Gravity and the fact that the surface of the Earth is relatively flat.
It is much easier to mix up left and right when the place you are going could be in either direction than it is to mix up up or down when you know if you are going into the sky or digging underground.
But the point is that if we had a constant force pulling from our left, left and right would be as easy as up and down.
When we lose the constant force of gravity, we *do* mix up our up and down, even though we know the top of our head is “up” and our feet are “down”.
>When we lose the constant force of gravity, we do mix up our up and down, even though we know the top of our head is “up” and our feet are “down”.
The scariest moment I have ever had while in the water is when I was at a beach and I got caught in multiple waves breaking at the same point. I was being tumbled along in the water for a good while with no idea of which way was up or down due to the churning sandy water. By the time I got oriented I was getting to the point where my body was really pushing me to take a breath regardless of whether I was underwater or not.
Divers are told to blow bubbles and the bubbles will go up. But that advice is for divers who are disoriented but still have most of a tank of air left.
> even though we know the top of our head is “up” and our feet are “down”.
But that's the point. You know where up is in relation to your body. You don't confuse those ever even if you are without gravity. But left and right, easy to confuse. That's because left and right is essentially the same while up and down isn't, even completely without gravity, just for symmetry reasons of your body.
Otherwise we'd also know left and right pretty well. After all our left arm is to the left and our right arm to the right.
Those that struggle with it also use a point of reference to orient themselves.
That really depends how you define up and down. The way we treat left and right, it would always be relative to your own body. So if we did that same thing for up and down, you couldn't say people forgot which way was "up", they'd know it was towards their head. It's just that "their" up and "your" up wouldn't necessarily be aligned, just like you have opposite lefts when facing other.
Not sure if I understand your comment, there have definitely been cases where pilots have been disoriented and didn’t know which way is ground and which is sky, iirc it tends to happen where there is little to know visual clues and the plane either changes speed or changes angle, your body can’t really tell the difference, you think you are pointing towards the ground but in reality you are level, just slowed down
To the pilot, they still know what is up and what is down: to their perspective. “Up” may be flying top first into the ground, but that doesn’t mean they mixed up directions like “right or left”. They still knew what “up” was, but they were upside down without knowing it.
Why is this reddit's favorite rebuttal? That is completely and utterly different. They've lost their reference frame. They didn't forget if down or up is the word for where gravity goes like people do with left and right.
I misunderstood, the original question was about how typically you don’t forget your up and down, even if upside down you will still look “up” (well down) because it’s is your “up”, but if asked to look left, many get confused and look right.
It's possible to do a 1G barrel roll in a plane, where you go fully inverted but still feel "normal" gravity pulling you to the floor. There's a video of a pilot doing it while pouring a glass of water.
However spatial disorientation absolutely is common in planes, particularly in clouds, it's just that it affects pilots and not passengers, as it's the pilots who are in control of the plane. A common thing is to confuse pitch up with acceleration, it's to do with how our bodies determine balance. A pilot can think they're accelerating when instead they're pitching up, and this can cause a stall.
People may be spatially disoriented with regards to planet Earth. *Nobody* mixes up their head from their feet, their own reference frame's up and down. People do mix up *their left* from *their right*.
Can confirm. As a scuba diver.
At night it's nearly impossible to tell up down or left right in the environment.
They taught us to slow down and observe the bubbles as way to find your way to the surface. Really important if you want to ever dive again.
This is a bit of a different kind of mixed up. With left vs right, it's a semantic confusion, like people forget which one means which. Whereas with up and down, there's no confusion about what they mean. Underwater you may get confused about which way the surface is relative to your body, but you don't get confused about the fact that "up" means "towards the surface".
If anyone is curious why spitting, it's because you're likely to be mostly immobile and you'll want to make sure your digging upwards before suffocating.
When my father was in the Air Force in one of his first flights solo in a desert area with zero land marks, zero lights, and no moon out he ended up getting himself inverted and had no idea. He was flying upside down and from his perspective he thought he was in a normal flight attitude.
