But I curiosity?? Not want sentence that did I.

Four years of psych (including developmental) and some work in the community and I never came across this phenomenon, so naturally curious, but I didn't want to insult the AskMe poster with my incredulity.

Have you ever had this problem? (apart from when you were a kid)

He must only know blondes.

/me is blonde

But seriously? No. My left hand is the one with big honking diamond ring.

Okay, really seriously this time: No, not at all.

See my comment on the thread. I'm a left-threaded nut in a righty-tighty world. I work hard to try to overcome it, but it's always been a weakness and I suppose it always will be.

I wouldn't trade my verbal skills or musical sense for a more sure-footed stance, if the trade had to be made (I'm sure there are plenty of people who've got both, but I always thought these were my consolation prizes.) Also, I'm quite good at noticing visual beauty, keenly appreciating art, and noting symmetry and balance and elegant shapes -- how I love to watch great dance! -- and I am thankful, because those things immeasurably enrich my world.

i do too. i totally have to stop and think, and pretend to pledge allegiance--it's pathetic i know.

i totally think it's bec i'm left-handed too.

I'm clumsy also, melis : >

So let's dance a beautiful stumbling dance together, sweetness! We can take turns leading...and I'll never yell at you for stepping on my toes.

anytime hon : >

No. Wait.... yeah, sometimes.... no, not really.

melis, we'll paint the steps on the ground for us to follow ; >

dreamsign, I totally have a problem with this. It can be very frustrating and it tends to come out more when I'm tired. I also have dyslexia.

It's very interesting. I remember having great trouble learning it as a kid (and for some reason, had to face a particular cardinal direction in order to get it straight -- which makes no sense), but it just hadn't occurred to me that people around me might have trouble with it at all. I can imagine it can be quite frustrating!

I have trouble with left and right all the time, which makes me feel like a complete idiot - there's obviously something weird going on in my brain but I'll be buggered if I know what it is.

There was an interesting thread on Kottke about it.

When I was a child, I would grab things and start to learn to use them with my left hand. My mom would make me use my right. (I'm 41 now, so that was the thing to do then). So when people ask if I'm left handed I tell them I'm ambidextrous: I'm not good at either. I can throw a frisbee farther left handed, but I can handle tools with either.I do feel like I have some of the qualities normally associated with both. I have to say, I don't think I know anyone who has trouble distiguishing right from left. I do know people who have problems with compass direction, which is absurd here in the Denver area with those big ass mountains always to the west...

I have a huge problem with right and left. I've put it down to the fact that "right" is the more dominant handedness, so I put that first when I say right and left, and yet when you look at your hands (as though reading a book) they're in the order left and then right. Hugely confusing, and there's no way I'll get it right in a stressful situation. (for example - chasing down the bad guy in "the getaway" with a friend providing directions)

In order to tell which is which, I have to pretend to sign my name. Shameful really.

I don't, but my mother always did. She went skiing a few times, and found that the convention for notifying people that you were about to pass them by shouting "on your left!" (or "on your right!") was totally useless. She once plowed right into the back of a guy while shouting "on your ...! on your ...! on your ...!" and being completely unable to determine which direction she was going to pass the poor guy on.

I don't know when exactly that I learned which was left and which was right, but I mastered it before I truly mastered the bow when tying my shoelaces without having to resort to having a friend hold their finger in the middle of my bow.

So then I move to Sweden, and I meet these kids and I notice an odd fashion on their bikes - all 3-9 year olds had one green handle and one red handle on their bikes. I asked a few friends what that was all about and they explained "it's so that you can remember which is left and which is right." Oh, ok, so which is it then? "The green here is right" the kid would say, pointing to what was clearly my left, "and the red here is left." I tried desperatly to connect green/red to left/right (without making the connection that the colors reminded kids to stay on the right hand side of the road, red being "no-go" and green being "go" - as no kid managed to explain that) but it just wouldn't stick, and the more kids I asked, the more often I'd find a kid saying something like: "this red one is...uhhm.. right. Yeah." and finally I was as confused about which was which as all the other kids.

All I had to do when using those bikes was to close my eyes when asked so that the bikehandlebar colors wouldn't distract me and answer - correctly - that my right was my right. To this day those handlebars confuse me. ;) Weird how help-aids can really trip some kids up.

My mom would make me use my right.

My ma says when i was in a highchair, she would put a spoon in my right hand and i would always just let it go and drop it, so she would do it again, etc. Finally, it dawned on her i was lefthanded.

