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Why some people can't tell left from right

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By Kelly Oakes12th January 2023

It can seem like an almost childish mistake, but a surprising number of adults confuse left from right and scientists are only just starting to understand why.

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When British brain surgeon Henry Marsh sat down beside his patient's bed following surgery, the bad news he was about to deliver stemmed from his own mistake. The man had a trapped nerve in his arm that required an operation – but after making a midline incision in his neck, Marsh had drilled out the nerve on the wrong side of his spinal column.

Preventable medical mistakes frequently involve wrong-sided surgery: an injection to the wrong eye, for example, or a biopsy from the wrong breast. These "never events" – serious and largely preventable patient safety accidents – highlight that, while most of us learn as children how to tell left from right, not everyone gets it right.

While for some people, telling left from right is as easy as telling up from down, a significant minority – around one in six people, according to a recent study – struggle with the distinction. Even for those who believe they have no issues, distractions such as ambient noise, or having to answer unrelated questions, can get in the way of making the right choice.

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"Nobody has difficulty in saying [something is] front and back, or top and bottom," says Ineke van der Ham, professor of neuropsychology at Leiden University in the Netherlands. But telling left from right is different, she says. "It's because of the symmetry, and because when you turn around, it's the other way around, and that makes it so confusing." 

Left-right discrimination is actually quite a complex process, calling upon memory, language, visual and spatial processing, and mental rotation. In fact, researchers are only just beginning to get to the bottom of exactly what's going on in our brains when we do it – and why it's much easier for some people than others.

Former US President Donald Trump was briefly flummoxed when leaders were asked to cross hands at a summit in the Philippines in 2017 (Credit: AFP/Getty Images)

HOW BEING LEFT-HANDED CHANGES YOUR BRAIN

 

Around one in 10 people are left-handed, and studies on twins have shown that genetics has a role to play. A study at the University of Oxford recently revealed four regions in human DNA that seem to play a role in determining if someone is left or right handed.

Those who were left-handed were found to have "mutations" in four genes that code for the body's cytoskeleton – the complex scaffolding that sits within cells to help organise them. Scans of people with these mutations showed that the white matter in their brains had a different structure. The left and right sides of the brains of left-handed people were also better connected than in right-handed people.

"Some individuals can tell right from left innately, just can do it without thinking," says Gerard Gormley, a GP and clinical professor at Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland. "But others have to go through a process." In an effort to understand what happens in wrong-sided medical errors, Gormley and his colleagues have conducted research on medical students' experience of making left-right decisions and examined the process.

"First of all, you have to orient right from left in yourself," he says. When the answer doesn't come instantly, participants described various techniques, from making an L shape with their thumb and index finger, to thinking about which hand they use to write, or strum a guitar. "For some people it's a tattoo on their body or a piercing," Gormley says.

Then, when figuring out which side is someone else's left or right, the next step is mentally rotating yourself so you're facing in the same direction as the other person. "If I'm facing you, my left hand will be opposite your right hand," says Gormley. "That idea of mentally rotating an object adds an extra degree of complexity." Other research shows that people tend to find it easier to judge if an image shows a left or right hand by imagining their own hand or body rotating.

Research published by Van der Ham and her colleagues in 2020 found that around 15% of people rate themselves as insufficient when it comes to identifying left and right. Almost half of the four hundred participants in the study said they used a hand-related strategy to identify which is which.

The more asymmetrical someone's body is – in terms of writing hand preference, for example – the easier they find it to tell left and right apart

The researchers used something called the Bergen right-left discrimination test to dig deeper into how these strategies work. Participants looked at pictures of stick people either facing toward or away from them, with their arms in various positions, and had to identify their highlighted hand as their left or right. "It seems simple, but it's kind of frustrating if you have to do a hundred of these as quickly as you can," says Van der Ham.

In the first experiment, the participants sat with their hands on a table in front of them. "There was a very clear effect from how this little stick figure was positioned," says Van der Ham. "If you were looking at the back of the head, so it was aligned with you, people were a lot faster and more accurate." Similarly, when the stick person was facing the participant but had their hands crossed, so their left hand was on the same side as the participant's left hand, people tended to do better.

