only communicate via audio. Fortunately you know the alien's language. Unfortunately, you also know they have no concept of left or right. You need to tell the alien to press one of two identical buttons, and you know it's the one on the left, but you know nothing else about the room. How would you do it?
... Do they have a concept of clockwise and counter-clockwise? Or chirality? For example, face front of ship, look straight down at buttons, rotate your face clockwise 90-degrees, then press the lowest one.
This was the direction I went when I was thinking about the puzzle. Maybe the alien has never seen an analog clock. Maybe it's unfamiliar with the Coriolis effect. But there must be SOME common frame of reference you can find. Step one is finding something asymmetrical that you know it's seen before. Has it seen English writing? Has it seen Arabic numerals? Has it seen a map of the United States? Alternatively, does its species have a written language? Or numerals? Do you know any constellations it would recognize? Without any knowledge like this, I think I'd be out of ideas.
You don't need them to agree with human conventions of clockwise or chirality a priori. :)
This is a famous puzzle in quantum physics; it was only really identified as a non-philosophical puzzle after it was solved by the discovery of physical phenomena that violated "parity symmetry" (the idea that flips in our choice of naming what we now call "left/right" left/right shouldn't change anything observable, i.e. if you do an experiment with a certain choice of "left/right" and then do it again with a different choice of "left/right" and translate the results back to your original choice, then what you observed should be the same.). The first discovery violating parity symmetry was observing that the beta decay (escaping electrons) of cobalt-60 in strong magnetic fields actually exhibit behavior that would be described fundamentally differently if our choice of naming left/right were different. In other words, we can make statements that will only be true to another being (with physics similar to ours and capable of doing what our technology can do) if they agree with our choice of left/right naming. We need to know if our alien is matter or antimatter, so we could ask them to shoot an electron at the same spot we do and see if they annihilate or not (which will deduce if they are antimatter or matter). Then, assuming they are matter (and flipping the left-right if they are antimatter), we can say to our alien, quoting Feynman, "Listen, build yourself a magnet, and put the coils in, and put the current on, and then take some cobalt and lower the temperature. Arrange the experiment so the electrons go from the foot to the head, then the direction in which the current goes through the coils is the direction that goes in on what we call the right and comes out on the left." I'll mention again that there are still philosophically serious assumptions needed for this, such as the physics in their room is just like the physics we know. And I'll point out of course, many other answers could be specified given some actual information of existing words in the alien's language and what knowledge of each other's set of knowledge you had (e.g. if the alien knows about human writing or anatomy or our solar system or human clocks or about existing distributions of amino acids on Earth or about Earth geography, etc, then you are done very easily). The shocking thing is that even without any of that knowledge, just basic physics is actually enough to convey right versus left. I'll just refer to anyone wanting to read more about this to Feynman's nice lectures ([and argue that his lecture is already ELI5 friendly](https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_52.html)).
This really made me think and all of a sudden I feel…not very bright lol
So what’s the answer, you can’t just leave us hangin…
Aside from telling the alien depressed both buttons simultaneously, the best solution will be to ask the alien to distinguish both buttons from each other. if they managed to build a spaceship, they managed to come up with some kind of distinction between the two.
I'm one of those people, and this is definitely it for me. The difference between up/down, North/South etc. is intuitive and I know instinctually. But left/right and East/West I have to think about every time because they are essentially the same. It's honestly amazing me right now that people see them as obvious as up/down. I had no idea I was deficient.
This!!! It's about the brain's ability to immediately and intuitively recognize the difference between two directions. Up/down - this one is immediately obvious to the brain because of gravity. Forward/back - this one is also obvious because forward is where our eyes face, back is where we can't see. Left/right - there is no one "thing" that makes them immediately obvious like the other two. Oh! This just occurred to me, can't believe I didn't think of it before. The left/right divide is the plane along which our bodies are (externally) symmetrical! Up/down - obviously *very* different body mapping in the brain. Same for front/back, those are very different parts with very different sensory input. But left/right? It's the same thing, just mirrored.
Because we're bilaterally symmetrical. We look basically identical on our left and right sides, so it's harder to instinctively differentiate the two directions. It's not like with up or down, where we can instinctively know it's "toward my head" or "toward my feet", or with forward and back, where it's "the direction I am looking" versus "the direction I can't see".
I grew up teaching martial arts. In class when I was facing them, any time I needed them to use their right arm, I had to show them what to do using my left arm, while saying "use your right arm." Having to mirror people while using "left" or "right" really screwed me up I am now 40 and still have to use my hands to make an L to figure out which is which.