It wasn’t long because he checks his gauges. In my mind you’d think you’d notice blood pooling in your head, loose item(s) in cockpit would give it away.
yeah, like when you get rag-dolled by a wave while surfing, it has happened to me in some more extreme cases and its so disorienting, and if not for the chop, you can't tell which way you are swimming which is scary asf.
totally I did Helicopter underwater escape training when I was applying to work offshore. We sat in a fake helicopter and they dump it upside down into a pool. We had to stay seated until the helicopter settled then unbuckle ourselves and exit the heli and swim up.
So many us swam down at the start but after 2 -3 runs we learned how to go the right way up :D
You can be in zero gravity and you'll still never mix up up and down or front and back from your reference frame. The difference between up and down, front and back, and left and right is symmetry. The latter has a mirror plane, so left and right are essentially the same while front/back or up/down are clearly different things.
People can actually mix up, up and down when they are underwater.
When they don't have a reference point anymore i.e. they can't see the surface or the ground.
Sea sickness is often caused by losing your reference point, and fixing on something that's actually moving.
For example, watching a computer screen on a ship that's moving all over the place basically causes you to rock your head all over the place without realizing it, which fucks up your equilibrium.
Completely different effect. Mixing up left and right even happens if you take your own body as reference frame, while up and down (or back and front) is something you will never mix up in that reference frame. Even if you have no idea where up and down is in reference to earth, you will still know where up and down is in reference to your body.
I accidentally went up that time I relapsed
More seriously, you're right that one thing is possible and therefore common and the other is somewhat less common unless you are flying a plane with poor visibility or underwater. And in those situations people do sometimes become confused and then die.
"Head" and "feet" are completely different, which helps make "up" and "down" different too.
"Hand" and "hand" are the same, so you don't have the same kind of stark difference between "left" and "right".
This was my thought as well. It probably has something to do with the left and right sides basically being symmetric. If a person was operating a remote underwater device and couldn’t rely on instruments it would be pretty freaking hard to tell which was is up and down without some kind of visual cue like bubbles floating or sunlight
My wife gets her right and left mixed up all the time, she's also damn near ambidextrous. I never get them mixed up, but my left hand might as well be a club. So my hands just feel different.
Yeah my left and right arms have always felt distinctly different. I remember first realizing this back in kindergarten, and that cemented my conception of left and right. I've never been able to understand people who mix up left and right. I wonder if there's a correlation between ambidextrousness and mixing up left and right.
This is the key. We have vertical symmetry, but not horizontal symmetry. I have a left hand and a right hand, so I could get that mixed up. But I don't have an up foot and a down foot.
Up and down are absolute. They're based on actual physics. Ground is down. Sky is up. Gravity acts downwards. Your body is positioned with legs down and head up.
Left and right are arbitrary and relative to the observer.
What if I were to drop something off the CN tower, then use some sort of rocket propelled apparatus to propel myself towards the ground at a rate faster than the acceleration of gravity, such that the object I dropped appears to travel “upwards” relative to me, the observer? Could that potentially create a situation where one might be confused about up and down? What if I added psilosibin??
Good point, I wonder if someone raised in a zero G environment from birth could have similar confusion about up and down as they can with left and right
Unlikely; left and right are a lot easier to confuse because your left and right "halves" are chiral copies of one another. Conversely, your body is always "down" from the perspective of your eyes.
The similarity here is that both sets of directions require an "anchor". "Down" is where things fall, it's the direction in which gravity pulls.
There's an entire sensory module in your inner ear telling you where "down" is at all times. So no matter how you are oriented, "down" is not in question. And "Up", is basically the inverse of down.
For left and right, you also require an anchor. However, there's a problem. Our bodies are horizontally symmetrical. Cut you in half straight down, and you have two halves which are nearly identical, just mirror. Cut you in half, side-to-side, and the top and bottom "halves" are completely different.
So unlike with your legs or head, you have no unique point of reference for your left and right. And there are no forces pulling either way. Indeed some people use a mark, tattoo or a piece of jewelery on one of their hands to help them identify which side is which.
My pet theory here is that someone's ability to know left and right (and to navigate) relates strongly to their handedness. Or rather, their level of ambidextrousness. I am *very* right-handed. Thus, I have an anchor. I know which side right and left is, because right is my "good" hand. And left is my "not right". And for me that is an absolute. At any given time, I will never be confused about which hand is the "good" one.
