darkemeralds. (Reply)

Posted by

I feel sure you're right about brain architecture. Yes, I am left-handed--very strongly so--and am the only person in my family for three generations who is. I've long supposed that my extremely clear sense of left and right--of relative direction--arises from it, and have been frustrated by not being able to deal with absolute directions.

The counselor I've been visiting for work-related learning problems wondered yesterday if I might be slightly dyslexic. I don't think so, but there's something...something about visual-spatial perception that just doesn't work "normally" in my brain. I can't account for it by heredity--at least not in any direct way--and I'm impressed with the persistence of gender stereotyping in your situation, where two male family members had difficulties like yours, but in your case it tended to remain a gender-specific trait.

I was just googling "Never Eat Shredded Wheat" to see if there was a handy explanatory link (all the references I could find call it a mnemonic for remembering the compass points, and I became annoyed because [prejudice] who can't remember the names of the cardinal directions??? [/prejudice], and none explained the useful way in which, if you can figure out one direction and point at it with your right hand, you can turn towards the right and say the rest...::sigh::), and I came upon a British travel book by that title. The blurb said:

[The author] blames several factors for our collective cultural disorientation, including the fact that we're all in such a terrible rush to get somewhere that we no longer notice the journey (plus, of course, the infantilising effect of GPS and sat-nav).

Grrr. I don't want to get all up on some high horse of woe is me and my terrible handicap, but condemning GPS and sat-nav as "infantilising" does seem to come from the school of "you could do it if you tried, you lazy-minded loser."