Everytime I want to give a direction or specify which side I’m refering to, I need a second or two to assure myself that I’m properly applying the words left or right correctly. I always have to consiously refer to my left arm.
The same when someone gives me directions. “Turn left” she says, and I have to have a moment to confirm which way is left. On occasion, even after giving myself a moment I’ll still screw up.
It is frustrating for my wife. It is frustrating for me.
I have no problem with forward or backward.
I think it may be because I’m left handed.
Or maybe I have a specific brain damage.
Anyway, anyone else have the same problem? If so, are you left handed?
You are not alone. I too have “directional dyslexia” with my right and left.
It gets to the point where I actually have to hold up my hands with the thumbs stretched out. The “L” means left. Seriously. 39 years old, and I have to use pre-school tricks. My wife is a very patient woman.
Yes, friend, I too had this specific disability. It was quite embarassing – here you are, an intelligent, capable person, with a pretty good sense of direction (at least as relates to finding your way around a new town), and you don’t instinctually know your left from your right. It really got bad for me, because the normal tricks weren’t working – namely, what everyone says about pretending to pick up a pencil and seeing which hand instinctively reaches out. Somehow I could even confuse myself on that one; maybe I was supposed to be ambidextrous or something.
Then a couple years back someone pointed out to me that if you look at the back of your hand and make a right angle with your thumb and index finger, you can see an “L” on your left hand. So that’s been my crutch ever since. The moment I hear “left” or “right,” I automatically start making the “L”, and then I know for sure I’m picking the right one. I don’t even have to make the full “L” anymore; just start to make it. Close friends will catch me doing it and still rib me about it.
Me too. I think it is some kind of minor brain “difference.” I have to do the “which hand makes the L” trick too, only sometimes I get confused about which way an L goes (I am not dyslexic). Even when I think I’ve really got it down, I’ll make a boneheaded mistake.
The oddest thing is that is only left and right. I am very good at navigating, mapreading, finding my way, etc. (though if I am giving directions I have to check and recheck that I have said “left” and “right” in the right places). I am very good about North, South, East and West and would prefer to give directions that way, but nobody else seems to know how to use them.
If somebody says, “Turn left. Now! Now, turn left! Omigod, if you don’t turn left we’re all gonna die!” I usually have to think for a second. Which hand is my left hand? It is easy for me to tell my left hand from my right hand, I’m never confused about that. Then I can turn left.
Now if someone screamed, “Turn east! East, I say, now!” I’d usually have no trouble.
Yep. My husband keeps threatening to have ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ tattooed onto the correct left and right hands.
I swear, if I hear him say, “No! MY left!” one more time, I’ll scream.
Count me in as another lefty who has trouble with right and left and uses the left hand makes an L trick.
When I give people driving directions, it usually sounds like, “Okay, exit the freeway and turn right. You should be heading south. Then turn left on Main, which will put you heading east.” This way, if I give them the wrong right/left direction, at least they have the ordinal directions to help them a bit. I’ve definitely told people to go the wrong way more than once.
“Turn left here… What are you doing? Why aren’t you turning the right way? What do you mean that’s not left?! Dammit! Turn the other way. No, the other, other way! Sorry!”
Yup, I’m left-and-right challenged, too. Like the rest of you, I have no problem with other directions, I am able to visualize going places easily, I just have trouble with left and right. For me, right and left are this way and that way.
Female, right-handed but more than a little ambidextrous.
[QUOTE=Lemur866]
If somebody says, “Turn left. Now! Now, turn left! Omigod, if you don’t turn left we’re all gonna die!” I usually have to think for a second. Which hand is my left hand? It is easy for me to tell my left hand from my right hand, I’m never confused about that. Then I can turn left.
Now if someone screamed, “Turn east! East, I say, now!” I’d usually have no trouble.
