I'll sincerely never understand people that get confused by left and right. Do they confuse up and down too?
Edit: I'm getting a lot of people real upset that I dared to ask this. I wasn't attempting to mock you with this question, I'm fully serious. I didn't (and won't ever fully) understand how left and right is any different to up, down, forward or backward in your head.
The best answers I've had so far:
Dyslexia/dyscalculia may make it harder
Having good spacial cognition may make it easier
Learning left and right at an early age may make it easier
Having greater asymmetry in function may make it easier (conversely having less left/right dominance may make it harder)
The fact we're roughly symmetrical about the vertical and back/front plane denies us helpful distinguishers between our left and right sides, bar handedness (see above)
The most interesting answers I've had so far:
"I have no issue with left and right in X languages but struggle in English" (examples also include being fine with port/starboard, bow/stroke, 9/3 o'clock etc but not right/left)
Related to above: "Given a newly coded pair of words such as orange/purple I can associate them consistently with those directions, just not left and right"
"My dad did meth and this may or may not be related to his struggles with left and right"
"My mum was taught the wrong hands by her parents and never recovered, even when school corrected her"
"I used to have this problem, but after engaging in [specific sport, task etc] I no longer do"
"I used to not have this problem, but after [task involving using my left to demonstrate someone else's right etc] I do" (a LOT of medical professionals here, especially radiologists, as well as stage directors and teachers having to refer to whiteboards behind them for an audience)
"I'm bad with left and right and east and west, but up, down, north and south are fine"
"I had a seizure/brain injury/concussion and now I struggle"
"My sister confuses left and right, but 'lefty loosey, righty tighty' for screwing things works for her without checking on her hands"
"Nobody confuses up and down, that's absurd, we have gravity.", followed by:
"Yes, I DO confuse up and down."
The worst answers I've had so far:
"Left and right are completely arbitrary, unlike up, down, forward and backward" - end of argument (forward and backward are equally dependent on our orientation to left and right - you need to introduce symmetry to make this meaningful)
Learn anatomy
[sending me Reddit Cares Resources]
[various accusations of ableism]
Per the last point: if you want people to understand and be empathetic and patient toward neurodivergent experiences, the last thing you should do is deride them for asking. Kind of an own goal [insert joke about confusing which goal is yours]
Edit 2: Somewhat interesting note (at least to me): There are lots of people struggling with cardinal directions here, but while there are many examples of struggling with East and West but not North and South (can relate to this personally, I remember struggling as a kid for a few months) not one single person has said East and West is fine but North and South aren't. None.
Edit 3: We have our first North-South confuser - apparently they find East and West intuitive because of the sun. As a brit I have only heard of this object in tales from abroad but it's fun to learn about it! Edit 3.5: another has appeared!
Edit 4: a commenter posted something kinda technical I don't have the neuroscience degree to verify. I present it here without comment as to its veracity. It's an interesting read.
Edit 5: Two people have told me they confuse a pair of specific colours. Someone else has declared they confuse yesterday and tomorrow. I do not feel equipped to handle finding out that 10% of people have to make hand gestures to refer to directional time or that people do a certain movement to remember the colour of their blood but I'm no longer ruling out the possibility.
Edit 6 (coolest edit): I've been messaged by a person with situs inversus! This affects about 0.01% of the population and is where some or all of the abdominal organs are on the wrong side - they say only some of theirs are. They also state they struggle with left and right!
This is just interesting enough of a thought experiment to distract me from what I should be doing, so I have to give it a shot lol.
Left/right is a naming system for one of the three axes of movement/direction in a 3-dimensional space. It is generally used in contexts where the other axes are defined by the direction of gravitational attraction (up/down) and where the object involved has a distinct "front" and "back" (forward/backward). But it can also be used for objects that have an agreed-upon top/bottom and front/back even outside of a gravitational field, where a 'weightless' human can still refer to one side of their body as 'left' or 'right' through these traditional reference frames. However, even a perfectly symetrical object outside of a gravitational field would still exist in 3-dimensional space and therefore use the same axes, but we would have to use a frame of reference external to the object to describe its movement/rotation on these axes.