"That tells us that the body really is involved in this," says Van der Ham. The next question was whether participants were using cues from their body at the time of the test to identify left and right, or referring to a stored idea of their body instead.

To answer that, the researchers repeated their experiment, but this time tested four different scenarios: participants sat with their hands either crossed or uncrossed on the table in front of them, and had their hands either visible during the test, or covered with a black cloth.

But the researchers found that none of those changes influenced test performance. In other words, participants didn't need to actually see their hands in order to use their own body to distinguish right from left.

"We haven't completely solved the issue," says Van der Ham. "But we were able to identify our bodies as being a key element in identifying left from right, and that we consult our body representation as we have it in a more static way."

Mistakes made during medical procedures due to left-right errors have led some surgeons to take extra steps to ensure they operate in the right place (Credit: Tommy London/Alamy)

In Van der Ham's experiments, the boost in performance that came from being in line with the stick person was more pronounced in people who said they use a hand-related strategy to tell left from right in their daily lives, as well as in women generally. The researchers also found that men tended to be faster in responding than women, but the data did not back up previous research showing that men perform better overall in left-right discrimination tests.

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Exactly why people differ in their ability to tell left from right isn't clear, though research suggests that the more asymmetrical someone's body is (in terms of writing hand preference, for example) the easier they find it to tell left and right apart. "If one side of your brain is slightly larger than the other, you tend to have a better right-left discrimination," says Gormely.

But it could also be something that we learn in childhood, like other aspects of spatial cognition, says Van der Ham. "If kids are in charge of finding the way around, if you just let them walk in front of you for a couple of metres and make the decisions, those are the kids that ended up being better navigators," she says.

Research by Alice Gomez and colleagues at the Lyon Neuroscience Research Center in France hints that left-right discrimination is something that children can pick up quickly. Gomez designed a two-week intervention programme, delivered by teachers, designed to increase five-to-seven-year-olds' body representation and motor skills.

When they were tested on their ability to locate the correct body part on themselves or a partner – their right knee, for example – after the programme, the number of left-right discrimination errors were almost halved. "It was very easy for us to increase the abilities of children to be able to locate the [body part] on the basis of the name," says Gomez.

One reason for this might be that the children were taught a strategy – to think about their writing hand – for when they couldn't remember right and left. The programme's focus on children's own bodies is another possible explanation, especially as other research shows that an egocentric reference frame is key when we make left-right decisions.

In a typical classroom, children might label body parts on a diagram rather than their own bodies, because the latter is more time-consuming and difficult to assess for a teacher, says Gomez. "It's very rare that they will have the time to be egocentric," she says.

Most of us can distinguish up and down intuitively, but working out left from right can take more mental gymnastics (Credit: Alamy)

While there are plenty of everyday scenarios where knowing left from right is important, there are some situations where it's absolutely critical. Brain surgeon Marsh was able to put right his wrong-sided trapped nerve surgery – but a surgeon removing the wrong kidney or amputating the wrong limb, for example, would have devastating consequences.

Medicine is not the only field where left-right errors can make the difference between life and death: it's possible that a steersman turning the ship right instead of left was a contributing factor in the sinking of the Titanic.

But while some people have to put in more effort to judge left and right, everybody has the ability to get left-right decisions wrong, says Gormley. He hopes that more awareness of how easy it is to make such a mistake will lead to less stigma for those who need to double check their decision.

"As health care professionals, we spend a lot of time labelling spatial orientations: proximal, distal, superior, inferior, but really pay no attention to right or left," he says. "But actually, of all the spatial orientations, that is the most challenging."

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6 Ways to Meditate for People Who Can't "meditate"

"Meditation gets you out of your thinking into the present moment by focusing your attention to your sense perceptions (sight, sound, touch, etc) with 100% focus."

