I can't believe that this otherwise intelligent group of people is having conversations about their inability to identify left from right. I am at a loss for works.

Where is LJ when you need him to make a snarky comment? :D

Well, that's kind of the point. It's not about intelligence it's about the manner in which our brains process certain types of information. It's also a common trait amongst dyslexics, as is confusion over quarter to and quarter past on a traditional clock face.

You were saying? ;)

So what you are saying is all you guys on this thread with the common confusion are dyslexic? WTF? Is this some kind of convention I have stumbled upon. Dyslexic Fourmites United? :D

That's Dyslexic Fourmites Untied, please.

I truly believe that my lack of sense of direction is a form of dyslexia. I'm not saying it is the conventional dyslexia, but there is something in the way our brain processes certain information.

I don't think any of us are asking for government aid, we are just saying we have to use different methods to arrive at the conclusion. Learning is just that: training your brain to think in a way that circumvents inadequacies in your own personal information processing.

It took me 4 days to figure out where my parking space was and how to get to it. Once I made a turn on a one way street and was going the wrong way, it was a lost cause. I finally just parked in paid parking so I could be on time for work. I don't enjoy getting lost...I just don't process direction.

My book is going to be called No Connection to Direction (thought of this years ago) and is not just about not knowing left from right, but the lifelong struggle for my raison d'etre. ;)

Dyslexia carries with it a range of possible traits and 'symptoms'. Each individual trait is not exclusive to dyslexics, it's the combination of a number of them, or the presence of a couple of specific ones that lead to a diagnosis of dyslexia.

No two brains work exactly alike. Most people have ideosyncracies and oddities in the way their brain processes certain types of information, which if they were to be combined with a few other traits wold be considered a form of dyslexia. I have a serious difficulty with spacial relationships. I have no sense of direction and have great diffulty with certain spacial concepts. I also have difficulty with numbers.

I am neither dyslexic nor unintelligent :P

I have dyscalculia. Tested and proved.
I have trouble with left and right and recognising faces as part of this (although I did not know this was considered as a flag for years, so it's not self-indulgence).

Again, I'm not asking for aid or sympathy, but I do hope my friends will be understanding. Don't just tell me your door number, describe your house. Don't say first right, next left, second right - say right after the pub, left at the house with the white fence etc etc

I make up rhymes and picture references for pin numbers, postcodes and other important things. I get by. I am not stupid and I have better spelling and grammar than anyone I work with.

So :frog:

Also, I cannot arbitrarily tell you which direction (N/S,E/W) I am traveling down a certain road. All I can tell you is that I have figured out how to get around my new town much faster than my eagle-scout husband.

I hate it when he tells me, "go west on Little Patuxant" or some such. Huh? Which friggin' way is "west"?

When I was a little girl living in Colorado, I was told that "west" was the direction the mountains were in. When we moved to Chile, the mountains were suddenly east of our house, but I thought that direction was still called "west" and chalked it up to some southern hemisphere weirdness.

I have my own short comings but I have been blessed with an internal compass and the ability to retrace a route I have traveled only once before, even if it has been a year or more since I traveled it last. As a kid in Oklahoma we learned directions early as the Mid West was mapped out in mile sections, with cardinal directions at points of orientation. But then again it may be genetic, as my father and 2 of 3 brothers can do it but one brother and my sister never could, neither could my mother.

At first I was like: :confused:
And then I: :D
I forgot all about the alligator. (One should never forget alligators, they can pop up in the unexpected places!)

I am pretty good with spatial stuff like packing up a truck with different sized boxes or packing a suitcase or planning the space for a company building (use to do this for a living.) I am also pretty good with faces, but cannot remember names...I repeat names in my head so I remember them, but I still usually forget. One thing that helps is seeing the name visually spelled out in my head. If I can do that, sometimes I remember. If it is a name written on a nametag, I don't have much of a problem.

I can be pretty good with directions, as long as I can see it on a map, first. If I can't see it, visually, though, I am not good at it. Like when someone gives you directions over the phone...I may as well not have directions at all. If I can mapquest it, I am good.

Choco, the mountains to the West have always helped me, too, having lived on the front range for a long time. Now that I live in the middle of the mountains things get all screwed up. In Kansas, I was totally clueless about directions.

My sense of time is really messed up, though. 5 hours can seem like 15 minutes to me. And I might really truly believe I have only been doing something for 15 minutes, until I look at a clock or something. I have a bad short term memory, so that doesn't help.

Words escape me, all the time. This is probably why I am not a very good writer...I don't think of things is terms of audible descriptions...I think of them as what they look like.

I have a diagnosis for you case: Painter. "Artist" also applies to this particular condition. I would have it checked if I were you. ;)

I'm bad at knowing people's names when they're in Halloween costumes. I'll probably go around all night trying to figure out which ones are Case and Mac Tire.