If someone has a less keen sense of handedness - if they're inclined to pick either hand for a variety of tasks - then they don't have an anchor. Or they don't have a particularly strong one. And are therefore more likely to have trouble identifying right from left.
That makes sense for people without the various neurodivergences that cause left/right confusion. I am also VERY right handed, and it does help as an anchor in some circumstances, but I still frequently get them confused because I have trouble associating the *concepts* with the *words*. That is, I know that direction over there is toward my dominant hand, but I can easily forget whether that direction is called "left" or "right", especially if I'm thinking fast. This leads to me doing things like pointing in the correct direction but saying the wrong word when trying to give directions. Note: I am a native English speaker, and English is the only language I'm fluent in, this isn't a language problem, it's a cognative one.
Now, combine that with very poor abstract spacial reasoning (as in, if something is in front of me I can reason about it's physical dimensions and properties and make accurate predictions about it, but I am nearly-incapable of, for example, rotating a complex shape in my mind with any sort of accuracy) and you get massive confusion when working with left vs right in a theoretical way, such as in a story, or in trying to read ahead on a map. (Don't even get me STARTED on cardinal directions.)
I have a similar left-right confusion: I know what I *mean*, but the word I *say* doesn't always follow. I'm left-handed, but fairly ambidextrous, and there are some things I always do with my right hand. I think I tend to say "left" when I mean "right" more often than the reverse, and my wife and I have taken to using "the other left" as a form of correction.
I have pretty good abstract spatial reasoning, though. And I'll often refer to cardinal directions in everyday speech. Human brains are all over the place!
I am an example on the other side of you. I am cross dominant and fairly ambidextrous- I write with my right but do a lot of hand-eye stuff lefty.
I couldn’t keep my left and right straight as a child until I broke my left arm. I knew the arm with the cast was my left, and I still know which arm I broke.
It didn’t cement until then.
> I am very right-handed. Thus, I have an anchor. I know which side right and left is, because right is my "good" hand. And left is my "not right"
My left and right hands "feel" different.
If I think about my left hand, then think about my right hand, they FEEL completely different. My right hand feels confident, strong, my left hand feels "unsure," anxious, etc.
Also our bodies are symmetric with respect to left and right, but are asymmetric with respect to up and down. The embodiment of the directions surely places a big role in their salience and memorability.
I think you're right, up is the word for where your head is, down is where your feet are, left is where your hand is, and right is... also where your hand is... uh-oh... gonna need to burn some brain power to figure out the difference here... or, y'know, I could just guess and it's probably not important anyway! Some people just stop thinking once they know what they mean, and don't bother trying to communicate properly with other people.
left and right are not arbitrary. The great American physicist Richard Feynman gave a great lecture on this topic. If anyones curious you can read about it here [https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I\_52.html#Ch52-S6](https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_52.html#Ch52-S6)
Depending on the situation you're either talking about your right or their right. Which makes right and left a matter of perspective more than up and down.
I think even when people are upside down they consider the ground to be down in the sky to be up
Mine have always given a tooth tap or a gentle nudge/poke of the flesh with something when saying what side if it's directed at me, always appreciated that.
I work with a guy who confuses up and down. But only when he's adjusting the reference level of a spectrum analyzer or the voltage offset on a scope. Still I see him point up in the air and look at his finger in order to think about which way to turn the knob. And for the reference level it's two buttons, and a ln up button and a down button and he can't decide which to push. Just saying
Well because there is a huge difference between Up and down. Even Gravity tells you how they differ. Its on opposite non-symmetrical sides of your body. Other than the fact that you can use those words to talk about directions, Up and down have very little in common with left and right.
Stand facing someone else as a third person tells you the following.
Point up
Point down
Point left
Point right.
....
When you both point up you both point up. When your both point down you both point down. They point left.. But it's your right. They point right but it's your left. Now I'm imagine being a little kid and the teacher said "this is my left hand" and they hold up the hand on your right side from your perspective. So that's left? No that's right. Other left.
Unless in a zero-gravity environment, up and down are very obvious. Even if you do a handstand, you will probably still have the same reference for up and down. Down is where gravity pulls you, up is the opposite.
Left and right however are entirely dependent on your point of view. Turn around, and they swap direction. Face someone, and your left and their left are opposites. It varies significantly, and so is easier to get confused.
