Why do many people have difficulty with "left/right"?

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People don't confuse "up" and "down" or "backward" and "forward", but many people have difficulty with "left" and "right". Why is this?

Because of human body plan - up/down and front/back body parts have obviously different shapes. Left/right body parts don't.

Also it's interesting that the subjective stuff is what we learn.

We don't learn the compass as much. I think we learnt it once at school when it was referring to actual directions rather than just the names of them.

I couldn't point north but I could tell you what 'my left' is or what 'up' is.

We learnt left and right a fair bit and we learnt up and down and back and forward starting at nursery.

We also learnt port and starboard about twice. Yes, left and right but in a set place rather than being subjective.

If we learnt compass directions for eg we could avoid directions that go something like 'go left, no not my left, your left' etc.

I think compass directions and ship directions would be even less likely to be learnt inland, I could be wrong on that though. Just my secondary was originally a marinal school to teach boys how to go fishing/on ships so I think my town emphasised that stuff more. (I learnt the directions in primary though)

Up and down is based with with gravity.
If not that, at least it's easy not to confuse the feet from the head.

Forwards and backwards is based with vision.
Forwards is usually always visible, backwards isn't.
Unless someone had eyes behind their heads or their neck can bend 180-360 degrees, and then confuse the spine with the ribs and belly.


Left and right remains relative from where one is facing, yet that's still confusing in times of stress and inattention.
On top of subverting it with the mirror and to whom they're facing with.

It doesn't use gravity, left and right can look visually the same.
Sometimes I speculate that spatial wise and body wise, it may not help with how the human nervous system is physically setup.



It's not easy for me to get confused spatially.

What I get confuse with, instead, is the names and labels of left and right.
Even up, down, forwards, backwards -- it's the names themselves that my head, on verbal levels, are too slow and troublesome to process or just stops on less specific associations instead of arriving at the correct one.

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I'm terrible at being a passenger giving directions to the driver, because even if I know exactly where I am going I still say "right" instead of "left" and vice versa. It's like I'm always seeing right and left from the point of view of an invisible person facing me. I don't know why.

Yet whenever I pick up a pen or a pencil, I subconsciously hold it in my right hand immediately. (Mind you, when I'm cleaning I subconsciously use either hand, but I suppose your left hand* isn't supposed to be 100% useless).

*Or vice versa if you're left-handed.

That issue of confusing the labels, but not the concepts: I have that a little with "east" and "west". Not north/south, not left/right, but just east/west. I will know that a highway goes east (and can visualize it going east on a map of the city in my head), but sometimes the word "west" pop out of my mouth. Sometimes.

If you think about it -whats weird is not that so many folks cant tell right from left, but that so FEW have that problem.

Left/right is much more artificial and unnatural than up/down or front/back. The human body has bilateral symmetry (your left half looks much like your right half), but your top and bottom look different. And gravity helps cue you as to up and down. If you can see it -its in front of you, and not behind you.

When I was a grade schooler I would to think to myself "if I were to pick up a crayon to color a picture which hand would I grab the crayon with?" And thats how I gradually learned right from left. If it wasnt for handedness I dont know if any human would ever learn right/left.

Hello, directionally challenged person here.

I used to struggle with left and right. Still do on occasion. I learnt by making an L with my left hand and a backwards L with my right. My sense of direction is short-sighted in the sense that I often struggle to tell what direction something would be unless I can see the location directly in front of me. Which is annoying because even if I know the place well enough to visualise it in exact detail, I seem to reach a mental block that gets in the way of describing the directions.

So, if someone were to stop me for directions to somewhere I know how to get to, I usually can't describe it to them at all. Even if I walk there regularly. If they followed me, I could easily bring them to the location, but for the life of me I can't put it into words. Similarly, when spelling out words for someone, I much prefer to write it out in front of me than to sound out the letters involved. I'm not exactly sure why, but even when I know the letters involved I find it harder to summon the individual letters than the full written out word.

There does seem to be an issue with my brain when it comes to making sense of information outside of a narrow learned context. North, South, East and West mean next to nothing to me. I am aware of the chart I learnt and the order of which they go in. However, applying that information to what's around me just gives me a headache and makes me annoyed. I have to figure out what direction I'm already going in, which I'm going to struggle with without a compass. So, if you tell me to "go South West" from where I am, I'm probably going to stare at you blankly and ask you "Alright, is that in the direction of that birch tree over there, the church, or somewhere in between those two things?"

I tend to rely on my other senses to navigate rather than an inherent sense of direction. Past tests done by education officers have shown that there seems to be some kind of a delay between me taking in visual information and being able to convert that information into an audio format. Sometimes I forget the word for an item, so I start drawing it until I remember the word.

Part of the problem is from perspective. Basically, is one referring to one's own left and right, or to the left and right of someone standing in front of one, or like the people in a picture in front of you. I tend to get confused when an article says that "so and so" is the person on the left or right in the pix in the article. Is that my left and right, or the left and right of the persons facing me in the pix?

In my case there is an added complication. I am primarily left handed, but also somewhat ambidextrous, and I have become more ambidextrous over the course of my life. This has made me more confused about handedness over time. I will often find myself doing something with my right hand that I had intended to do with my left hand. This happens to me a lot when pouring liquids, or handling a full cup of a drink. I will suddenly realize i'm using the right hand for these tasks, that need care in doing to prevent spills, and that I'm doing fine with the right hand, when I hadn't planned on using that hand for the job.

Being ambidextrous can be a good thing, but it does startle me a lot because it happens a lot without my thinking about it ahead of time. It reminds me a of a horror movie I saw decades ago about a murderer's detached hand that went on killing people.

I get the words Left & Right confused. I always thought it was due to my dyslexia. As a kid I was told to remember which side is right by me being right-handed so therefor I use my right hand to wright. I remember that but I still have to think about it to process it thou. When I'm walking on the sidewalk & a bicyclist comes from behind me & says something like On Your Left or On Your Right, it takes me a couple seconds to process which side they are on & they pass me rite as I'm figuring it out. I never get up & down or backwards & forwards confused unless I'm looking at a map &/or trying to remember something I heard or saw. I have a bad memory & a horrible sense of direction.