4 ms·

There are a lot of basic assumptions about thought that don't apply to everybody. My wife, for example, can't process "left" and "right" without great effort.

There are a lot of basic assumptions about thought that don't apply to everybody. My wife, for example, can't process "left" and "right" without great effort. She's intelligent and is a gifted artist in a variety of mediums, and is not dyslexic in the least. But if you tell her to "turn right" in a car it's very confusing for her to translate that into which direction she should take. Even more confusingly, she's a very good navigator, much better than I! I process "left" and "right" like a "normal" person and yet I'm legendarily bad at finding my way while driving. I've tried to get her to explain the left/right difficulty and it's hard for her to put into words, because of course how can you explain how your brain doesn't work? The most she's been able to say about it is that she understands what her "left arm" or "left foot" is but can't translate that to what my "left" is, or vice-versa. Anybody else ever heard of or experienced anything like this?

kaffeemitsahne 11y ago
When I took driving lessons my instructor asked if I had any difficulty with left vs. right, I thought it was a strange question at the time but I guess it's not that uncommon.
to3m 11y ago
I used to have this problem a bit, but over the years I seem to have worked it out somehow. When driving I do seem to have internalized that left = off road and right = across traffic. I never really noticed this until I drove abroad... I quickly realised I had to be very careful not to think too hard about what I was doing, because if I verbalized any of it then I just became confused. I also found it rather taxing to follow directions.
barrkel 11y ago
I have zero difficulty with left or right, but great difficulty recalling which way is west and which is east. Usually I resolve it by remembering that west is left and east is right when looking at a north-up map, but I have to recall it every single time. I have never been able to bind the west / east words directly to directions.
stordoff 11y ago
That reminds me of a tangentially related thing I experienced. I never had a problem with left/right until I heard someone explaining the "hold your thumb out, if it makes an L that is left" 'trick'. Before hearing about that, left and right came naturally, and I 'just knew' which was which. After hearing it, I constantly second guess myself, and there is a brief (but noticeable) hesitance before I can say "Ok, that's left".
- JohnBooty 11y ago
  I think the brief pause you describe is very common, I think? I've never struggled with right/left, but I have to pause like that. That was my initial response to my wife - "can't you just do the 'L' trick with your hands?" It doesn't work for her. Nor does, "Well, you write with your right hand, so can't you just remember that is 'right'?" She just has a total mental block there. :)
bane 11y ago
I don't think it's uncommon. It gets even harder when trying to figure out relative left-right to other people. Here's a tip I learned once: hold your hands out, palms facing away from you and fingers up. Point your thumbs at each other and index fingers straight up. The left hand will form an "L" (for left) and the right hand will form a backwards "L".
- derefr 11y ago
  I found this impossible throughout my childhood. One day it was suddenly easy. I think, between the two moments, I had started playing a lot of top-down 3/4-view RPG video games. There's something about having an avatar that has a directional "facing" on a fixed-orientation orthogonal grid (picture a chessboard, where the piece has a face)—and where commanding the avatar with a direction button both moves it and turns it to face the same direction—which seems like it acted to train my brain to reflexively use this "model" whenever trying to figure out a directional visualization. I'd picture myself in the third person, give myself an "origin point", and then visualize where I'd be (in both movement and facing) before and after, relative to the origin. (All this was without actually 'picturing' anything, in the traditional sense. Imagine having the sensation of manipulating a ferromagnetic cube floating inside a strong electromagnetic flux. The cube interacts differently with the surrounding magnetic field depending on its 3D orientation—it'll feel different when you're trying to add yaw if the "south" side of the cube is the one facing you, vs. the "east" side or the "bottom" side. Now imagine that the cube is a feeling in your proprioceptive system, rather than in your hands. Now imagine that there is no cube, only the feeling.) One interesting effect of this is that I've found that I now get "acclimated" to cities I live in, and begin to have a very strong sense of where north is in those cities—because, at first, I look at Google Maps on my phone a lot while navigating, and so my "origin point" becomes fixed to North, such that I begin to see the same sort of fixed-orientation RPG grid overlaid on the city, with streets running "up-down" instead of north-south and "left-right" instead of east-west. I will actually have an intuition of "I'm facing up" when I'm facing north. On the other hand, when I'm in a city I haven't acclimated to, man do I miss that sensation; I get completely lost.
  - JohnBooty 11y ago
spc476 11y ago
Is your wife left-handed? I have trouble with left and right and I'll often point left and say "turn right." I should also mention that I'm left handed, and our society (in fact, most if not all societies) are geared for right handed people.
tempestn 11y ago
I don't have any problem differentiating left from right, but I do have very clear memories of learning the concepts as a child, and coincidentally, I learned them through visualization. Also, they were definitely two distinct concepts - I internalized "left" some time before "right". I'm not sure how long, since I was like 4-5 years old at the time, but I'm going to guess on the order of a month. Anyway, I learned left because one time we were walking down a specific street by our house - coincidentally on the way to a beach - and I guess I was asked to walk on the left side of the road or something. For some reason, I knew which side was the left at that time. So from then on, any time I had to know which was was left, I would just pull up a mental picture of that street, and then know that side was left. What's interesting is, I definitely didn't use the same picture for right. I don't remember why, but I remember that some time later, my "right" reference became a mental image of the swimming pool where I was taking swimming lessons. I was at the edge of the pool looking out, and somehow (I've forgotten how - perhaps deducing from left) I worked out which way was right. So from then on I would visualize that view out of the pool to know which way was right. IIRC I did it consciously for a period of time, then it would happen automatically, and at some point between then and adulthood the crutch faded away and I automatically knew left and right like most people. (I have no memory of how long that took, but it probably was still as a young child.) Anyway, aside from whatever general interest that story might have, I wonder whether a similar technique would work for your wife? Pick a specific mental picture to associate with "left", then spend some time intentionally pulling it up whenever leftness needs to be ascertained. Then once it's cemented, do a different one for right.

