Nothing spatial is intuitive for me. Up or down and above or below are clear. But when I encounter left or right, clockwise or counter-clockwise, east or west — I have to put intense effort into matching the word with a direction.
I dealt with this spatial idiocy for many years by flapping my hand, using the kinetic energy to help my brain connect the direction with the word. When I’m driving and one of my passengers says “Turn left!” I flap what I think is my left hand for a second or two until my brain gets the hint. And if I’d gotten it wrong, someone in the car hopefully corrects me (“No, the other left!”) before I actually made the wrong turn.
Or I’d be talking with someone and I’d say, “So when you get to the plaza, you’ll need to look to your [pause while I flap my right hand] right, then…”, while ignoring the perplexed look this sometimes would get.
My flap-dependent way of matching the words “left” and “right” with the proper direction could sometimes be embarrassing. Such as when running a meeting during a web development project and multiple times having to say “in the upper right” or “in the left nav…”, flapping for a live audience! [Thank goodness for online meetings, right? Especially when I can claim my camera is broken.]
Finally, after flapping for most of my life, I’d had enough! In the early 2000s I marched myself into a tattoo parlor and had a beautiful, extra-scripty “L” tattooed on my left palm. I had to contact several tattoo artists before finding one who would do the job, as apparently palm tattoos are especially tough to do with good results. I’d asked for it to be in the center of my palm, but the inker said we needed to compromise.
And yes, it was very painful.
Why didn’t I also have an R tattooed on my right hand? Because I didn’t need to add the time to actually read the letters. I’m trying to make up for my brain not intuitively/instantly matching the words right and left with the correct direction. By only marking one hand, I am not adding another ~1/4-second or so lag for my brain to interpret those symbols and tell them apart. I know the marked hand is the left. This is why it’s okay for me to have chosen such an over-decorative L: I could’ve tattooed a picture of a rutabaga there and it would have served the same purpose.
It took a while for me to kick the flap-habit, but now when I am faced with the words left or right, or if I know the direction I want but need a word for it, I hold up a palm and look for the L (or the absence of it). Not only do I no longer need to flap, I now have a guarantee of getting the correct answer [almost] every time! (Well, I still move my hand, but it’s nowhere near as silly-looking as the flapping was.)
It’s also about time, and…
But my spatial idiocy doesn’t just apply to direction in space and matching words to the directions. This spatial/direction confusion extends to anything that requires going in a specific direction. Including calendars, screws, water faucets, clocks, math, and probably more that I can’t think of at the moment.
In general I’m okay with time: I can tell time just fine, thank you very much. But calculations with dates and times don’t have to get too complex to throw me. “What time will it be in 45 minutes,” is tough enough, but if you start to throw in multiple time zones then this becomes something that I’ll need to figure out in writing, possibly with diagrams.
I used to work with a large team that spanned the globe, so I would have to do things like set up an eight-week meeting schedule with alternating start times spanning five different time zones from Portland to Seoul. What a nightmare! I can’t begin to tell you what a game-changer it was for me when I discovered the incredible timeanddate.com website. Using this tool, now calendaring across time zones is pretty easy.
Here’s another case: I am a knitter. Even about ten years into this, I still must frequently consult my notes on when the yarn should be in the front or back, which direction to wrap yarn around the needles, and how to tell if a stitch is backward: On the left needle, the rightmost leg of the stitch should be to the front. Easy, right?
One of the most impactful examples of my directional issue (aside from occasional wrong turns when I’m driving) is math. Adding, subtracting, and multiplying are fine. But once I get to even a very simple division problem, I can’t seem to intuit which number is going into what. To say I have math anxiety is an understatement, especially when I must grab a calculator during a meeting for what everyone else in the room seems to consider a simple problem.
I do not have dyslexia or dysgraphia: my reading and writing are fine. I can effortlessly, intuitively tell which way letters go when they are in their proper context of words and sentences. But if I see letters and numbers out of context, especially if I am stressed or tired, I can very easily get confused.
Is that E or L backwards? No idea. Let me put it into a word… Okay, I see which way it goes now.
This is why it really doesn’t help at all when someone [inevitably] says: “It’s easy to know your right from your left: Just use your index finger and thumb to make an L, and that one is your left!” Yeah? Well, I can make a pretty convincing L with either hand, and because it’s out of the context of a word, I don’t automatically intuit which one is backward.
I used to be constantly embarrassed about this, but somewhere along the line, in my 40s or 50s, I was able to let that go. We all have our quirks, and this is mine. Well, it’s one of mine, Okay, it’s one of many of mine. In any case, it’s just part of who I am and it doesn’t really bother me any more.
- Except when I insist we must turn left, the driver turns left, then I realize I used the wrong word…
- Or when I am assembling furniture and am upside down and struggle to figure out which way to turn a screw…
- Or when I need to do even simple math in front of others…
Yeah, but it’s okay! There are far worse issues people have to deal with, so I’m fine with this easy one.
So what’s it all about?
Neuroscientists call this phenomenon left-right confusion (or right-left confusion/disorientation), and there are several theories for what causes it. I copied (and then edited) the below from this StackExchange page. (I normally would have just linked to the page, but there is also some incorrect information there that I don’t want to link to.)
The brain region called the left parietal lobe is responsible for spatial sense and navigation (proprioception) and sense of touch (somatosensation). It is said that if you are one of the 20% of people who has a problem detecting left from right, you may very well have other problems associated with the left parietal lobe.
Although not definitive, executive director of the Handedness Research Institute, M.K. Holder, believes the problem resides in the degree to which brain function is “lateralized,” or divided between hemispheres. Men and right-handed people tend to be more strongly lateralized, thus women and left-handed people are more likely to have this peculiarity. To put it simply, the more “biased” the brain is toward one hemisphere over the other, the more likely there is to be left-right confusion.
Another intriguing theory suggests that left/right confusion may be tied to your personality type. Phillippe De Sainte Maresville, a Jungian expert with a left/right problem, believes people that combine the (S)ensing method of gathering information and the (F)eeling process of decision making are more prone to this problem of left-right confusion.2
Sources:
* Knitting photo from stitchandstory.us
1. “Left or Right? Why Some Smart People Confuse Them” By Erin Froehlich [smartlivingnetwork]
2. “Can’t tell your left from your right? You needn’t worry about it” By Susan Perry [minnpost]
3. Perietal lobe [wikipedia]