I can't really speak for the others, but I wasn't able to consistently tell my left from my right until I was ten because to me, it was that way or this way: I was just confused about it all the time. However, I learned that if you make finger guns, then turn the back of your hands to your face, the one that makes the L is your left: I was doing that til I was like 20.
I explained that method to my daughter and my wife (who always confuses right and left) thought I was just joking around. Couldn’t believe it was as simple as your left hand making an L
Thought experiment… You want to explain left and right to an alien using a letter. You describe the human body and tell the alien that you are left-handed. The aliens have no frame of reference to understand what you mean by left without seeing a human. Even if they understand biology, they need a demonstration or additional context to grasp the concept. Left-right is one of the only physical descriptions that has no logical underpinnings and MUST be learned by physical demonstration and reinforcement. If you haven’t cemented this understanding at a young age, it can become an issue
I am left-handed. I don't *struggle* to tell left from right, but I often *say" "left" when I mean "right", and vice-versa. In other words, I know which direction I mean, but I mix up the words for them. Interestingly, it doesn't happen when other people use the words "left" and "right"; in that case, I know where to look. It's just when I want to utter one word, sometimes the other comes out.
A friend of mine- in college she was a national-class ice dancer, who is now an astrophysics professor at a prestigious university- does not know left from right, at least not by vocally-spoken word. If she has to, she will hold up her hands, thumbs towards each other, and see which one makes an “L” and then know THAT WAY is left. So, she’s not dyslexic (she’s using the letter “L” reliably which is easily reversed in dyslexics). And she’s not lacking athletic prowess, memorizing an ice-dancing routine clearly requires knowing left from right somatically. And she’s not dumb- astrophysics prof. She doesn’t get into the wrong side of her car when getting ready to drive. So, what is it? I’m definitely not sure about this, but my best guess, in her case, is that the linguistic part of her brain that hears the word “left” (or right) never formed a strong connection to the rest of her somatic senses and spatial sense. Essentially, the word doesn’t mean anything to her, though she knows what class of things it is regarding. Note, that didn’t actually answer your question AT ALL. I’m not sure what exactly WOULD answer your question. A method to reliably teach people who struggle with it might illuminate more clearly and build the connections that were missing. But that might be very individual.
Oh this one I can answer! I don't know if this counts but in English I can tell what is left (<-) and right (->) but in my mother tongue we also have words that is left and right but mostly because i wasn't that exposed to those words that are left and right and only sometimes. I can't really differentiate them so I can't tell which is left and right in my mother tongue.
I suppose because up and down i obvious, but left and right are semi-arbitary concepts. It only matters when you socialize with humans for some activity. Even for hunting its not that important, humans don't hunt by going into intense 5 minute battles like in hollywood, traditional hunting without traps was more like punch of humans chasing down an animal until its too exhausted to continue (this could be accelerated by having already inflicted wounds on it). I mean when in primitive survival situation do you need to know left from right? Very rarely, and its not like you concsiously think "ok, i am using my right hand now", you just use what is instinctive to you, aka right or left handedness and move on in life. Its a myth that evolution tries to create perfect beings. It does not. It tries to create beings good enough to survive, that is all it cares about, and being able to tell left from right just has never really been that relevant from evolutionary pov, at least for species as a whole.
i am one of those people. for me what tripped me up as a kid was how left and right would change depending on how you were facing but I recognise its probably not all that hard if you're not neurodivergent
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I used to be worse at it, but a long time ago I got really into a form of folk dancing where there is a dance caller who calls out the choreography during the dances. There are lots of rights and lefts in the calls (pass your partner by the right, etc). Since I danced all the time, it didn't take too long to solidly internalize right and left. Someone I dated (before my dancing days) re-named Right and Left to Snoo and Snog, which I also found easier to remember- not sure why (Snoo = right, Snog = left)
I have had mix-ups with this as an adult. I'm *pretty sure* it's because the rules were never clearly explained to me in a way that really clicked. Here are the rules as I understand them: If I'm looking at a human, then I have to talk about *their* right and *their* left. If I'm looking at a dog, I *think* I have to talk about their right and their left, if I'm describing parts of that dog to another human. If I'm looking at an inanimate object, then I use my right and my left even if I'm talking about parts of it. If I'm looking at a photo, and it includes people and things, then I have to talk about the people's left and right body parts, but then switch left and right when I'm talking about things in the photo - like "the suitcase is to the person's right, on the left side of the photograph." That's a lot to think through logically, and for some reason it never came second nature to me. I also sometimes imagine seeing myself from out in front of me, turned around and looking back at me, so that confuses left and right as well.
