Some years ago I posted about Nicaraguan sign language; now a story in Discover magazine discusses “a new study led by Jennie Pyers from Wellesley College”:
By studying children who learned NSL at various stages of its development, Pyers has shown that the vocabulary they pick up affects the way they think. Specifically, those who learned NSL before it developed specific gestures for left and right perform more poorly on a spatial awareness test than children who grew up knowing how to sign those terms.[…]
Pyers explains, “The first-cohort signers find these tasks challenging because they do not have the language to encode the relevant aspects of the environment that would help them solve the spatial problem.” She added, “[They] did not have a consistent linguistic means to encode ‘left of’.”
This is a fascinating result, especially since the first group of adults were older and had been signing for a longer time. It’s clear evidence that our spatial reasoning skills depend, to an extent, on consistent spatial language. If we lack the right words, our mental abilities are limited in a way that extra life experience can’t fully compensate for.
It’s not the dreaded Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but it’s interesting stuff. Check it out. (Thanks, Aidan!)
People in general aren’t very good at recognizing the difference between left and right. I often ask people whether they innately know which is which without having to think about it, and I’ve run across only 2 people who’ve said they know the difference innately. Most people have memory-aids of some sort (mine is “on which hand would I be wearing a watch?”).
That said, there’s more to it than just left/right, so I’m certainly not discounting the study. Really this is just a particular hobbyhorse of mine 🙂
I remember it by how I had to set the table as a kid. Knife on the right, fork on the left. With gestures (knife here, fork here) when I’m feeling particularly obtuse.
I used to need to remember left vs. right (up until about 16) by the hand I used to bless myself, but I did eventually learn it innately.
For committing medical factoids to memory I do end up using mnemonics, often ones that would not work for anyone else, e.g. gentamicin is an aminoglycoside, so vancomycin is a glycopeptide (despite that glycopeptide also has g!), the sensation of a curtain or wall coming down across one’s vision in the context of cerebrovascular pathology sounds like Mauer, one of the German words for wall, so it’s amaurosis fugax.
I wish I could find a reasonably convincing essay that I read a few years ago, arguing that the wide dissemination of ideas like a metaphorical market, a mean, a median, GDP per capita, means that we’re better at reasoning about contexts that involve these ideas than our great-grandfathers.
DG: With gestures
Yeah, exactly. I still automatically look down at my right thigh when I need to choose right from left; it had a scar on it when I was about six, fifty years ago now.
Mark Liberman would argue that we still suck at thinking in terms of statistics and distributions.
I’ve had two fingers crushed on my left hand. It sorta helps.
It’ll never catch on, Sili.
I caught (the skin of) my right wrist in a machine in a meat factory when I was seventeen, and still have a gnarly scar because of it. Never used that as a landmark, and I don’t particularly recommend that approach. (Though if you do go down that road, try to find an emergency department with better triage than mine had.)
This seems like an odd niche sort of situation, because the kids were apparently making up the language (or “language”; I don’t know enough about signing to know to what extent this is a metaphor rather than a description) on their own rather than learning it from an earlier generation, so not only did it lack certain lexical resources, the kids (assuming they’d not completely mastered Spanish, which may not be entirely accurate) apparently didn’t, as it were, know what they were missing. Is there a “regular” natural language (please please don’t let it be Piraha . . .) that is unusually impoverished in spatial vocabulary, or is the ability to verbally distinguish left from right, up from down, etc etc pretty much ubiquitous? A stripped-down pidgin wouldn’t really be a counterexample if its speakers were also native speakers of a lexically-richer tongue.
Apparently, Kuuk Thaayorre uses absolute directions.
Grammars of Space: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity seems to be a more or less self-contained survey with papers on interesting cases.
Kári Tulinius may of course have higher standards for innateness than I am imagining, but I do not perceive any more need for mnemonics than for up and down. (And I’m well acquainted with the need for “no, the other left.”)
“”language”; I don’t know enough about signing to know to what extent this is a metaphor rather than a description”
It’s a description. Sign Languages of the Nicarauguan type (properly ISN – Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua) are full languages.
I worked for several years with the main sign language in Poland (PJM – polski język migowy) which (when I was working with it) didn’t seem to have distinct signs for left and right. There was a single sign, which might be glossed SIDE.
Also, IME left and right aren’t important elements in the phonology of sign languages. Instead the contrast is ipsilateral and contralateral (the dominant hand in the signing process). And a person’s dominant signing hand is not necessarily their dominant hand in other kinds of tasks. Some signers, like my principal consultant when I was active in PJM, are ambidextrous(sp?) and switch dominant sides.
