Why do people confuse left and right but not up and down?
In:
Up is the direction of the sky, down is towards the earth, and the constant presence of gravity makes it pretty obvious pretty much all of the time what is up and what is down. It also doesn’t really change much throughout the day as we are usually facing roughly the same way up.
Front is whatever direction you’re facing (and back the opposite) – also no confusion there.
But left and right is pretty arbitrary. It’s hard even to come up with a formal definition. Merriam Webster says:
>of, relating to, situated on, or being the side of the body in which the heart is mostly located
The Cambridge English Dictionary has:
> **on or towards the** [**side**](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/side) **of** [**your**](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/your) [**body**](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/body) **that is to the** [**west**](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/west) **when you are** [**facing**](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/facing) [**north**](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/north)**:**
So that first definition means you need to know where your heart is (or at least, where most people’s heart is). The second one relies on the definition of “west”, which is itself arbitrary. In short, really the only way to know left from right is just to remember. Some people are better at this than others. For some it is a totally internalized thing. For others, it’s like their credit card PIN. Even if you know it by heart, you do need to think about it, even if only for a fraction of a second. So while you usually get it right, when you’re under stress or time pressure with a lot of other things on your mind, you can make mistakes.
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