Yay! Sure! 100%. When I meditate it's 50%-50% at best. My monkey mind swings from trees with great abandon, my thoughts rambling, rumbling and wildly roaming. AND 50%-50% is great unless you spend your life sitting on a mountain top and meditating . . .

Why meditate?

Meditation has been rigorously, scientifically studied and has shown to literally change the brain. A regular meditation practice helps significantly with depression and anxiety, meditation has been shown to help with anti-aging, fighting infections, contributing to a sense of control and combating feelings of loneliness.

Nearly anything can be turned into a meditative practice as long as you focus on leaving your "head" and experience the world through your senses. (Sorry - Television, video games and reading don’t count as meditation because they simply replace our own thoughts with more stimulating ones.)

When the stress, thinking of "doing nothing" for 20 minutes, negates benefits here's 6 alternative forms of meditation (I've tried five of them- and they work. You can guess which one I've ignored)

1. Take a Musical Bath Like a warm bath, sink into the melodies, soak in the harmonies, bath your body in the rhythms and Immerse yourself in sound. It is a powerful and enjoyable form of meditation. Get an album you’ve wanted to listen to for some time and listen to it… really listen, with no interruptions.

2. Dance When NO ONE Watches

Dancing is the natural progression from listening to music. Many of us have had the horrible feeling of dancing while being stuck in self-conscious over thinking and paranoid about how we look. Meditative dance is ignoring everything that is going on outside our own body and becoming one with the music. Flay your arms, sway your hips, roll your eyes - Let go of protecting your self image, have fun and even be silly.

3. Draw with your eyes


Drawing is less about talent and more about learning to see. Thinking actually can get in the way so that's why this exercise is meditative. (Don’t worry about what it's going to look like, it’s the meditative process that counts not the Museum of Modern Art.) Here's How: By drawing without looking you use your sight perception to get out of your head- what you THINK it should look like - and be in the moment.

  1. Choose what to draw — a cup, your foot, a chair, it doesn't matter.

  2. Set a timer for 10 or 20 minutes.

  3. Arrange yourself so you can see the object you will be drawing without seeing the paper. Put your pencil through a paper plate so you can't see your paper.

  4. Focus your eyes on some part of the object and coordinate your eye moving around the outline (contours) of the object with moving your pencil to record what your eyes observe.

  5. Without looking at your hand, your paper or your pencil focus only on the shape of an object. Do not look down at the paper as you SLOWLY move the pencil, concentrating on the lines, and contours of the object as you let your pencil "flow" in time with your eyes.

  6. Continue observing and recording until the timer rings

Just like any meditation practice, this exercise can be difficult at first but will become easier as you learn to shift your thinking from an analytical, labeling mode to one that is more intuitive, MEDITATIVE.

4. Yoga

Not only is yoga incredible for flexibility, balance and strength, it’s also one of the oldest forms of meditation. You combining various movements with coordinated breathing to help focus on your inner body. Watch yoga videos on YouYube, there’s hundreds to choose from – and practice them a few times a week. Don’t get caught up with all the bells and whistles, yoga is about feeling connected to the earth and your inner body. (The last time I checked your feet were already touching ground.)

5. Meditative Munching

Take advantage of one of the necessities of life - food - and the fact you do it every day . . . several times a day. Remember, the power of meditation comes with practicing full focus. When your mind strays return to taste, texture, temperature. Eating in front of the TV, in the car or standing over the sink only encourages the monkeys to leap around. Eat slowly, savor each bite - focus on the textures, flavors, aromas and the temperature. (And while you're chewing, feel grateful for each bite of nourishment.) 6. Restore with Chores

(We've gone from what I consider the most enjoyable - eating - to the least enjoyable) Chores can be meditative WHEN you focus solely on what your are doing. Your monkey mind will try and take over to keep you entertained and stimulated. Just as in all meditative practices keep refocusing your monkey mind on the task at hand: Washing dishes - focus on the temperature of water, seeing the pot become cleaner and cleaner; Mowing the lawn - examine the cutting patterns, inhale the aroma of cut grass; Making the bed - notice the feel, color, wrinkles of sheets, the tension of folds, your hand motion . . .

