My cousin is a mddle aged physics professor, but still has trouble telling left from right.
So yes- many high functioning mature successful folks sometimes cant master what I mastered when I was eight- which was to think to myself "if I were to color a picture in a coloring book which hand would I grab the crayon with?" and then extrapolate to the rest of existence about which way is left, and which is right-by holding up my crayon hand.
My cousin is working on it though. He said someone told him to remember that "when you're driving your car - your wife always sits on your right. And your wife is always right."
Whatever works.
Though I got the right-left thing down about the same time as most children I did have a related issue well into adulthood. But this issue is purely the fault of everyone else and not my fault.
There was an old moron joke about the moron carpenter preparing to nail something into a wall. He goes through his bucket of nails and painstakingly throws away half of each of his nails because "their points are on the wrong side"( ie towards him, and not towards the wall)?
Thats the way most folks are about turning screws. If you're trying to loosen something they will scream at you to "turn it to the left", or if your trying to tighten it "turn it to the right".
Apparently Im the only person in creation who is aware of how ret*d those commands are. They are just as dumb as the guy thinking that his nails have points on the wrong end!
If you're tightening something: what you're doing is turning it clockwise. The minute hand does indeed 'move to the right" at the top of the hour. But it does exactly the same amount of motion TO THE LEFT at the bottom of the hour. So why is 'clockwise' called 'turning it to the right'? You could just as easily call it "turning it to the left", "turning it down", or "turning it up", because the minute hand moves in all of those directions during the course of an hour as it goes around the dial. And the same is true of anything moving counterclockwise. So right and left have no meaning when one is speaking of a spinning cylinder. The relevent directions are only clockwise, and counterclockwise.
So in my old age Ive learned to remember that its "clockwise to tighten" so as not to get flustered by hotheaded companions screaming idiotic meaningless directions at me like "twist it to the right".
