I keep seeing this happen over and over again. Here and anywhere else on the internet people are typing. People say east when they mean west and vice versa. This goes along with a general human tendency to confuse left and right.
I have never see anyone confuse north and south. This says something about our brains and bilateral symmetry.
Just now, in a geographical thread, two posters separately confused east with west, confusing the heck out of me trying to comprehend what they were saying. My usual go-to heuristic is not “Doper says the contrary of what they mean.” I suspect in that thread, Dopers were getting their mental wires crossed because the focus was on the Pacific Ocean. Brains that have a fix on east and west based on the Atlantic Ocean get their directions mixed up when it’s the other side of the world.
It’s also not that uncommon for people to confused left and right. Poking around on Google it seems that left/right and east/west confusion are related to how the parietal lobes in the brain handle spatial orientation.
As you note, people don’t usually confuse north and south, so one trick to getting east and west right is to first focus on north/south and figure out what direction you mean from there.
Apparently left/right and east/west confusion affects women more often than men. I assume that this is also related to the fact that men handle spatial orientation and things like geometric rotation better than women (on average).
The was also a recent thread that asked what the furthest one had traveled in each cardinal direction. Nobody could agree on what exactly that meant concerning east and west.
As discussed in the aforementioned other thread, the lines of latitude have a clear physical basis, starting at the equator and moving north and south to the poles. There is no such physical basis for the lines of longitude, which arbitrarily center on Greenwich, for no actual physical reason. That’s part of the fundamental difference between north-south and east-west.
Another is that maps are typically oriented with north being up and south down. East-west is relative to that, and left-right confusion, or just momentarily forgetting that “when facing north, west is left”, can make the east-west distinction more difficult.
I don’t have left-right confusion, but when it comes to east-west, it sometimes takes an extra moment’s thought to get it right. Sometimes I visualize a map, or just remember that west is left when facing north – something I may sometimes have to explicitly tell myself when making a turn in an unfamiliar place if I don’t have my handy GPS with me.
I think a confounding issue is that the ancients picked words for those directions that are too similar. From which modern European-derived languages have: “east” & “west” in English, este & oeste in Spanish, Ost & West in German, etc.
If east was “east” and west was “stew” we would make far fewer mistakes.
Yes, yes, left/right and east/west confusion is a real thing in human mental processing. But IMO a LOT of online mistakes are word adjacency typos. The words are too similar and get stored real close together in brain-space.
And of course “e” and “w” being adjacent on the QWERTY keyboard means if you miss that first letter, spellcheck will help you convert one direction into the other, probably unnoticed.
I grew up in Ohio. I didn’t have orientation problems then. I later lived in the Boston, Massachusetts area. I also didn’t have orientation problems. I finally moved to Los Angeles, California. I then had an orientation problem.
I somehow had associated “east” with “towards the ocean”. And kept that in Los Angeles, thus making me switch east and west. I think I’ve improved, but hard to be sure.
~ raises hand ~ I confuse north and south all the time. Never on a map, but in the real world. And east and west, but never left and right.
If I say “towards the ocean” or “towards Mexico,” I’m fine, but where I live north just feels south in a way that’s hard to explain—because it makes no sense at all.
I have occasionally driven the wrong direction, even in my hometown, because I got the cardinal direction wrong.
I’ve done it occasionally. Both the house where I grew up and the apartment where I live now are fairly close to the Lake, meaning that most places I go to are at least somewhat south of me. Between orienting my mental map with my destination on top, and the fact that points south of me are often literally up from me, I sometimes think of the direction towards my destination as “north”. I usually catch myself before I say it out loud.
Also, when I’ve visited Chicago, I’ve always gotten North and East mixed up. That one’s more straightforward: Growing up in Cleveland, I have it hard-coded into my brain that the direction towards the lake is north.
You’re right, though, that it’s harder to confuse north and south: When I’ve visited Toronto, I did not confuse north and south, even though “the direction towards the lake” was now opposite.
As Douglas Hofstadter once pointed out, there’s no equivalent term in English (and perhaps in any known language) for “side-by-side” or “abreast” in the vertical dimension. (His suggestions: “bebove” or “aneath.”)
But also, there was a recent thread about mahjong. It is really simple: the dealer is always seated East. The player to the right of the dealer is South. Across from the dealer is West, and the player to the left of the dealer is North. Play proceeds East → South → West → North. Same for dealing the tiles, but do not forget to draw them proceeding clockwise, obviously.
When I visit the Northern Hemisphere, the north feels south in a way that is easy to explain – the Sun is on the wrong side of the world. And that means that East and West are the wrong way around too.