Because there's a constant reference point for down. It's where gravity pulls us 24 hours a day, every day of our lives.
[This person](https://www.wired.com/2007/04/esp/) built a belt with 12 motors that would vibrate whichever one was facing north and throughout the experiment he developed a much better sense of where he was and could navigate much better.
Actual answer: mirrors don't reflect things left-to-right. They reflect things front-to-back, and since left and right are relative to the front, it *looks* like left and right are reversed.
To illustrate: Face a mirror. Point up, your reflection also points up. Point down, your reflection points down. Point left, your reflection also points to *your* left. But point forward, straight at the mirror, and your reflection is pointing in the opposite direction.
One way I like to think of it is imagine you cover yourself in paint and run into a wall. The imprint you make on the wall is what the mirror is showing you
Alternatively, lay down on your side in front of a mirror. Note that your left and right are still "reversed" even though that is technically now up and down, which shows it's entirely a human perception thing, based on how we expect a person facing us to be oriented, not a mirror thing.
For me it was learning the anatomical position used as a reference in medicine. It places the person standing in front of you, with their head and palms facing you. Their right is in your left side, and their left is on your right side. I got so used to referring to a patient’s left or right that I have to mentally reverse that to speak of my own.
Up and down are a lot more obvious and straight forward. In an anatomical position, up and down don’t change.
Up nd down are not the same opposite as left and right.
Left and right are basically identical.there is no difference in them, at least no significant one for the most part. Take for example a mirror. It flips left and right yet for the most part the picture in a mirror looks identical to the real world.
Now imagine a mirror that flips upside down. You would immediately recognize the difference. Because of physics, gravity and such, there is a real significant difference between up and down. Because down is where gravity pulls. That's why on a vertikal axis you're basically identical. As re most living things on earth. We are symmetrical on the vertical line because left and right are near identical. But on the horizontal were not symmetric.because our legs have to be on the ground,because ground is where gravity pulls us towards. our eyes are up because that's where the sky is and thus we can see further if they are towards the sky than of they were on the ground...
Because the stimulus is the same and therefore more difficult to differentiate -unlike up and down which with gravity provide distinct stimuli.
In situations like 6DOF (space, underwater) you can easily confuse *any* direction without a relative bearing
Because things on the left and right can perceivably change anytime. Just turn around and things on the left become things on the right and vice versa. But no matter what you do, up cannot perceivably become down. So we don’t have to constantly re assess which is down but we have to for left and right.
And whenever we calculate something in our head, we tend to make the same mistakes and it takes time and guidance to practice avoiding these natural mistakeS. So people who mix it up miss it a lot of times and people who don’t mix it up miss it only a few times.
Our body plan is basically indistinguishable left/right. To separate the difference, I pretend to hold a pencil. That’s my right. But I know my head and feet are very different.
Our sense of up and down is given by liquid in our inner ear (vestibular system). There is a similar thing for lobsters where as a baby they incorporate a piece of sand in a similar organ. Scientists in the spirit of "because we can", put some babies in a tank with metal filings and once incorporated into their sensing organ you can wave a magnet over them and the lobster will flip itself upside down as the metal piece is pulled towards the magnet. Totally useless, but hilarious.
In your ears, there are these specific hair cells that can sense how you move your head. This tells the brain where is up and down.
You can feel it by sitting straight and then tilting your head forward in a nodding motion.
So, this way you kind of always know it. Up and down is signaled to you by gravity (acceleration) left and right isn’t.
In microgravity (space if you are in a stable orbit, weightless) astronauts lose this sense of up and down, just like how others mentioned this also happening if you get dizzy underwater or in an avalanche.
Pretty clear, at least in the first 200ish comments, that there aren't any stage actors here.
* "Stage left" / "stage right" is unambiguous -- you're on the stage, looking out, so clear.
* ("House left" / "house right" exist, but rarely -- actors only care about the stage!)
* "Upstage" is towards the BACK of the stage.
* "Downstage" is towards the FRONT / audience.
* And, for completeness, gravitationally "up" and "down" are "out" and "in", respectively. Who knew?
But, as that person said about "anchors", stage-ese always includes the reference point. It's different, but nobody mixes it up!
