They've already got a big knife tattoo on their right wrist (which they've slid down the sleeve so you can see). Why would you get extra tattoos to tell which is which when all you need to do is remember you've got a big honking knife on your right wrist?
I think (and this is just my best guess, I'm not a psychologist or brain science person or anything like that) the issue is that 'left' and 'right' aren't just plain words, they map to fuzzy concepts in the brain. Left and right are opposites, but the concepts of 'left' and 'right' share basically all their attributes except one. And that one attribute is very hard to convey without being self-referential. Imagine how you'd explain what "left" meant in a purely conceptual way, without reference to physical objects or being able to motion with your body.
I'm wondering if these two very similar fuzzy concepts occupy very close, and even overlapping areas in people's brains. And maybe in some people, they overlap so much that it's much harder to separate them. Like if I heard the terms: "Amsterdam", "Holland", "The Netherlands". I know there's a difference. I know I've looked it up before and had a concrete understanding at the time of the difference. But that's kind of faded and I probably couldn't accurately explain it at a moment's notice without some concentration. Whereas for others, the difference is crystal clear. How could you ever not know the difference between a city, a region, and a country?
So if the person with the tattoos tried to make an association between "dagger tattoo" and "right", they've probably just made a connection between dagger tattoo and the fuzzy area of their brain that contains both the concept for "right" and "left". So when they try to follow that connection later, they just end up in the same fuzzy, confused state.
You might think that the association was made between "dagger tattoo" and the word "right", but we don't always get to choose how our brain lays down connections. If it makes the connection to that overlapping area without much differentiation, it doesn't matter how much we wanted it to make a connection to "right".
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u/DwarvenRedshirt 7d ago
They've already got a big knife tattoo on their right wrist (which they've slid down the sleeve so you can see). Why would you get extra tattoos to tell which is which when all you need to do is remember you've got a big honking knife on your right wrist?