kaffeemitsahne 11y ago

When I took driving lessons my instructor asked if I had any difficulty with left vs. right, I thought it was a strange question at the time but I guess it's not that uncommon.

to3m 11y ago

I used to have this problem a bit, but over the years I seem to have worked it out somehow. When driving I do seem to have internalized that left = off road and right = across traffic. I never really noticed this until I drove abroad... I quickly realised I had to be very careful not to think too hard about what I was doing, because if I verbalized any of it then I just became confused. I also found it rather taxing to follow directions.

barrkel 11y ago

I have zero difficulty with left or right, but great difficulty recalling which way is west and which is east. Usually I resolve it by remembering that west is left and east is right when looking at a north-up map, but I have to recall it every single time. I have never been able to bind the west / east words directly to directions.

stordoff 11y ago

That reminds me of a tangentially related thing I experienced. I never had a problem with left/right until I heard someone explaining the "hold your thumb out, if it makes an L that is left" 'trick'. Before hearing about that, left and right came naturally, and I 'just knew' which was which. After hearing it, I constantly second guess myself, and there is a brief (but noticeable) hesitance before I can say "Ok, that's left".

JohnBooty 11y ago
I think the brief pause you describe is very common, I think? I've never struggled with right/left, but I have to pause like that. That was my initial response to my wife - "can't you just do the 'L' trick with your hands?" It doesn't work for her. Nor does, "Well, you write with your right hand, so can't you just remember that is 'right'?" She just has a total mental block there. :)

bane 11y ago

I don't think it's uncommon. It gets even harder when trying to figure out relative left-right to other people. Here's a tip I learned once: hold your hands out, palms facing away from you and fingers up. Point your thumbs at each other and index fingers straight up. The left hand will form an "L" (for left) and the right hand will form a backwards "L".

derefr 11y ago
I found this impossible throughout my childhood. One day it was suddenly easy. I think, between the two moments, I had started playing a lot of top-down 3/4-view RPG video games. There's something about having an avatar that has a directional "facing" on a fixed-orientation orthogonal grid (picture a chessboard, where the piece has a face)—and where commanding the avatar with a direction button both moves it and turns it to face the same direction—which seems like it acted to train my brain to reflexively use this "model" whenever trying to figure out a directional visualization. I'd picture myself in the third person, give myself an "origin point", and then visualize where I'd be (in both movement and facing) before and after, relative to the origin. (All this was without actually 'picturing' anything, in the traditional sense. Imagine having the sensation of manipulating a ferromagnetic cube floating inside a strong electromagnetic flux. The cube interacts differently with the surrounding magnetic field depending on its 3D orientation—it'll feel different when you're trying to add yaw if the "south" side of the cube is the one facing you, vs. the "east" side or the "bottom" side. Now imagine that the cube is a feeling in your proprioceptive system, rather than in your hands. Now imagine that there is no cube, only the feeling.) One interesting effect of this is that I've found that I now get "acclimated" to cities I live in, and begin to have a very strong sense of where north is in those cities—because, at first, I look at Google Maps on my phone a lot while navigating, and so my "origin point" becomes fixed to North, such that I begin to see the same sort of fixed-orientation RPG grid overlaid on the city, with streets running "up-down" instead of north-south and "left-right" instead of east-west. I will actually have an intuition of "I'm facing up" when I'm facing north. On the other hand, when I'm in a city I haven't acclimated to, man do I miss that sensation; I get completely lost.
- JohnBooty 11y ago

spc476 11y ago

Is your wife left-handed? I have trouble with left and right and I'll often point left and say "turn right." I should also mention that I'm left handed, and our society (in fact, most if not all societies) are geared for right handed people.

tempestn 11y ago

I don't have any problem differentiating left from right, but I do have very clear memories of learning the concepts as a child, and coincidentally, I learned them through visualization. Also, they were definitely two distinct concepts - I internalized "left" some time before "right". I'm not sure how long, since I was like 4-5 years old at the time, but I'm going to guess on the order of a month. Anyway, I learned left because one time we were walking down a specific street by our house - coincidentally on the way to a beach - and I guess I was asked to walk on the left side of the road or something. For some reason, I knew which side was the left at that time. So from then on, any time I had to know which was was left, I would just pull up a mental picture of that street, and then know that side was left. What's interesting is, I definitely didn't use the same picture for right. I don't remember why, but I remember that some time later, my "right" reference became a mental image of the swimming pool where I was taking swimming lessons. I was at the edge of the pool looking out, and somehow (I've forgotten how - perhaps deducing from left) I worked out which way was right. So from then on I would visualize that view out of the pool to know which way was right. IIRC I did it consciously for a period of time, then it would happen automatically, and at some point between then and adulthood the crutch faded away and I automatically knew left and right like most people. (I have no memory of how long that took, but it probably was still as a young child.) Anyway, aside from whatever general interest that story might have, I wonder whether a similar technique would work for your wife? Pick a specific mental picture to associate with "left", then spend some time intentionally pulling it up whenever leftness needs to be ascertained. Then once it's cemented, do a different one for right.