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
Yup, my husband is the same way. It makes for fun road trips when he’s the navigator 💀
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
I dont have this problem and thats tricky for me also
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.
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”.
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
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
Sitting there muttering to himself something about non-euclidean geometry.
I wrote L and R on my hands for the driving test
the advice I got before driving was: your left hand is the one where the thumb is pointing to your right hand
and I still think about it
If you lay your hands flat with each thumb pointed at the other hand, your left hand will form an “L” shape. That’s probably what they meant to say.
Edit: oh looooooool, I literally just didn’t get the joke
This actually makes sense. I always assumed people know which one their dominant writing hand is and go from there. That’s what i always did until i just knew. Like when someone asked me, i made a fist or something with the hand i was writing with
That’s a sensible way to do it. You’ve got a built in asymmetry to map it to.
It’s something I try to reassure my learners about: the examiner doesn’t care if you go in the wrong direction so long as what you did to get there was safe and legal.
Obviously, don’t take the piss and make up your own route, but taking a couple wrong turns will never fail you your test.
It’s perfectly okay to go the wrong way on the driving test in the UK, as long as you do so safely. Sometimes there are complicated places and weird roundabouts, it’s better if you’re in the wrong lane to commit to it
And also that you communicate that you’re aware what you’ve done, and how you’re going to continue.
I did it on mine, and said “I’ve just come off at the wrong exit, so I’m going to just continue along here.”
Examiner said it was OK, and just directed things back onto the route at the next junction.
Should’ve tried to argue that turning right is safer so they’re just going to make three rights
Only if anon is in a country which drives on the right.
