Why is it you can get understanding of someone’s face by moving your eyes over it left to right or right to left, but written English is only intelligible read left to right?
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Humans are designed from birth (through evolution) to be extremely good at recognizing faces. That’s why we see faces in so many places like in burnt toast, in a water stain, in a mountain range, the list goes on forever. We are not designed to understand written language, we need to learn it.
In concept any word could be understood read in either direction (in fact in practice they are often read as a single unit). The English language though is arranged such that some statements or descriptors are dependent on order. Multiple sentences often build upon each other.
For example: “John got up earlier than usual. He was unhappy about this.” Now if we read right to left we would first read a sentence that made little sense; who is “he”? Unhappy about what?
In contrast a face is just an object. The right half of the face holds not special order compared to the left, in concept they could be entirely independent.
Bacause face recognition is not the same as reading. With reading you learnt how to read from left to write because that is how coherent words are written
With faces it is a bit different. It is like when you see a dog yoh automatically know that it is a dog.
Same with a cup of tea.
Language has rules about how words in a sentence modify other words in a sentence. We’ve learned to read left to right, and when we see those words that modify others, we can properly map them to the right thing in the sentence. If you start reading it backwards, then suddenly those mappings need to be retrained.
With something like visualizing an object, there isn’t the same structured rules to it, so it can be processed in any way.
Because language unfolds over *time*, and the reading direction corresponds to the direction of time. Similarly, you can also only read a comic book in one direction, if you want to understand what happens when.
You can look at a single symbol all at once. You can look at a single face all at once. You can string letters together to encode something happening over time (i.e. spoken language). You can string faces together to encode something happening over time (i.e. an emotion unfolding or changing).
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