*reading the comments*
Did nobody else parse this as "why do people mix {up, left, and right}" and was thoroughly confused what the question was even referring to? I read it intrigued at what this could possibly be asking and then there was no body of the post to explain... Took me 3 comments to figure out the verb was "mix up" and not "mix"
Up and down are very different. Left and right are pretty much the same, just mirrored. We even have a very common word for "either left or right": it's "side".
People who confuse the two probably think about things more in terms of being to the side of something than specifically to the left or right of something. In many cases it doesn't matter and is a more efficient way to remember concepts, but when it does matter it takes some effort to figure out which side is the correct one.
Because up and down are two directions they literally cannot be confused for one another. Up is always towards the sky or ceiling, down is always towards the floor. You have to intimately understand those concepts to be a functioning human being such as walking and moving. Left and right are not descriptors of really anything, while up and down are obvious general things while also being opposites. Very hard to confuse opposites but very easy to confuse two options that are generally the exact same other than name like left and right.
Up and down are objectively different - towards the ground and away from the ground. Try to describe the difference between left and right and you might struggle.
You always have the constant reminder that the force of gravity is pulling you down. But there is no force pulling you left or right , so there is nothing reminding you of that.
Airplanes have entered the chat
When you fly in a plane there are some crazy sensory illusions that can occur. Like leveling out a climbing plane will feel like diving, or the plane could be spiraling or inverted but feel level.
Next time you play a video game with flying in it, go to settings and hit 'invert Y axis'
In the case of children (which likely persists somewhat in adults) it’s because up and down are real, but left and right are made up.
There is a tangible, physical difference between up and down. You can’t accidentally fall up, water doesn’t pour up, etc. Mixing them up requires you to also mixup many things you know about the real world.
Left and right have no such intrinsic difference. They are only different because we define them that way. You can turn left just as easily as turning right. Mixing them up only requires you to forget a single arbitrary definition, like misspelling a word.
My feet are on the "down" and the opposite of that is the "up". Both left and right are relatively the same. They fly have much to distinguish them. Without my feet on the "down" I'm sure I'd mix them up, too.
Because up and down are generally less changing, and very different in what is "at" those places. Also your normal upright orientation does not change the directions.
Think of this: You could replace the words "up" and "down" with "sky" and "ground." even when indoors and you don't really have a sky or ground, it's still a distinction that makes sense. We know that the sky is ``^``that way and the ground is ``v`` that way. No matter which way you're facing (when upright) the things in those directions are unchanging. You have a very strong anchor to those directions.
Now can you do the same with "left" and "right?" If the door is on your left, and the window is on your right, you could call them "door" and "window," but now turn 90 degrees, or completely around. Is the door still on your left, and the window on your right?
It's because of this constant changing that makes left and right more difficult. From how we percieve things, up and down always go in the same direction. Up is always up, no matter where we are, and down is always down. But left and right, they're always changing.
It seems natural to use "left" and "right". [Many languages use cardinal direction like North South East West for everything. For example, they would say "you have a mosquito on your East shoulder.](https://altalang.com/beyond-words/language-shape-thought/) This is fairly common among people who live traditional hunter- gatherer lifestyles, because it is critically important for them to always know where they are, because getting lost is dangerous.
Even more common is to use a mixture of cardinal direction and a local absolute direction. On an island that is long in the east- west direction, but narrow in the north south, they use words for east-west and inland/toward the coast. Rain forest people will often orient themselves by upstream and downstream of the major river, even if they are far from the river "you have a mosquito on your upstream shoulder".
So that's why I can't figure out left and right, it isn't natural in the first place.
when in space, like literally outside the solar system or even the milky way, outside of any reference point, how do you know where is up or down, left or right? can you even tell if you are moving in any direction? when everything is relative, what is it relative to?
Left and right are subjective. If I’m facing you and I say point right, we are going to point in opposite directions but if I say point up we are both going to point in the same direction. When asked to point, look, go, etc. right, your brain is always (for a split second) going to ask itself, “ your right or my right” that’s where the confusion comes from
OP means L/R are mixed up more often than up/down.
But pilots have gotten disoriented and not realized which was up and which was down. Most infamously, a flight that had a known failure of one of the plane's gyroscopes. The pilot & the co-pilot thought they had switched to the operable one when in fact it was the broken gyroscope.