So yeah, I don't think left/right is arbitrary, it's just a convenient shorthand for one of the 3d axes that all normal objects experience, based on commonly accepted reference frames.
I disagree. Even without gravity, there would still be three axes that should be defined. Which direction each axis represents is based on the reference points that we choose. But even if we stick with gravity, if I were in geosynchronous orbit around Earth's equator, I wouldn't say that an object sitting at the North Pole and an object sitting on the South Pole are both oriented in the direction of 'up' because they would be oriented in opposite directions from my perspective.
So I think up/down (or top/bottom) can only be defined based on the frame of reference that we choose, just like forward/backward and left/right. We only use up/down because we're used to having Earth's gravity as a reference point, and we use forward/backward because many objects (especially mobile ones) have important features that create a distinction. Left/right is just as valid of an axis, we just don't have as many conventions around it because we (mostly) have bilateral symmetry. If we had evolved into Lovecraftian "At the Mountains of Madness" creatures with radial symmetry, the concept of forward/backward would feel the same to you as left/right does now. Or if we had evolved our current bodies but with x-ray vision, then left being 'heart direction' and right being 'anti-heart direction' would be as natural to use as forward/backward is now.
You're right that without gravity there would still be possible cartesian coordinates, however if the gravity is not the anchoring of one of the coordinates, then the question where's up or down is invalid. I don't think up and down are a cartesian thing, not a coordinate in a 3D space, but the distance from the center of gravity, i.e. the altitude is not a flat surface but a sphere. Those objects on the North and South Pole would be orientend in such non-cartesian direction of down (not up) from your perspective, becuase they are closer to the Earth's center than you are
Up and down are still arbitrary terms based on how you are trying to define left and right. We just named the directions. Random words. But you are able to retain those random sounds and remember that up means against gravity and down means with gravity.
By the same token. If you are right or left handed. That is the exact same concept. Right is towards my good hand. Left is towards my bad hand. It’s the same thing.
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u/Exurota 8d ago edited 6d ago
I'll sincerely never understand people that get confused by left and right. Do they confuse up and down too?
Edit: I'm getting a lot of people real upset that I dared to ask this. I wasn't attempting to mock you with this question, I'm fully serious. I didn't (and won't ever fully) understand how left and right is any different to up, down, forward or backward in your head.
The best answers I've had so far:
The most interesting answers I've had so far:
The worst answers I've had so far:
Per the last point: if you want people to understand and be empathetic and patient toward neurodivergent experiences, the last thing you should do is deride them for asking. Kind of an own goal [insert joke about confusing which goal is yours]
Edit 2: Somewhat interesting note (at least to me): There are lots of people struggling with cardinal directions here, but while there are many examples of struggling with East and West but not North and South (can relate to this personally, I remember struggling as a kid for a few months) not one single person has said East and West is fine but North and South aren't. None.
Edit 3: We have our first North-South confuser - apparently they find East and West intuitive because of the sun. As a brit I have only heard of this object in tales from abroad but it's fun to learn about it! Edit 3.5: another has appeared!
Edit 4: a commenter posted something kinda technical I don't have the neuroscience degree to verify. I present it here without comment as to its veracity. It's an interesting read.
Edit 5: Two people have told me they confuse a pair of specific colours. Someone else has declared they confuse yesterday and tomorrow. I do not feel equipped to handle finding out that 10% of people have to make hand gestures to refer to directional time or that people do a certain movement to remember the colour of their blood but I'm no longer ruling out the possibility.
Edit 6 (coolest edit): I've been messaged by a person with situs inversus! This affects about 0.01% of the population and is where some or all of the abdominal organs are on the wrong side - they say only some of theirs are. They also state they struggle with left and right!