Why do some struggle to tell left from right?
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Just googled. “Mixing up left and right **can be a sign of stress or anxiety, and it can also be a symptom of a cognitive disorder, such as dyscalculia**. It can also be caused by an overstimulated mind, which can cause confusion. Additionally, some people are born with an **innate confusion** about left and right.”
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Speaking only for myself here. I’m mixed-handed. I use both hands but am not ambidextrous. I write with one, throw with the other and so on. Rarely but it does happen that I’ll mix up left and right due to not having a dominant side. At least this was my doctor’s prognosis?
I’d guess because it’s learned and somewhat less intuitive as up and down. It’s easy to understand how people might struggle to remember west and east, so you can kind of extrapolate from there. You would think at some point you just internalize it and the struggle stops, and I’d wager the vast majority do.
It’s possible dyslexia and similar learning difficulties might make it a harder thing to grasp for some.
My guess is because people have left/right symmetry but not top/bottom symmetry.
Interestingly, not only do I sometimes get left/right confused (but not top/bottom) I also sometimes get east/west confused (but not north/south).
I suppose because up and down i obvious, but left and right are semi-arbitary concepts. It only matters when you socialize with humans for some activity. Even for hunting its not that important, humans don’t hunt by going into intense 5 minute battles like in hollywood, traditional hunting without traps was more like punch of humans chasing down an animal until its too exhausted to continue (this could be accelerated by having already inflicted wounds on it).
I mean when in primitive survival situation do you need to know left from right? Very rarely, and its not like you concsiously think “ok, i am using my right hand now”, you just use what is instinctive to you, aka right or left handedness and move on in life.
Its a myth that evolution tries to create perfect beings. It does not. It tries to create beings good enough to survive, that is all it cares about, and being able to tell left from right just has never really been that relevant from evolutionary pov, at least for species as a whole.
Doctor here – in healthcare we have to flip everything we see in order to correctly document things (your right shoulder is on my left field of vision, for example) and we do this automatically, so this is something I struggle with sometimes because you’re undoing an automatic flip
I’m dyslexic, and so is my mom. We both do it. Just like reading and writing, the more I practice the better I do with it.
I would say, it’s just kind of not how my brain works. People ask how I don’t know my right from my left, and I always want to ask how they don’t know how to change the brakes on their car, or rebuild a bicycle, or repair your espresso machine. I can take something apart and understand how it works, that’s how my brain works. Left and right less so.
My mom is the same way. She got into home repairs after retired. She redid her entire kitchen. New cabinets, tile work, gas lines, plumbing, trim, and paint. She’s a woman in her 60s.
People’s brains are weird.
I dunno about the rest of you, but I mess them up because I’m left handed and I’ve lived a life of listening to instructions telling me to “take (the thing) in your right hand…” And having to mentally change that to “left hand” because what they *meant* was “dominant hand”
And this then goes through every single bit of instruction for the whole thing. Step 2 is “take other piece in left hand”? Well actually for me it’s “right hand.”
Quick: Which hand is your west hand?
Unless you belong to one of a few cultures that exclusively use cardinal directions*, that’s not easy to answer. It’s not someone you’re intuitively tracking. Humans aren’t born knowing left and right either. It’s something we have to learn, basically through rote memorization, until it becomes second nature—just like how you learned your times table. And just like some people struggle to get the times table down for one reason or another, it’s not surprising the same would apply to left and right.
* I mention cultures that use cardinal direction because they really drive the point home. There are cultures that have no concept of left and right. They say something is to their north, or to their west. They know which direction is which as intuitively as you know left and right—they don’t even have to think about it.
You (likely) don’t have an intuitive sense of cardinal direction like that, because you weren’t raised in a culture that forced you to develop one. Neither form of direction is something we’re born with—it’s a cultural thing that we learn. It’s just so *ingrained* in our culture that it seems natural.
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