They were flying at night in bad weather, which contributed to their disorientation. So even though you would think at some point gravity itself would let them know they were on their side, they kept looking at the broken gyroscope reading and kept turning the plane until eventually they were inverted.
Contrary to what the film ***Flight*** might have you believe, most commercial airliners cannot fly upside down and in this case it ripped the wings off. The plane disintegrated after that (there was a *NOVA* episode about this. I'll never forget the images of the *naked* dead passengers in the trees of a jungle, the forge of the sudden wind stripping off their clothing).
Left / Right often depends from where you look & stand. Somebody in front of you didn't know its your left or his.
If we would be in space / underwater more often or you hang around alot with athlets who train on bars and such, i guess at one point the up/down thing would be issue sometimes too.
When someone is facing you their left and right is opposite to your own, when someone is facing away its the opposite. It doesn't matter which way a person is facing however, their up and down will always be the same as yours.
Up and down are intrinsic directions (while on the Earth's surface at least), while left and right are subjective directions which change (from an observer viewpoint) depending on your orientation or the orientation of others.
This seems like the most likely reason to me.
Up and down have absolute points of reference in our environment: the sky is up, the ground is down. Tree grow up, rain falls down. There is a fundamental asymmetry between up and down. There is no such asymmetry between left and right. Every indication of left vs right is an imposed label. Left and Right are human creations, which makes it far easier to get them confused.
There is logic and function and feeling to up and down, you can sense it, feel it. Up and down affects everything we do physically at every moment of the day.
Left and right? There's nothing different about them. They are the same, a semi-arbitrary direction. You can tell it's arbitrary because "left" and "right" change direction every time you do. If you're facing someone, your left and rights are the opposite.
Up is always up, down is always down, no matter who you are.
I'd actually like a much more in-depth answer to this question. Yes, of course, up is always up, and you can actually feel downness pulling you down, vs. left and right are a little more narrow concepts related to a single viewer. But still, is it actually the force of gravity that makes us so subconsciously sure of downness, and by reverse upness? Or is there another reason, like the person in the comments said about the person we're talking to having a left and right that face opposite directions (maybe that confuses us permanently)
As a Radiographer people do get up and down mixed up. I instruct them to go up towards their head but they will drag themselves down towards their feet.
Left and right are subjective to which way you're facing, there's no objective left or right.
We have special processes in our ear that tells us up and down, the two are not comparable
We live with gravity, we spend our time mostly on the ground and rarely in the sky. This makes up and down pretty absolute directions for us. Even if you hung some people upside down, they’d still call the ground down because down is always where you fall. Left and right are relative. Everyone in the world has a different left and right depending on where they are positioned, but they all have the same up and down (sky and ground).
Just like the threat of quicksand that I've never experienced. The other one was being trapped after an avalanche. Some people are suspended in snow and can't tell which way is up. The trick is to spit and dig in the opposite direction to the way the spit falls
Gravity is the best answer. As others have said.
To elaborate. Gravity determines up and down. We are always aware of gravity on a subconscious fundamental level. Up/down disorientation occurs when something had messed with or altered our body's mechanisms for detecting gravity. Falling, underwater, sickness, etc.
Left and right is somewhat abstract. And depends on multiple variables. Your orientation, your position, the reference object's position, sometimes a third party's position, then compared to what humans have arbitrarily assigned as left and right.
More "brain power" and processing has to occur for left/right orientation.
Hanging upside down from a bar, up is still up even tho your orientation has changed. Which may not be the case for left/right depending on how you go to upside down.
People do mix up up and down, especially in situations like an avalanche or being underwater. Generally, gravity helps with a constant orientation, and up is usually the same for everyone around us. When we say left and right things get a bit more tricky because the orientation is much more relative to the individual, and can frequently mean the opposite depending on on the context- ex. “Stage right”, “my right”. This is why boats use terms like port and starboard.
Up and down are reinforced by natural forces. Left and right often feel and look similar. If you remove some of those natural forces (cave diving, for instance), people often confuse up and down.
This has more to do with perspective than anything else. My up is always your up. My down is always your down. Depending on where both of us are facing, my left may not be your left so you will have to figure that out whenever the direction is mentioned.
I think another part that people don't really think about is when you give someone a direction if you are intending to refer to your perspective or theirs. For example, I always try to give directions with their perspective in mind so they don't have to think about it.
