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Tuesday, June 25th, 2013 08:17 pm
tell me which one's my right hand again
Due to me being that kind of very determined person, we got a giant whiteboard at work, so giant that I decided to add a word of the day to the space using the time-honored method of wikipedia freefall-- that is, starting from my previous word of the day, I follow links until I find something interesting in under five minutes. Though it's more word every three days, because the whiteboard is less easy to wipe clean than you might think;
Current: Prosopagnoisa, aka face blindness.
Previous: jamais vu, presque vu
While surfing my way through aphasia, I remembered I wanted to check what it's called when someone has left-right confusion, and discovered--again--that this isn't yet an actual thing in itself, but is a major hanger-on of pretty much every brain malfunction you can possibly have, and while it possibly effects up to twenty-five percent of the population in varying degrees of severity, it's still--a thing among many things, a description of a few words that tells is it's something that happens. What it is seems a little vague, and science has yet to tell me why.
I can't immediately identify my right hand when I'm actually engaged in writing with it. I have to look down and check to see where my pencil is and connect that to the objective knowledge of a lifetime that I'm right handed, ergo, the hand that writes is the hand that's right. I can feel a pencil in my hand, but I gotta get visual confirmation because the connection isn't there without it. This is my entire life, every time. I can hold the concept left and right if I'm engaged in some kind of memory game that keeps it in short term memory, but if I stop thinking about it, I lose it. Five minutes, tops.
It's probably the most innocuous problem you can possibly have when your brain doesn't follow the blueprints....
Unless you're giving directions, trying to follow directions, driving, reading a map, trying to get yourself un-lost, want to use googlemaps for more than the most general interest reasons, learn choreography, ballroom dancing, blocking on a stage, set margins or padding in CSS, or tell someone where they should look in a table without using numbers, because I read left to right, so left--I almost wrote 'right' there--starts with one, but my brain has no idea that you call that side 'left'; the word has no meaning and I have to consciously fish up the definition and stare down at my hands until it makes the connection.
I know the sun comes up in the east and goes down in the west, but when I'm standing there, if you asked me which way was north, I'd get it right half the time because there are only two choices that don't involve a sunset.
If you only know the concepts of clockwise and counterclockwise when you've got a clock in front of you and a couple of seconds to stare, but if you're asked what time it is, you have no problem identifying it on a glance. Like reading left to right all your life, I know I do that because that's what the rules of English grammar tell me, but my brain doesn't understand what on earth the readable flow of words across the page has to do with the concept of 'left to right'. If someone had told me I read purple to gretna green, it would have been equally believable; I have no clue.
And ask me about trying to use a screwdriver; that's body memory, but half the time I screw up the threading because righty-tighty, lefty-loosy is less useful than the assistance of a hungry bear.
Also, people assume you are incredibly, incredibly stupid. Does that count as an actual problem?
These kind of tiny brain shorts fascinate me because they're almost invisible and don't affect most people's daily life as they understand it because it's this one thing that you can't do among thousands of things you can't do (skydiving, breathe water, knit) and it's much, much later that you realize it's a thing, and realize how much you do automatically to compensate when you can and avoid when you can't. And it's not until now I get why when I learned to do anything physical--dancing, basketball, cheerleading, marching band--people got in the habit of physically moving me through the steps before I'd get it, but when they did, I could do it immediately after because without a sense of left and right to work with, having to create that concept first before you can apply it to yourself, much less other people, means it's kind of hard to remember the moves when you're still trying to conceptualize where the moves are going.
Here's something I just learned--I can't use googlemaps on a small scale--say, I'm in a park--to get anywhere. I went in circles and had no idea why this was happening because I followed the tiny blue triangle and read the directions and ended up staring at a really familiar tree way too many times. Finding that out at one in the morning in the greater San Antonio area really changes your view on innocuous when you're less than thirty feet from a highway and two major roads just out of view but no matter how hard you tried, you couldn't find them and it's too dark and nothing around is distinctive enough to envision the world as a thousand landmarks linked together to tell you where you need to go.
The thing is, this shows up everywhere--it's insane, really--but while it's listed as a side effect for every goddamn disorder of the brain or memory in the free world, I still have no clue what it is, why it doesn't work for me, and science doesn't seem to either. Few articles if any have ever detailed what it meant when the severity meant all you had to work with when it comes to left and right is that everyone says it exists, and everyone's gotta know more than I do.
This is why I love the Road Coloring Problem. I'm shit at geometry, you have no idea, but here, direction doesn't matter, left-right, north-south don't even exist; all I have to do is follow a pattern and I'll always get exactly where I'm supposed to go even wheN I don't know where I am.
I'm going to say, I get it's pretentious on some level to have a profoundly transcendental experience with a solved millennium problem that's most practical application will upgrade PRISM's ability to stalk us through the internet more efficiently, but once in a while, I go back to read the theory, and on a bad day I get my pens out and draw it, and wonder a little if there was a way to reverse engineer a theoretical advanced graphing concept to explain how at one in the morning, I can't get out of a discrete area of less than one hundred square feet in the middle of a San Antonio park.
