this is a very real condition. my wife has a phd in experimental physics and can NOT remember which is which. if she looks at her hands she has a trick (the L your thumb and index fingers make is the correct orientation) but say “turn right!” to her and you might have well just made the muted trumped voice from the old peanuts cartoons
Can confirm. Had it my whole life. If you shout “turn right,” there’s a 50/50 chance I’ll get it right, but my brain is just guessing. I have to stop and think about it to know for sure. I would make a shit Rally driver…
I have a problem with it a little bit. It aggravates the fuck out of me when I’m dealing with screws, especially if I’m screwing something in upside down or from around the back.
Try thinking of a clock. Most screws get tighter when turned clockwise. When time moves forward, your schedule gets tighter. Like the screw.
I’m not sure it’ll help, but since it’s a rotational reference for a rotational target, maybe it’ll help.
Personally I’m constantly drawing circles with my finger like a clock hand and then positioning my hand to face the screw while still drawing circles. It helps a lot.
The problem is the mnemonic everyone uses doesn’t use rotational motion. Maybe we need an actual rotational motion mnemonic. Maybe “clockwise screw wise” would work
I could never remember how screws worked until physics and the right hand rule.
I told my partner to turn left an intersection and she couldn’t remember which was which, so she went straight ahead instead. Like the choice locked her up, and resulted in no action being taken at all. I assume we would have driven into a building if it had been a T-junction
Does she remember whether she’s right or left handed? Just as a static fact about herself? I feel like it should be easy to reconcile an instruction like “turn right” by cross-referencing the knowledge of “I’m left handed” with “this is the hand I prefer to use”.
Maybe it’s not something where they remember they’re right or left handed based on that specific thing, but just that they prefer using the hand on that side.
That sounds weird. You wouldn’t need to understand the concept of left and right to know you have a dominant hand. You would just innately know one hand is the dominant one and the other isn’t. If I told my cat that a treat was behind the door on the left he’d be like “wtf is left bruh”, but he almost always bats at shit with his right paw.
Yes, that’s my point. They know they have a dominant hand, and which hand that is. They are also likely to remember whether they are right or left handed. Even if they don’t know intrinsically what “right” is it can simply be memorized in the same way that people know their blood type.
Combining those two pieces of information should let a person figure out which side is which.
truuuust me she’s tried everything you can think of. I find it surprising that she cant remember right as in correct as in dominant hand but she cannot. its honestly a little baffling
this is a very real condition. my wife has a phd in experimental physics and can NOT remember which is which. if she looks at her hands she has a trick (the L your thumb and index fingers make is the correct orientation) but say “turn right!” to her and you might have well just made the muted trumped voice from the old peanuts cartoons
Can confirm. Had it my whole life. If you shout “turn right,” there’s a 50/50 chance I’ll get it right, but my brain is just guessing. I have to stop and think about it to know for sure. I would make a shit Rally driver…
I have a problem with it a little bit. It aggravates the fuck out of me when I’m dealing with screws, especially if I’m screwing something in upside down or from around the back.
I literally hate myself. :p
Try thinking of a clock. Most screws get tighter when turned clockwise. When time moves forward, your schedule gets tighter. Like the screw.
I’m not sure it’ll help, but since it’s a rotational reference for a rotational target, maybe it’ll help.
Personally I’m constantly drawing circles with my finger like a clock hand and then positioning my hand to face the screw while still drawing circles. It helps a lot.
The problem is the mnemonic everyone uses doesn’t use rotational motion. Maybe we need an actual rotational motion mnemonic. Maybe “clockwise screw wise” would work
I could never remember how screws worked until physics and the right hand rule.
I dont have this problem and thats tricky for me also
Tbh same, I don’t have to do the hand thing anymore though I just have to take a second to imagine me doing it, and that’s enough.
I told my partner to turn left an intersection and she couldn’t remember which was which, so she went straight ahead instead. Like the choice locked her up, and resulted in no action being taken at all. I assume we would have driven into a building if it had been a T-junction
Yup, my husband is the same way. It makes for fun road trips when he’s the navigator 💀
Does she remember whether she’s right or left handed? Just as a static fact about herself? I feel like it should be easy to reconcile an instruction like “turn right” by cross-referencing the knowledge of “I’m left handed” with “this is the hand I prefer to use”.
Maybe it’s not something where they remember they’re right or left handed based on that specific thing, but just that they prefer using the hand on that side.
That sounds weird. You wouldn’t need to understand the concept of left and right to know you have a dominant hand. You would just innately know one hand is the dominant one and the other isn’t. If I told my cat that a treat was behind the door on the left he’d be like “wtf is left bruh”, but he almost always bats at shit with his right paw.
Yes, that’s my point. They know they have a dominant hand, and which hand that is. They are also likely to remember whether they are right or left handed. Even if they don’t know intrinsically what “right” is it can simply be memorized in the same way that people know their blood type.
Combining those two pieces of information should let a person figure out which side is which.
truuuust me she’s tried everything you can think of. I find it surprising that she cant remember right as in correct as in dominant hand but she cannot. its honestly a little baffling