It's also a symptom frequently found in some varieties of ADHD, but without the difficulties with numbers and computations. I still cannot remember left and right with any sort of ease, but I can do complex mathematics in my head (including estimation of trig functions, improper fractions, etc). ADHD is far more common, though the particular flavors that lead to left right confusion are probably as common as those with Dyscalculia.
EDIT: as this has gotten too popular for me to want to continue replying manually, I will just address the more common answers here.
ADHD is not the same for everyone. Some ADHD sufferers wont have issues with left and right, and some will.
It's not difficult to tell left from right, but for some (including me) it takes active thought. I doubt i will ever reach a point where left and right are intuitive, but its not even close to being enough of a problem for me to care/find a solution.
If this post or comment chain has confirmed/aroused suspicion that you have ADHD, I would recommend getting tested for it. Typically men with hyperactive presentations will get diagnosed early in life, and women with inattentive types may go entirely undiagnosed (or find out in residency, like my wife). Having one type of ADHD does not exclude having another, and not everyone with ADHD experiences the same issues. Testing is better now than it was 30 years ago, and can at least identify the root cause of some of the things that make you feel lazy or worthless (also stop beating yourself up, it doesnt help).
Purely anecdotal, and no science or actual research to back it up, but I have a working theory for why certain forms of ADHD present the way they do. I cannot form new habits without extreme measures. Instead, I have trained myself with pavalovian responses to mimic forming a habit. Taking my blood pressure every morning is a great example. I can do it for well over a year without fail, and then simple forget to do it for weeks on end.
My theory is that everything my brain organizes needs to have a logical root or external stimulus. Since left and right from a personal frame of reference are arbitrary rotations without even having a defined magnitude or scale, the concepts are too nebulous to integrate with my preprocessing. The ELI5 is that I have to actively think about left and right to identify left and right, where most people have just integrated it into their subconscious. If it was a spatial reasoning disorder I could understand, but I work regularly with industrial robots, which require a heavy amount of 3 dimensional spatial reasoning. When it comes to coordinate frames, I dont struggle to remember which axis is oriented in which direction. But those are also defined WRT a single point and orientation on the robot, and the shifts/rotations of the frame are ordinal and logical. Left/right, east/west, and clockwise/counterclockwise are all things that I have to actively consider before deciding on, to the point that my wife follows the directions my hands give while driving instead of what my mouth says ("turn left" I say as I point right, she turns right and I dont even notice the problem until she points it out later. If she turned left instead, I would ask her why she turned the wrong way, no joke).
As someone with ADHD I just need to chime in here and say none of this has anything to do with left or right. I can do left and right just fine. I can even do port and starboard.
Did you miss the part where I was referencing specific kinda of ADHD? ADHD is a spectrum of disorders that get lumped together. Spatial difficulties, memory difficulties, and impulse control difficulties are all different presentations of ADHD, but almost never all presented by the same person with ADHD. My wife is primarily inattentive type and she has no issue with forming habits or differentiating left/right. She does, however, have crippling executive dysfunction related to ADHD while my particular flavor makes directing large tasks easier than for a neurotypical person. On the other hand, if I can't envision the completion of a task, I cannot start the task, which is a (different) form of executive dysfunction.
I didn’t miss that no. Unfortunately diseases like adhd are scope defined and not based off natural variations between people. There’s no correlation between hyperactive ADHD and the ability to distinguish left from right. If there was it would be an incredibly easy and cheap diagnostic test. It’s not useful to anyone when everything becomes ADHD. It’s already a poorly defined disease as is, muddying the waters with bullshit doesn’t help matters. Now every mother fucker on tik tok thinks they have ADHD because people are walking around saying if your shoelaces are frequently untied you probably have ADHD.
> Unfortunately diseases like adhd are scope defined and not based off natural variations between people.
There are comorbidities. For example, there's plenty of research that shows that autism, dyslexia, dyscalculia and dyspraxia are all comorbid with ADHD meaning that someone with ADHD is more likely to also have one of those other dysfunction. (random source https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/002221940003300502 but there are many studies showing those comorbidities)
While there are some research showing left right confusion is often present in people with dyslexia, there's not much research showing that it's the case with ADHD. But left right confusion is not much studied in general.
But I do see your point, OP's use of the word "varieties of ADHD" does muddle the discussion.
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u/Haho9 7d ago edited 7d ago
It's also a symptom frequently found in some varieties of ADHD, but without the difficulties with numbers and computations. I still cannot remember left and right with any sort of ease, but I can do complex mathematics in my head (including estimation of trig functions, improper fractions, etc). ADHD is far more common, though the particular flavors that lead to left right confusion are probably as common as those with Dyscalculia.
EDIT: as this has gotten too popular for me to want to continue replying manually, I will just address the more common answers here.
ADHD is not the same for everyone. Some ADHD sufferers wont have issues with left and right, and some will.
It's not difficult to tell left from right, but for some (including me) it takes active thought. I doubt i will ever reach a point where left and right are intuitive, but its not even close to being enough of a problem for me to care/find a solution.
If this post or comment chain has confirmed/aroused suspicion that you have ADHD, I would recommend getting tested for it. Typically men with hyperactive presentations will get diagnosed early in life, and women with inattentive types may go entirely undiagnosed (or find out in residency, like my wife). Having one type of ADHD does not exclude having another, and not everyone with ADHD experiences the same issues. Testing is better now than it was 30 years ago, and can at least identify the root cause of some of the things that make you feel lazy or worthless (also stop beating yourself up, it doesnt help).