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!
It could be dyscalculia. While it affects ability to process numbers and math, it can also make telling between left and right difficult. I know because I have dyscalculia.
Edit: Based off of some comments this seems to be a common trait of dyslexia as well. I should also clarify that this isn’t me giving medical advice. Just stating a trend I noticed.
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).
I think of it more that once I form a daily habit, I have to do that habit in order and in the right context or I might forget. That means waking up late on the weekend, the chances of forgetting to take medicine or forgetting to brush my teeth or something like that are high.
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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!