• Ben Hur Horse Race@lemm.ee
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    8 days ago

    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

    • vithigar@lemmy.ca
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      8 days ago

      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”.

      • borari@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        8 days ago

        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.

        • vithigar@lemmy.ca
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          8 days ago

          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.