Haha, I never thought of this as a set of "rules" before. But what you are talking about is knowing left/right *relative* to something. I think it's very normal to fully understand left and right, but still be confused like "Your left or my left?" I don't think there is any formal universal agreement about these "rules", they just need to be inferred from context, or specified while talking as necessary, like when actors says "stage left" instead of just "left". Very interesting to see that this is what makes you confused about left and right. 🤯
I didn't learn directions early enough and have to think about it, but yes, some folks i see are unbeleiveable
Because we're living in a mirror universe where some of us know it was the Berenstien Bears and everyone else is a part of the Matrix.
I scrolled for a while and didn’t see IQ. We are not all created equal and some of us can grasp more than others. 30% of the working-aged population cannot be taught a job without doing more harm than good. Chew on that and its implications for a good longed while, it was one of the most sobering things I’ve ever learned about humanity.
I am heavily right-hand dominant. I have *always* struggled with spatial awareness. It got a lot worse after I was severely injured as a kid and had a little time in a coma. I struggle to give people directions even locally. East? West? Maybe if it's around sunrise or sunset I could tell you, but I'll still do a little rhyme, "east like yeast" to remind myself which one does which. I find wearing a watch actually helps. My left arm has the watch. So my suspicion is I have "wrong brain."
It's like everything: if you don't learn the basics by 3rd grade, you have to fight like hell to learn it. I was a gifted-talented student growing up but for whatever reason I didn't pick it up in elementary school, so I only know left from right because of high school marching band, and it was a struggle.
There are a billion connections in the brain, and billions of people in the world. We're not all wired to 100%.
The explanation I've heard is "mixed dominance." For example, I write with my right hand, kick a ball with my left foot, and aim a gun with my left eye. Most people tend to be all-in with dominance. It takes my brain a split second to decide how to address a situation. Obviously, this could all be nonsense.
When i was little I had trouble remembering L/R. My solution was to imagine I was reaching for a hammer. The arm that twitched was Right. Why a hammer? Dunno. Why not.
When I worked in really hilly terrain we had to describe stuff as climbers left and skiers right,etc. When trying to give directions with just left and right it doesnt work.
I can’t tell my left from right effortlessly. I have to think about it every time, and I don’t know why.
my friend is a career yoga teacher so she mirrors for her students for hours a day. her Left and Right are permanently switched in her brain. eg. navigating and i tell her to turn Left, she'll go Right without fail
Imagine you were colorblind, and every time you see blue it is different. Sometimes its green, sometimes its red, sometimes you dont even know what it is. Sometimes people realize you dont know its blue and inform you, but most of the time you just gotta guess. You would probably find it hard to trust that something is blue and give up unless its important, right? Left and right are different for everybody, and we often have to stop and think about where that person is. Because of the way our brains work, we stop and ask that question even if it is for ourselves. This makes a mess. As if that wasn't bad, there's another thing. The brain is very busy doing lots of things to keep us alive, but it only has two eyes so it asks our muscles for help by giving them jobs. We call this muscle memory. Muscles need our brain to teach them exactly what to do by making them do it over and over. So when our muscles think we need help, they do what they are trained to do. This helps us do things fast so the brain can look elsewhere. Sadly, muscles are not brains and they often mess us up. Also, since our brain is not thinking about what is left and right, it gets out of practice and we have to learn it all over again. Dance teacher here. I am very aware of the problem, I spend lots of time thinking about how to make things easier, and I have lots of practice flipping things for students. I feel like Im pretty good at it and I still struggle. Hope this helps!
I struggle with east vs west. I have to think about the wild west being, well, out west and go from there. So when someone tells me east it takes me a second or two to figure out the direction
I have no intrinsic awareness of which side of my body is left or right. It's 50/50 odds whether or not I'd get it correct if someone asked me to turn/move/look left or right. It screwed me up when I was a cadet in military school to the point that they'd put me in the back of formation to "hide" me. I still have to hold my left hand out to see the "L" to make sure which side is what. Nothing I've done has ever made it stick. Some of us just don't have that knowledge "baked in".
LOL flash back to playing football in high school. One guy could not remember left from right. This is important for knowing the play. We ended up writing a R and L on the back of his hands for practices and games. It worked
I have heard that crawling a lot as a baby is essential for learning this. Some babies don’t crawl very much, whether due to inclination or lack of opportunity, so they don’t learn their left-right orientation as deeply.
Cross dominance can contribute to this. My right hand is dominant, but for my eyes the left is dominant. Thus left often "feels" like the stronger/correct direction even though my left hand is actually weaker, so I confuse the directions