[QUOTE]
I’m the exact opposite. I’ve never had trouble with Left/Right, at least not since I was young. Don’t get me wrong, I do have an excellent sense of direction and orientation. However, for whatever reason, I always want to swap East and West. I don’t get them confused persay, the word “West” just feels Eastish, and the word “East” feels Westish. So, I often want to use the opposite word to describe the direction I actually mean. I’ve worked on it and pretty much fixed it though. FWIW, I never have any trouble with North/South.
I have this problem too. I have less trouble with north, south, east and west than I do with left and right. Then again, I’m kind of messed up anyway… I’m left-handed at some things and right-handed at others. (Semibidextrous?)
I’m left handed and I have this problem too. If you’re an oddball, at least you’re not a lonely oddball!
I think for me, I habitually have translated references to ‘right hand’ to mean ‘dominant hand’ when following directions for sports, knitting etc. because I so often have had to accommodate for right-handed instructions, and naturally substitute ‘left hand’ in these instances. So that makes for confusion.
When giving driving directions, I prefer to say a landmark is on the driver side or the passenger side. I never do get those screwed up.
Oh, I have this problem! I always have to stop and think and hold out my hands to check. For some reason, my left hand feels like my right hand–even though I’m right-handed.
Same here as the rest of you. My trick is to picture words on a page. You read English from left to right, so the side of the page where the writing starts is the left side, and so forth. I also have trouble with East and West.
I’m dreadful when it comes to determining “left” and “right” quickly. I write right-handed (via natural inclination, not retraining), but I do everything else with my left hand (or foot). To this day, I maintain that some of my traumatic (heh) PE difficulties stemmed from this. Imagine the following conversation:
Teacher: Is anyone left handed?
Me: <confused and already humiliated> I think I might be…
Teacher: You might be? What hand do you write with?
Me: <raising my right hand and trying to work it out in my head> My…right.
Teacher: Then you’re right handed.
Me: But I really think I might be left handed.
Teacher: If you write with your right hand, you’re right handed.
See, in my sport of choice–horseback riding–the left/right handed issue just didn’t come up…this is why I honestly didn’t know. I just assumed I was somehow completely unathletic and uncoordinated when I couldn’t do anything. We didn’t get this straightened out for good until I started high school and started to golf with my father. Not only do I prefer to do all athletic tasks left-handed (like my grandfather who does everything left-handed), the difference in my left-handed vs. right-handed ability is rather profound (my father is the lucky one–he can’t write with his left-hand, but he’s ambidextrous when it comes to everything else).
Oh, how middle school PE would have been different if I had known this! The horror stories I could tell, most of them stemming from this combination of athletic failure and the fact that, for one year, they made me and two other girls play PE with the boys because we were all almost six feet tall. I not only had a rep as a clumsy mess, but I was also a solid D-cup. How many footballs (or basketballs…or soccer balls) to the chest can one person sustain? Lots, unfortunately…
Another lefty with this same problem here. When I used to wear a watch it was a piece of cake, watch was on the right wrist. When I stopped wearing a watch it still wasn’t too difficult, I just had to think which wrist the watch used to be on. Now, about six years since I stopped wearing a watch, it ends up with me spending several seconds trying to remember which wrist used to have a watch on it, was it that one? No wait, the other. Wait… yes? Shoot there goes the turn.
Yep, me too. I don’t really understand those people who can effortlessly and unconsciously distinguish between left and right. I mean, what’s the difference? I seems completely arbitrary.
Great question and great answers. I don’t feel so weird now. Well, I still feel weird, but I’ve got great company.
I’ve always felt it was a strange and mild form of dyslexia. I sometimes have it with east/west, but never with north/south or with words. This is not related to being directionally challenged as I generally know which direction north is and typically can generate a good mental map of where I am.
The horror stories I could tell, most of them stemming from this combination of athletic failure and the fact that, for one year, they made me and two other girls play PE with the boys because we were all almost six feet tall. I not only had a rep as a clumsy mess, but I was also a solid D-cup. How many footballs (or basketballs…or soccer balls) to the chest can one person sustain? Lots, unfortunately… 