Never had a problem with it, EXCEPT: my wedding. I knew the wedding ring went on the left hand. I knew that my wife's left hand would be on my right side. The problem was that I was so damned panicked that I couldn't remember which was my left and which was my right.

I have noticed, though, that as time goes by it takes me longer and longer to figure out East and West.

Speaking of East and West, here's a possibly-related question: when following a map, do you (a) keep the map oriented with North to the top, regardless of which direction you are travelling (me), or (b) turn the map as you make turns so that the direction you are travelling is always on top (my wife)?

Depends entirely on the size of the map. Turning the map makes things easier for me, but not enough to bother with turning a big unfolded paper map that fills up the whole passenger seat area. If it's a map book or a page-sized map, though, I turn.

I turn - but we're usually talking smaller book-bound maps while driving.

Not really, except when I'm learning a dance. Then forget it. : )

Like eekacat, I grew up being forced to use my right hand instead of the left because, in those days, left-handed-ness didn't exist and we were just being "difficult" (I remember bein forced to sit on my left hand while writing at school). But I have no problem telling left from right, port from starboard or east from west.

My eldest daughter (right-handed), however, has massive problems telling left from right, which means that driving with her if you are giving directions is terrifying - she will take both hands off the wheel and hold them up to see which one makes an L so she knows which way to turn.

yhbc, you let your wife read a map? Have you lost your mind? Everyone knows that women can't read maps! I usually turn the map, but I can navigate fine either way.

Lefties represent! I love it that in my house of four, my wife is the only freak whose right-handed.

I am an excellent map reader, and do not turn the map around. And I'm female and right handed.

I'm right handed for writing and ambidextrous for everything else. I can also read maps and navigate very well. My husband (a righty) gets lost in his own neighbourhood, but he admits he's directionally challenged.

There are several south-paws in the family. I wonder if that has anything to do with my being ambidextrous.

Fetal ultrasound has shown to increase left-handedness by 3 of 100 births.

". . .observed 287 human mothers within 4 days after giving birth and noticed that 237, or 83%, held their babies on the left. Handedness did not explain it; 83% of the right-handed mothers and 78% of the left-handed mothers exhibited the left-side preference. When asked why they chose the left side, the right-handed mothers said it was so their right hand would be free. The left-handed mothers said it was because they could hold the baby better with their dominant hand. In other words, both groups were able to rationalize holding the baby on the left based on their own preferred hand."

Anecdotally, Catholic females seem to have the most difficulty with handedness and orientation.

that's so weird, Feisty.

I bet the left-handed moms, being clumsier generally (like me), felt more confident using the left to hold.

amberglow, the clumsiness, do you believe it exists because of operating in a righthanded environment?

Being left-handed in a right-handed world can be a problem and I suspect could lead to a certain amount of apparent clumsiness when trying to operate simple things like scissors, which are engineered to be used in the right hand. Like many left-handed people, I do lots of things right-handed and have often wondered if that is only because I have learned how to do them by watching others and whether I would be better to unlearn the skill and try doing it left-handed. Basically, any sport that is played one-handed (tennis, table-tennis, squash etc) I play left-handed, but most two-handed sports (cricket, baseball, golf etc) I play right-handed. For the trivia lovers, I understand that a very high proportion of highly successful golfers are left-handed, but all play the game right-handed.

amberglow, I always hold kids in my right because I am so clumsy with my right that I hate to have my left hand tied up.

I wish I understood what was up with my handedness. I self-describe as "semi-ambidextrous". I generally prefer my right hand over my left, but I do use my left for a variety of things (interestingly, all the things that one learns to do with one hand or another at the earliest age I do with my left) and I'm more facile with my left hand than most other righties are. And there was a mysterious episode in grade school that my mom, regrettably, cannot recall where I did weird training like walking on balance beams because "neither side of my brain was dominant and that was a problem", if I can trust my recollection and I doubt that I can.

Also, I fractured my wrist in my early twenties (I believe a door had really pissed me off when I was drunk) and wore a cast on it for almost an entire year. During that time I had to write with my left hand and, interestingly, I could only legibly write with my left hand if I used the letterforms taught in elementary school while, with my right hand, I had long switched to the draftsman's script.

Anyway, about the question, at this point I think it's almost certainly true that there are sex differences in human brains. This may be one of them. But there are so many unknowns and so many variables that any conclusions along this line are very premature.

amberglow, the clumsiness, do you believe it exists because of operating in a righthanded environment?

I think that's definitely part of it. It's the adaptations we have to make everyday that can also exacerbate an innate clumsiness too.

And we do learn so much by watching others.