Finally, for years I’d misinterpreted what’s interesting about ISN. I’d assumed that the school had started instruction using some kind of Signed Spanish (which wouldn’t be a full language) and the kids sensibly modified it in the direction of a natural sign language. That kind of scenario happens frequently. But I recently came across one source that indicated the school had been set up as ‘oral’ where the children were supposed to lipread and speak which makes the sign language there much more interesting.
Just to clarify. The common practice in Sign Linguistics is to use geographic acronyms of the American Sign language ASL, British Sign Language BSL kind. At present the international tendency is to use the acronym from the country of origin in any language.
So ASL is the name of American Sign Language not only in English, but German, French etc. Similarly Polish Sign Language is PJM in English.
I seem to recall hearing a podcast (ABC’s Lingua Franca, I think) which talked about an australian aboriginal tribe who didn’t have words for left, right, front, back but instead used North, South, East, West for everything. They seemed to have an enhanced sense of compass directions as a result.
There’s a good discussion of absolute-direction languages in Dying Words. Actually, we should speak of “absolute-direction cultures”, because pointing gestures are interpreted in the same way: when someone says “You go into the shop and then it’s on this side” (pointing southward), you are supposed to look on the southward wall of the shop; but an Anglo may interpret this as “the rightward wall of the shop” and look in the wrong direction. Similarly, when telling a story in two different locations, Anglo deictic space will be relative to the speaker’s position at the time when the story occurred, whereas Aboriginal space will be absolute: the story will be accompanied with (from the Anglo perspective) entirely different gestures depending on the orientation of the speaker.
I have an absolute left-right sense, and I don’t know what it’s based on. But I think I also have a bit of a north-south sense, dependent of that? Or east-west, or west-north/east-south, depending on the depending on the local topography, once I’m familiar enough with it? But it’s based on left/right. Once I’ve internalized a map.
As in, if the map is up south up, I think of east as left and west as right.
And by “up” I mean the direction the map is pointing towards. Even if it’s “down”?
Generally, I’ve seen attempts to define right and left with electromagnetic phenomena. But they are tautological.
I can define right and left, provisionally as in if I am facing the current magnetic north pole, and am in the northern hemisphere, my left hand is the one that is the one closer to France, and my right one is the one closer to India.
But I do have an innate sense of what is my left side and what is my right side regardess of that.
east as left and west as right
Assuming we’re on earth (no matter which hemisphere), east is where the sun rises; west where it sets.
Assuming you’re a human, left is the side of your chest where your heart beats stronger — also many other internal organs are asymmetrically positioned, but I don’t suggest cutting yourself open to find out[**].
[**] Unless you’re amongst the 0.01% of the population with Situs Inversus. In cases of doubt, cut open 10,000 random individuals, and take a vote.
Maps generally have writing on them, which is asymmetrical. A map with only coastlines and contours has no ‘up’ or ‘down’. (Except that all projections on to a flat representation distort distances and orientations. You might be able to recover the up/down by carefully comparing the map’s distances to distances on the ground.)
You can get jokey/tourist maps in New Zealand, with NZ top dead centre, the International Date Line vertically in the middle, and most of the (allegedly) civilised continents squished into the bottom corners [see “distort” above]. Plus a lot of featureless blue.
Generally, I’ve seen attempts to define right and left with electromagnetic phenomena. But they are tautological.
You need to use weak-interaction phenomena. Assuming you’re not on Earth (or you interlocutor isn’t):
Set up a source of electrons from beta decay or some similar phenomenon such as muon decay.
Let them crash into a solid barrier, creating X rays by bremsstrahlung.
The majority of the X-ray photons are circularly polarized in such a way that if you see them from behind (from the source), the electric field is rotating counterclockwise. This is the circular polarization created when linearly polarized light falls on a quarter-wave plate whose fast axis is 45` (1/8 of a circle) to the left of the electric field. (If possible, see this illustration from a popular Terran encyclopedia. For an alternate definition of “left” once you’ve defined “counterclockwise”, if an object is going around a circular track counterclockwise, it is turning left; its acceleration is 90` to the left of its velocity.
