Hmmm. I'll try. I guess the main issue is that I rarely ever deal with data in binary format. The times that I've dealt with binary strings has probably been mo

Hmmm. I'll try. I guess the main issue is that I rarely ever deal with data in binary format. The times that I've dealt with binary strings has probably been most often as binary numbers in some sort of programming or math puzzle. Thinking of it as "multiplying" or "dividing" by a power of 2 feels more natural to me than "shifting" bits left or right. Maybe this is because I was a math major instead of CS :p If I had more experience with lower level languages and / or dealing with raw binary data formats, I probably would have internalized it better by now.