December 25 - It's Christmas Time


All Things Tasty

 

by finding out why you always have room for dessert around the holidays and can't stop after you are full?

You have “hedonic hunger” to thank.

"It’s a holiday tradition. You lean back in your dining chair in a mild food coma, as glazed and inert as a honey-baked ham. You can’t eat another bite. You may never eat again. And then someone says the magic word: “pie.” That golden crust, the tantalizing aroma of brown sugar and pecans—yes, you’ll have some pie!"

"There’s a scientific term for what you’re experiencing, and it’s not gluttony. It’s called hedonic hunger, and it’s why you eat so much, even after you’re stuffed. Hedonic hunger is the desire to eat for pleasure, as opposed to consuming the calories your body needs for energy. Why are we so drawn to foods our systems don’t need? Because fatty, buttery, creamy, sweet-and-savory deliciousness has a powerful effect on the brain’s reward system, so our heads nod yes even when our stomachs say no.

Your Brain Wants the Food—Not Your Body

"Remember the last time you ate so much steamed broccoli, you could barely get off the couch but just kept going back for more? Probably not. Hedonic hunger tends to be activated by calorie-dense foods that are pleasurable to eat; in other words, anything fatty, fried, salty, or sweet. When our ancestors were scrabbling for nuts and berries, hedonic hunger wasn’t a thing. But then someone figured out how to turn milk into butter, and someone else figured out that potatoes taste amazing when you cut them into sticks and drop them into a vat of hot fat, and everything changed."

“Over the course of our evolution, our taste range has gone from ‘This tastes awful but will keep me alive’ to ‘This tastes good’ to ‘Holy cow, this is so delicious.’ It makes it hard for us to hold back,” says Michael Lowe, PhD, a psychology professor at Drexel University who coined the term hedonic hunger to distinguish it from homeostatic hunger, which stems from your body’s need for energy (i.e. that rumbling in your stomach when you haven’t eaten in hours)."

'“When we eat delicious food, we get a surge of the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is part of the reward system in our brain,” Lowe says. “It makes us feel good, so we keep eating the food to get that feeling.” (This may help explain what’s behind stress eating, and our time-honored impulse to try to fight sadness with brownies.) Eventually, Lowe adds, the brain changes, so even anticipating eating the food causes a dopamine rush: “This is why I called it hedonic hunger. It’s a hunger for more pleasure, not for more calories.”'

We're Tempted by Endless Environmental Cues

"Unlike eat-to-live homeostatic hunger, which our bodies alert us to, hedonic hunger is largely prompted by external cues, like the sight of glistening chocolate sauce, the scent of a fresh pizza, or simply plopping down in front of the TV if that’s your favorite place to chill with ice cream."

“I walk by a Starbucks and can smell that pumpkin latte from outside—plus, there are pictures everywhere, which makes it hard to resist,” says Surabhi Bhutani, PhD, assistant professor of nutrition at San Diego State University’s School of Exercise and Nutritional Sciences, who studies how smell and taste perception influence diet and weight gain. Add cooking shows, fast-food signs, and enticing holiday commercials, she says, and you have almost omnipresent triggers for cravings."

How “The Variety Effect” Factors In

"What else makes us more inclined to eat for pleasure? Having a bounty of options on hand. The more we can choose from, the more we’re likely to consume, a phenomenon known as the variety effect. And working alongside the variety effect is sensory-specific satiety: Imagine you eat all the brisket and green beans you think you can hold, and the sheer delight of those first few bites has faded—but then cheesecake shows up, promising to tickle a different set of taste buds, and you suddenly have “room.”'

"If this manipulation is starting to make you feel like a lab rat (or Templeton the rat from Charlotte’s Web, gorging himself at the county fair), don’t feel bad. Turns out, even nutrition scientists are susceptible. “If I’m at a hotel buffet, I may start with the dish that looks most appealing, but eventually sensory-specific satiety kicks in,” Bhutani says. “And then . . . "I look at 10 other highly palatable things I can try, and since I don’t feel satiated by those yet, I’ll go ahead and put them on my plate. If you tend to spend the holiday having a little more mac and cheese, then a cookie, then reheating some stuffing, then popping a few chocolates, that’s the variety effect in action."