All that assumes that you and your interlocutor are not in a region of the universe where antimatter is more common than ordinary matter, but that’s a pretty safe assumption. (The AMS experiments mentioned in the second response there didn’t find any anti-helium in Earth’s orbit, for what that’s worth.)
like V, i have a strong internal sense of left and right (i would not say it’s an innate sense: i remember having to check which hand made an L to be sure of “left”, but i don’t remember how lateral directions felt before that). my sister doesn’t have it at all. navigating* on a long road trip together, i finally internalized that enough to start consistently saying “turn toward me” instead of “turn right”.
i wonder about the interweavings in there between innate capacities and formative interactions with the world – and about founder effects in shaping lect evolution (i’m thinking about martha’s vineyard again, of course).
also, i think there are more than two categories (at least as possibilities; i don’t know if there are lects that make all of them primary – absolute (poleward; sunriseward) , geographic (up-river; cityward), body-absolute (speaker’s left; addressee’s left), relative (towards me).
.
* the Useful Non-Driver role i’m often (happily) in – on that trip, i was in charge of space, and she was in charge of time, because i have no reliable sense of duration or absolute time (tempo, yes; how many bars? not if i didn’t count).
body-absolute (speaker’s left; addressee’s left)
Is anybody else here annoyed by the picture orientation when taking a selfie with a phone?
I want to see the view as if I (or the person I’m about to send the photo to) was standing behind the phone taking the picture. In particular so that I can read any text and make sure I’m including all of the town name/shop sign/curiosity. The technerds who built the phone seem to assume I want the same view as if I was taking the photo in a mirror using the front camera. (Perhaps when phones had only one camera, that was the only way to do it.)
As it is, when I’m wiggling the phone to line up the image, I keep twisting it the ‘wrong’ way, so getting the image worse cut off.
bremsstrahlung
Ah, that takes me back! Did I encounter that in Willy Ley or Isaac Asimov? In either case, it was when I were a wee lad, and the alien-looking word was redolent with all kinds of exoticism. (Of course, I very quickly looked it up and learned how to pronounce it.) Thanks for the blast from the past, as well as a most interesting comment overall.
I am surprised to hear that there are people with no intrinsic sense of right versus left at all, though, on reflection, I suppose I should not have been.
I certainly have such a sense myself, as my patients would probably be relieved to hear …
Whether this sense is actually innate is another matter. It may well have been reinforced by medical training. Certainly it was an acquired skill in the case of my ability to distinguish, without pausing for thought, between right and left from the standpoint of someone who is facing me.
Medical convention is always to refer to right and left from the standpoint of the patient; I’ve found that patients are actually quite often confused by this:
“Close your right eye.”
“Do you mean, my right or your right, Doctor?”
Kusaal ditʋŋ “right, right hand” is clearly etymologically “eating (sc. hand)”, as throughout Oti-Volta. This is perfectly transparent in the context of the local culture. The root of dagɔbig “left, left hand” is reconstructable to proto-Oti-Volta and seems to have meant “lefthanded person” originally. It never seems to imply “clumsy” or “ill-omened” or anything of that kind. Just “left-handed.”
Surely your right eye (and anything else that’s attached to you) is always your right eye (hand, leg, etc). (In English at least).
It’s only when you have to step to the right, or look to the right, or something else outside yourself that it becomes a problem.
And yet I have really had such conversations with patients.
I suspect that the rightness of their own right eye is less salient to many people than the rightness of their right hand. It’s probably no accident that hands, specifically, figure so much, cross-linguistically, in terms for “chirality” (a case in point.)
Interesting. I wonder if the same people would doubt the location of their right eye if asked to close it by a playful child.
I can define right and left, provisionally as in if I am facing the current magnetic north pole, and am in the northern hemisphere, my left hand is the one that is the one closer to France, and my right one is the one closer to India.
Opposite for me, also in the northern hemisphere. Your method works in the eastern hemisphere, or really, only the region between the longitudes of France and India. OK, fellow pedants, between the longitudes of the easternmost point of France and the westernmost point of India.
@V: I have an absolute left-right sense, and I don’t know what it’s based on.
…
But I do have an innate sense of what is my left side and what is my right side regardess of that.
Do you mean you don’t mix up the words “left” and “right”, as some people (not just rozele’s sister) do? Or that you know which things you can see are on the same side as the hand you write with? Is there more to that than the ability to look at or point to or reach for things?
I often have to figure out east and west by imagining a little train going across a map between glasgoW and Edinburgh. I think a bigger map would just confuse me more, though.
I try to consciously notice when people are left-handed. I find it challenging, and not something that gets easier with practice.
I often have to think twice over East and West.
