Most of us distinguish right from left as easily and naturally as up from down. But for a significant percentage of the population, this task is no small difficulty. So why do people have such problems?
“Recently, I had a client with an unusual order: she wanted to get tattoos on her arms with the letters L (Left – left) and R (Right – right) to help her navigate in space. And she is not the only one – in addition to her, another hundred people told me that they were thinking of doing something similar. Yes, I myself would be useful! ” – says tattoo artist Irina.
It turns out, according to studies, from 15% to 30% of the population have difficulty determining the right and left sides. Moreover, as a rule, adults with high intelligence face such a problem. Women are more susceptible to it than men.
Usually, the inability to distinguish between right and left does not lead to serious consequences – yes, you can sometimes turn in the wrong direction or do the exercise incorrectly. All this is easy to fix. It is much worse if, for example, the surgeon mistakenly performs the operation on the wrong side of the patient’s body. In the US, by the way, there are up to 40 such medical errors per week!
To perform such a seemingly simple task, the correct operation of at least two processes at the brain level is required.
“Some people cannot distinguish between right and left automatically, they need to think about it specifically. For example, if a large group of people are asked to raise their right hand, someone may mistakenly raise their left hand first, or they may have to think a little to correctly fulfill the request, ”explains surgeon John Clark, who studies the causes of medical errors.
Performing such a seemingly simple task requires the correct operation of at least two processes at the brain level. “First, the process of spatial perception must work correctly – we choose one side, and not the center and not the middle. Then the naming process comes into play, because we have to assign the correct name to the chosen side – let’s say it is the “right” side, ”says Marco Andre Hirnstein, a biomedical psychologist at the University of Bergen in Norway. This process is often the most difficult.
Curiously, we are much less likely to have problems with other spatial concepts – few people confuse “top” and “bottom” or the back and front of an object. This is because these concepts are absolute. “We intuitively understand: “bottom” is where objects fall, “up” is where they fall from. The “front” side is the one that is closer to us than the “back” side,” explains Hirnstein.
Sometimes problems with distinguishing between the right and left sides can still signal brain damage.
At the same time, left and right are relative concepts. To remember them, we often resort to “cheat sheets” – for example, we remember that the right hand is the one with which we write, and the left hand is the one on which we wear a watch. However, it is not enough to remember only our own left and right areas, it is also important to understand that these concepts can mean other directions relative to other people.
Psychologist and author of The Right Hand, Left Hand, Chris McManus, gives the following example: “Imagine that you need to explain to an alien what “right” and “left” are, but he does not see you, communication is only voice. How to do it? It turns out that this is very difficult, especially if our alien interlocutor has no hands. In this case, our usual “cheat sheets” are useless!
Sometimes problems with distinguishing between the right and left sides can signal brain damage. For example, in rare cases, a disorder known as Gerstmann’s Syndrome develops after a stroke. Patients suffering from it are not able to distinguish the right side of their body from the left.
However, you should not worry too much: in most cases, such difficulties are not associated with any disorders or disorders, but only with an unusual feature of the brain.