🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <5463@cs.Buffalo.EDU> dmark@sunybcs.UUCP (David Mark) writes:
>Now, left-right is by far the least salient of our three orthogonal axes.
>Up-down dominates, and front-back is obvious.  I think we have to be
>'trained' on left-right, too, and that it is not as 'natural' as the others.
>I know I have trouble, and almost always have to think about it, and check
>my wrists for watches!

How salient the left/right distinction is differs from person to
person.  The more strongly you have a dominant brain hemisphere, the
easier it is to tell left from right. If you don't have a terribly
dominant hemisphere, you may be strikingly unable to tell the
difference (for instance, you may go into reverse instead of turning
on your turn signals in a car with the shift on the steering column;
take illegible phone messages by writing with the hand you don't know
how to write with; and turn the volume on your TV all the way up when
you wanted to turn it off, all of then things I have been known to
do). On the other hand, if you have a clearly dominant hemisphere, you
may be unable to think of a reason why one would be unable to tell
them apart; they will simply seem intuitively different. This can lead
to unfortunate consequences (quote from an operator here: "You mean
there's a reason I can't tell left from right? My boyfriend just says
I'm stupid!").

Women in general have less hemispheric dominance than men; people who
are at all left-handed  generally have less dominance than people who
are right-handed. Observation leads me to believe that both linguists
and computer scientists have a higher proportion of non-dominant
people than the population at large, although I have no data on it,
and the fact that multi-button mice are reasonably popular among
computer scientists would seem to be a counter-argument. (The only
saving grace about a Sun mouse is the Sun keyboard, which handily
indicates right and left. People don't snicker as much as they do
if you tape up a sign with right and left marked up on it.)

	Elizabeth Zwicky