The Myth of Self-Control

"Most of us are surrounded by the same sensory cues, but some of us are more compelled to follow through on our hedonic drives. That has nothing to do with a lack of willpower, Lowe says."

"According to a 2016 study in the Journal of Nutrition, when offered appetizing food, people who reported that they often experience hedonic hunger showed more activity in the reward areas of their brain than their peers who were less compelled by cravings. Research suggests there’s a complicated interplay between dopamine, the hunger hormones ghrelin and leptin, and our endocannabinoid system, a vast collection of neurotransmitters that help control eating as well as functions like memory, emotional processing, and sleep. The fact that some people have a greater neural response than others seems to be partially due to differences in DNA, Lowe says. “It’s clear that someone’s genetic makeup can predispose them to problems controlling food intake,” he adds. “But this is a frontier area.”'

"One thing that’s not necessarily tied to hedonic hunger: body mass and weight. In that Journal of Nutrition study, high hedonic activity wasn’t linked to a particular level of BMI. An analysis of 50 studies conducted by Lowe and colleagues did find a slight correlation between experiencing hedonic hunger and higher weight, but it was less than they expected."


How to Stop Overeating and Manage Hedonic Hunger

"Of course, there’s nothing wrong with hungering for delicious food. By all means, rejoice and be grateful to spend this holiday eating meals you love with people you love. But if you’re consistently wishing you could reduce the cravings a bit, here are a few ideas that may help soothe the neurochemical urge to eat every single thing. They may sound like often cited chestnuts, but that’s because they’ve been repeatedly proven by research."

1. Aim for 7 to 8 hours of sleep.

Research has shown that the reward regions of the brain become more sensitive to cravings when people are sleep deprived (getting less than six hours of sleep a night). So the more tired you are, the more easily you’ll give in to foods high in sugar and fat. In a 2019 study, Bhutani and her colleagues found that just one night of sleep deprivation left subjects more susceptible to the siren song of tempting food. 2. Manage stress and identify your triggers.

Though an isolated high-stress episode, like a bad breakup, can reduce hedonic eating, chronic stress has been shown to do the opposite and trigger stress eating (as you know if you’ve ever munched your way through an intense period at work). If you think stress is leading you to eat more than your body needs, consider replacing this stress eating habit with another habit: Pass up the vending machine for a walk, a meditation session, or yoga class. It may not give you the same immediate kick as a bag of Funyuns, but Future You will feel better for it."

3. Think about your habits.

“First, ask yourself something like, ‘When am I enticed by those high-calorie foods? When I’m with certain people? In certain situations? When I’m scrolling through social media?’” Bhutani says. Then try to imagine the outcomes: “If I do this, how is it going to make me feel? Guilty? Bad about myself? If so, what if I don’t act on it?”

“This kind of mindfulness can be hard to do, but if you stick with it, it has been shown to be a really effective strategy in managing hedonic hunger and overeating,” Bhutani says."

4. Try a visualization technique.

Picture yourself in The Bahamas. Or Disneyland. Or wherever you’d love to be at the moment of your craving. “The idea is to imagine engaging in something that’s not related to food but equally pleasurable,” Bhutani says. In a 2021 study in the journal Appetite, participants with self-reported chocolate cravings were asked to imagine that their favorite chocolate was sitting in front of them, then to either let their minds wander or visualize sitting peacefully by a stream in a forest watching leaves float by. Afterward, those in the latter group said they felt less compelled to gobble the chocolate.

5. Get some exercise.

Regular moderate to vigorous physical activity has been shown to lessen the desire for high-fat foods. It can help with the temptation to overeat too: In one 2021 study, women who were overweight or obese found that doing around 190 minutes of moderate exercise a week (a little less than half an hour daily), either walking on a treadmill or elliptical trainer, significantly reduced their desire to overeat, and they were less likely to do so over the course of three months.