Somewhere along the line I seem to have acquired the Oti-Volta East-is-behind-you, West-is-in-front-of-you outlook (the opposite of both the traditional Semitic and traditional Celtic systems.)
Assuming we’re on earth (no matter which hemisphere), east is where the sun rises; west where it sets.
The more polar, the less so.
If I was a fancier of such popular fools’ errands, I would suggest looking at statistics aiming to prove that speakers of very northern languages don’t rely so much on the cardinal directions.
Central Alaskan Yup’ik has calaraq, “east”, kanaknak “west” according to the dictionary; the lexemes don’t seem to mean anything else besides. Whether the terms are actually used much, I have no idea.
The most common use of that camera is as a makeup mirror.
Mongolians, meanwhile, look south (as is only sensible: turn your back on Siberia).
makeup mirror
or shaving mirror, I suppose (not having much use for makeup). Cue Carly Simon.
But no, I’ve not used my phone for either purpose. You’da thought there’s a setting somewhere … No, I’m not so vain.
Using bremsstrahlung seems like a rather roundabout way to find the parity-violating preferred spin orientation of a β-decay electron. And of course you can always observe the CP violation in neutral kaon oscillations to tell whether you are in a matter or antimatter galaxy (if the latter exist).
Bremsstrahlung was one of the ways it was done in the early days:
https://journals.aps.org/pr/abstract/10.1103/PhysRev.112.2061
Since I was talking about how “right: and “left” could be defined, what would be a more direct way that doesn’t involve a previous definition of “right” and “left” or a shared reference such as the Earth’s magnetic poles?
And I agree with your “of course”. I thought about mentioning CP violation, but decided I’d included enough physics for one comment.
The best prescription I remember for defining left and right absolutely using β-decay described using a particular two-body decay and three vectorial observables in the decay, A, B, and C that were more likely to form triad of one handedness than the other. As in, you measure the expectation of A • (B × C), and if it’s negative, you have the correct (meaning right-handed) cross product—or equivalently, the correct sign convention for the Levi-Civita symbol εᵢⱼₖ.
Thanks. I couldn’t find anything like that in a quick look, but one could also use Wu’s original experiment that demonstrated parity nonconservation. If you look at a cobalt-60 nucleus from the direction where the beta ray goes, the nucleus is spinning clockwise.
Medical convention is always to refer to right and left from the standpoint of the patient; I’ve found that patients are actually quite often confused by this:
I was reading a Pinguin Plays paperback recently, and got confused by “right” and “left” in the stage directions of a Pinter play. I remembered only that they did not mean what I originally had thought they mean, namely “right” and “left” from the viewpoint of the audience. I also used to imagine that “upstaging” meant going to the front of the stage, right in front of the audience.
I guess what is meant is not important at all times in all places.
@stu
Clearly you have not been aware of the other actors behind you, making faces, pointing at you and laughing, miming a groan, making obscene gestures etc., when you say your best lines. It is perhaps for the best. The upstaged actor would have to turn his face towards the upstager, who would then detect any such foul play immediately, and since he is facing the upstager and not the audience, there would be little point in foul play. At least you have Sparky, but better not try his loyalty by too much upstaging….
It seems like it would rarely make a difference when reading a play if left and right were inverted, so long as they were consistently inverted.
Something I mentioned in the Bullitt thread was McQueen’s scene stealing antics. One way he did that was, when he was toward the background of a shot and someone else was talking in the foreground, do something that looked dynamic, to draw the viewers’ eyes away from the foreground action.
A carefully calibrated toilet in outer space, free of Coriolis forces, will always swirl clockwise. Or maybe anticlockwise.
Coriolis forces have a much, much, much smaller influence than the precise shape of the toilet.
Also, this is strictly about American toilets. Elsewhere, the sewage pipes are much wider, the whole complex siphon mechanism isn’t necessary, toilets are flushed by just dumping water in them, and you need a bathtub to observe any swirling.
I remember hearing about an African con performer, who claimed he could show he was standing exactly on the equator by draining a small tank of water he carried. He would carrying it a few paces north, release the plug and show it spiraled one way. Then he would refill the tank, walk back south and let it empty again, spiraling the other way. Of course, Coriolis forces had nothing to do with it, not on that tiny scale. What made this difference was whether he turned his body right or left while carrying the tank and thus which way he started the contents sloshing.
Early Dilbert, when Scott Adams still worked at Pacific Bell and the cartooning was just a hobby, could be pretty clever.