right/left hand confusion?

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ok I know this thread has probably been done before, but I mean like extreme confusion. The other day I was playing twister with my little sister and my friend (lol I'm 14) and we were sopposed to put our right hand on yellow. So I looked at my hands and I put my left on yellow. My friend was like "that's not your right" and I was like "lol yah it it" and I thought to myself, she is so wrong,this is toattaly my right. Its like I insisted that my left was really my right,it wasn't just a momentarily thing. We had to write L and R on my hands.

so does any one else have extreme confusion about left and right like this?

I do and so does my sister. We are both NT-ish.

When I used to play rugby, I taped my right wrist so I would know which way to run when they said right. When I drive when someone else will be directing me, I have to put a bracelet on my right wrist so when they tell me to take the next right, I will know which way they mean.

Both of my hands seem like my right hand to me.

In a previous life I was a psychometrist. One of the benefits is I think I have taken about every neuropsychological assessment known to mankind. I learned then that I have mixed dominance. IOW, I do not have a clearly dominant brain hemisphere. I wonder if that is related to my right-left confusion. The neuropsychologist said it was definitely related to my clumsiness as a child. She said that although it would seem beneficial to have two dominant hemispheres, it actually isn't because they conflict.

Yes, I have a problem with this, but it's because I am partly ambidextrous. I am mainly lefty, but can do some stuff right handed, too. It does jolt me sometimes though, with trying to figure out which hand to use, or which is which, and I am in my early 50s, so I don't see this changing.

I have no trouble distinguishing left and right- I never mix them up. If I remember correctly, problems with that are part of dyscalculia...

I get confused all the time!! ! But its worse because Im learning to drive and I get left and right confused...

I do this all the time. Everytime somebody tells me left or right I have to look down and check my hands.
The only way I can tell left from right is that there is a freckle on my left hand and there is a small scar on my right hand.
Ask me to wear gloves and tell me which turn to take while driving and I will not have a clue.

Last edited by Kjas on 10 Aug 2012, 2:10 am, edited 1 time in total.

Right is the side my watch is on.

All the time. To this day. I also have dyscalculia big time. And, back when people used dictionary books, I would always flip through the alphabet backwards. You might imagine the fun I had in school.

I have always struggled with this. The only way I finally was able to remember it is to remember that in the US, cars are left hand drive. Thus, the hand I don't use to shift gears with is my right.

????

I shift with my right hand????

What's funny is that I repeatedly "checked" myself before posting this.

More of a Dyspraxia tendency, actually, but common throughout the Spectrum and also to a very slightly more mild severity in NT's. (not saying that NT's don't get is as badly, though)

I always get them mixed up, I often swap hands while eating too. My right hand seems to want to hold both the knife and fork at the same time, lol.

I have trouble remembering left from right also (and dyscalcula, thought to be related). I am right-handed so the way I tell them apart with the mnenomic "I write with my right". I say that to myself when I need to sort out left from right and then make a little move with my writing (right) hand and therefore know which side it is on and by default which side the left is on.

The only problem with this method is that it takes about 30 seconds, which is too much of a time delay for games like Twister. I was absolutely terrible at Twister as a child (yes, the game has been around that long). Luckily the car GPS gives considerable advance warning of upcoming turns so there is enough time to run throughh the mnemonic and know which way to go.


I have always found it puzzling and annoying that I have been unable to simply learn this simple pair of opposite directions for decades. After all, I don't confuse up and down or backwards and forwards.

I have always had trouble telling my right from my left. I have become better with it over the years, but it still gives me great difficulty, particularly in situations where I have to decide right from left instantaneously. I am proud that I was able to somehow teach myself how to do certain visual-spatial tasks I couldn't do as a child, such as easy to moderately difficult spatial rotation/visualization. With time and effort, I can now "see" how objects turn clockwise/counterclockwise or can be rotated/shifted left or right. However, when I need to decide right vs. left without thinking, I almost always blurt out the wrong one and then realize it a split second later. This is the biggest reason why I don't know how to drive. I would have enough trouble remembering to turn the wheel the correct direction normally, let alone if I had to quickly react to a driver swerving in my direction or something. And backing up? Forget it! Understanding how to turn the wheel in the opposite direction to back up right or left is beyond me. I have a lot of trouble backing up in video games, let alone in real life!

Sometimes I completely mix up what left and right are and will believe my right hand is my left and vice versa, so even writing right and left on my hands wouldn't help me because I'd just think I'd written it on the wrong hands. This doesn't seem to happen often though and the confusion only lasts for a couple of minutes at most. I seem to have a lot of problems with temporarily forgetting things. I've forgotten my own name a few times.

This is why I'm glad GPS systems were invented and people no longer have to rely on my backseat incorrect directions. I always dreaded having to give directions to cab drivers.





Turning in the correct direction has long been a problem for me driving and I often got lost going to new places before GPS was invented. Going to the same place over and over was never a problem since I just memorized landmarks. The GPS gives very advanced warning of upcoming turns and also has a large arrow pointing the correct way. Swerving in the correct direction to avoid another car has never been a problem. I suspect it is a different part of the brain that takes care of that, a part of the brain that doesn't need labels. So I bet you would be ok on that account.



That is a problem for me too. This is why I never parrallel park. It depends on correctly remembering the sequence of directions. I think this happens in a different part of the brain than the instinctual swerve to avoid an accident. I have succesfully avoided parallel parking for decades by either parking on a side street and walking (side streets tend to have fewer cars) or paying for a parking garage.

Yes, I get left and right mixed up but less than I used to. It was a lot worse when I was younger and I had to learn to pause and think about it for a second before I react. I am very ambidextrous and that is genetic in the family. It was a major problem learning left from right being told "We write with right hand", when I can write with both so that statement never helped clarify the confusion. Having poor vision on one side gave me a way to label right from left, but it took a while to figure that out.

I have a scar on my right index finger to remind me that many large/sharp tools are weighted "for right hand use only". I was using something big and sharp left handed and it flipped over on me and cut to the bone. They told me in ER that it's usually written in the fine print somewhere..even on the tool somewhere. It's supposed to make them more stable and easy to use for right hand use, but a real hazard if you switch hands or mix them up.
Yes, hand mixing can leave you scarred for life, lol. Not badly though. ER did a sweet job on it.