6. Consider therapy to understand and rewire habits.

If disordered eating, overeating, or stress eating is interfering with your daily life and happiness, therapy may help. “Cognitive behavioral therapy has been shown to be effective with binge-eating disorders,” Lowe says. “Other types, like mindfulness-based, dialectical behavior, and acceptance and commitment therapies, can also help you learn not to respond impulsively to strong urges and emotions.”

 


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T'was the Day After Christmas Eve Pome (Warning! R-Rated)


It’s true so they say that on Christmas day

old St Nick is always sick

from sugar, carbs, inhaling soot

and lunging sacks of children’s loot

Santa has to unbuckle his belt

to make room for cookies, and chocolate gelt

Popping antacids with each milk drink

he’s lactose intolerant, that’s why the wink


Up all night,

by mornings light he’s a fright

The chubby ole fellow, no longer mellow

Back's in spasm, eyes are red

Climbing to chimney tops, legs like lead

When home he goes, the "ho" "ho" "hoes"

have turned to moans

the silent night filled with grunts and groans

No longer just plump he’s a fat grump

The reindeer too have lost their cheer

for all things festive in the New Year

His packed on pounds during the rounds

create huge drag for even a stag

They huff, puff and wheeze

looking for a stiff breeze

to help carry Santa over roof tops and trees

All the way back the reindeer pray

he’ll loose 50 pounds before next Christmas day

Cuz Rudolph et. al are running out of gas

hauling Santa’s growing ass


* * *

Merry Christmas to all who indulge and bulge!

MELTED SNOWMEN OREO BALLS

Start by making Oreo Truffles. (Check out PJT December 18th for the Oreo Truffle recipe)

Mix the cream cheese and crushed Oreos and form them into balls. Place them in the freezer to harden. You can do this step ahead to save time.


Once truffle balls are frozen, dip them in melted candy coating, like almond bark. Melt it in batches so you don’t leave the trail of Oreos in the coating after a lot of dipping. No need to dip them and then shake off the excess coating to get a nice round ball because melting snowmen DRIP. Just let the coating pool at the bottom. Mini Oreos' hats top them off !

Decorate the faces with frosting in the tubes in the baking aisle or sprinkles for the eyes and nose or be creative!

After you decorate them, stick them in the fridge so the faces can harden.

 

We like to bring you a bit of serious, a bit of whimsey, and a focus on

MIND, BODY and SPIRIT . . .

. . . And so from The HeART of Spirituality we end with a few Prayers for Peace

  • St Francis -Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy.O, Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love; For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; it is in dying that we are born again to eternal life.

Baha’i prayer for Humanity

O Thou kind Lord! Unite all. Let the religions agree and make the nations one, so that they may see each other as one family and the whole earth as one home. May they all live together in perfect harmony.

O God! Raise aloft the banner of the oneness of mankind.

O God! Establish the Most Great Peace. Cement Thou, O God, the hearts together.

O Thou kind Father, God! Gladden our hearts through the fragrance of Thy love. Brighten our eyes through the Light of Thy Guidance. Delight our ears with the melody of Thy Word, and shelter us all in the Strong-hold of Thy Providence.

Native American Prayer for Peace

O Great Spirit of our Ancestors, I raise my pipe to you. To your messengers the four winds, and to Mother Earth who provides for your children. Give us the wisdom to teach our children to love, to respect, and to be kind to each other so that they may grow with peace in mind. Let us learn to share all the good things you provide for us on this Earth.

Christian Prayer for Peace

Blessed are the Peacemakers, for they shall be known as the Children of God. But I say to you that hear, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. To those who strike you on the cheek, offer the other also, and from those who take away your cloak, do not withhold your coat as well. Give to everyone who begs from you, and of those who take away your goods, do not ask them again. And as you wish that others would do to you, do so to them.

Namaste

 

Copyright © 2022, Peggy Arndt and Judy Westerfield, All rights reserved.


Our mailing address is: PeggyJudyTime@gmail.com


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