Current: Prosopagnoisa, aka face blindness.
Previous: jamais vu, presque vu
While surfing my way through aphasia, I remembered I wanted to check what it's called when someone has left-right confusion, and discovered--again--that this isn't yet an actual thing in itself, but is a major hanger-on of pretty much every brain malfunction you can possibly have, and while it possibly effects up to twenty-five percent of the population in varying degrees of severity, it's still--a thing among many things, a description of a few words that tells is it's something that happens. What it is seems a little vague, and science has yet to tell me why.
I can't immediately identify my right hand when I'm actually engaged in writing with it. I have to look down and check to see where my pencil is and connect that to the objective knowledge of a lifetime that I'm right handed, ergo, the hand that writes is the hand that's right. I can feel a pencil in my hand, but I gotta get visual confirmation because the connection isn't there without it. This is my entire life, every time. I can hold the concept left and right if I'm engaged in some kind of memory game that keeps it in short term memory, but if I stop thinking about it, I lose it. Five minutes, tops.
It's probably the most innocuous problem you can possibly have when your brain doesn't follow the blueprints....
Unless you're giving directions, trying to follow directions, driving, reading a map, trying to get yourself un-lost, want to use googlemaps for more than the most general interest reasons, learn choreography, ballroom dancing, blocking on a stage, set margins or padding in CSS, or tell someone where they should look in a table without using numbers, because I read left to right, so left--I almost wrote 'right' there--starts with one, but my brain has no idea that you call that side 'left'; the word has no meaning and I have to consciously fish up the definition and stare down at my hands until it makes the connection.
I know the sun comes up in the east and goes down in the west, but when I'm standing there, if you asked me which way was north, I'd get it right half the time because there are only two choices that don't involve a sunset.
If you only know the concepts of clockwise and counterclockwise when you've got a clock in front of you and a couple of seconds to stare, but if you're asked what time it is, you have no problem identifying it on a glance. Like reading left to right all your life, I know I do that because that's what the rules of English grammar tell me, but my brain doesn't understand what on earth the readable flow of words across the page has to do with the concept of 'left to right'. If someone had told me I read purple to gretna green, it would have been equally believable; I have no clue.
And ask me about trying to use a screwdriver; that's body memory, but half the time I screw up the threading because righty-tighty, lefty-loosy is less useful than the assistance of a hungry bear.
Also, people assume you are incredibly, incredibly stupid. Does that count as an actual problem?
These kind of tiny brain shorts fascinate me because they're almost invisible and don't affect most people's daily life as they understand it because it's this one thing that you can't do among thousands of things you can't do (skydiving, breathe water, knit) and it's much, much later that you realize it's a thing, and realize how much you do automatically to compensate when you can and avoid when you can't. And it's not until now I get why when I learned to do anything physical--dancing, basketball, cheerleading, marching band--people got in the habit of physically moving me through the steps before I'd get it, but when they did, I could do it immediately after because without a sense of left and right to work with, having to create that concept first before you can apply it to yourself, much less other people, means it's kind of hard to remember the moves when you're still trying to conceptualize where the moves are going.
Here's something I just learned--I can't use googlemaps on a small scale--say, I'm in a park--to get anywhere. I went in circles and had no idea why this was happening because I followed the tiny blue triangle and read the directions and ended up staring at a really familiar tree way too many times. Finding that out at one in the morning in the greater San Antonio area really changes your view on innocuous when you're less than thirty feet from a highway and two major roads just out of view but no matter how hard you tried, you couldn't find them and it's too dark and nothing around is distinctive enough to envision the world as a thousand landmarks linked together to tell you where you need to go.
The thing is, this shows up everywhere--it's insane, really--but while it's listed as a side effect for every goddamn disorder of the brain or memory in the free world, I still have no clue what it is, why it doesn't work for me, and science doesn't seem to either. Few articles if any have ever detailed what it meant when the severity meant all you had to work with when it comes to left and right is that everyone says it exists, and everyone's gotta know more than I do.
This is why I love the Road Coloring Problem. I'm shit at geometry, you have no idea, but here, direction doesn't matter, left-right, north-south don't even exist; all I have to do is follow a pattern and I'll always get exactly where I'm supposed to go even wheN I don't know where I am.
I'm going to say, I get it's pretentious on some level to have a profoundly transcendental experience with a solved millennium problem that's most practical application will upgrade PRISM's ability to stalk us through the internet more efficiently, but once in a while, I go back to read the theory, and on a bad day I get my pens out and draw it, and wonder a little if there was a way to reverse engineer a theoretical advanced graphing concept to explain how at one in the morning, I can't get out of a discrete area of less than one hundred square feet in the middle of a San Antonio park.
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