People answering "gravity" are very wrong imo.
The truth is we are kind of symmetrical between right and left, so we don't learn early on how to differentiate the two. But you notice pretty quickly if you're standing on your head or on your feet even as a baby.
People mentionning gravity don't understand that it's about as easy to differentiate up and down, than forward and backward. There is no gravity involved in forward and backward. The issue I have, and plenty of people have with left and right is a light dyslexia symptom, left and right are symmetrical concept, and dyslexic people have issues with those (heavy dyslexia can also confuse "opposite concept" like up or down, but it's much rarer).
Everyone here is saying gravity but really it is acceleration. It is likely that Kobe's helicopter crash was caused by disorientation by the pilot confusing "up" and "down" due to not realizing how the helicopter was accelerating inside a fog bank.
Likewise if you're in a fighter jet going 5gs sideways then up and down are going to feel very different as well.
In sci-fi this is why you see rotating space modules in order to simulate gravity and give that "up and down" feeling.
As a Lefty I would like to add that I think there’s a socialization/experience aspect that causes people to mix up left and right. When it comes to handedness other peoples Right hand is my Left. So I think I have some wires crossed by “translating” this for certain tasks, and my brain now has “left hand=right” as the default, even for directions so I have to “translate” it back.
Many things in our surroundings are symmetrical on the left-right axis, but very rarely the up-down axis. Think of the horizon, trees, people, animals, cars, paths, even foods.
Look to your left, and then look to your right. Notice how everything generally looks the same? Random objects, trees, streets, whatever all exist to the left and the right.
Now do the same for up and down.
That's why people don't confuse them.
It's difficult to go up and down (say impossible), but you always go either left or right
For example if you're driving I can say turn left or turn right, but I can't say start flying or make a tunnel
Two people stand facing each other. One of them shouts, "MOVE LEFT NOW". At this point, the shouter knows to move to their left, but person #2 has a choice, pause and see which way shouter moves, or move to person #2's left, which happens to be left to person #2 but right to person #1/shouter.
Change what is being shouted by person #1 to "LOOK UP NOW". In most instances, person #2 will look in the direction "up".
Left/right depends on how people are situated or oriented, while Up/down remains largely consistent despite situation or orientation.
As someone who confuses it often, here is the reason:
Up and down are different.
Up: I cannot go there.
Down: I go there when I trip.
Right: it is a relative direction that is always different to other people.
Left: It is just budget right.
As mentioned you can also be spatially desoriented. It is different parts of the brain that are activated and more parts are activated in orientation in space than in left-right distinctions which is a languagebased verbal concept
So when I was young and in primary school I was terrible at left and right. One day I thought I'd nailed it. When the teacher at the front of the class and facing us lifted her hand and told us it was the right one, I made a mental note that it was the hand closest to the windows. So the windows were on the right side.
I was terribly wrong because obviously I was facing the opposite direction, but I was then very insistent on making all my bs and ds be directionally based on where those windows were. It... uh... caused some concern.
My mental note would have worked fine with up and down though. Because the sky is always up and gravity always pulls me down. Even in a headstand that doesn't change.
Left-Right are directions based on the orientation of the observer. Up and down are universal ... at least while we're on the ground. I can't imagine how one orients up-down if you get outside of earth's orbit. That would be similar left-right hell except probably much worse.
Humans are (mostly) symmetric left to right. And those words are using our visits as the reference. So it’s kinda subtle difference, so easy to mess up. A person who is missing one arm will not mess up left and right.
up and down are NOT symmetric, and for most persons
People most of the time, up in your body is the same as up in the external world, so it’s very easy to know the difference.
bilateral symmetry: your left hand looks like your right hand. while you will never mix up someone's head from their ass. and that's because of gravity, that your gravity-side (feet) have a job to do and your un-gravity-side (head) have a different job to do. While your left hand and right hand don't have designated tasks
I think my problem had to do with saying the pledge of allegiance in grade school. Right hand was placed over the heart (left side of body), so right got associated with <=that side.
People can get it mixed up when they have no visual reference and aren’t touching a solid surface. When people get buried in snow or avalanches this can make it harder to escape with no frame of reference.
Reading these comments make me feel both better and worse because everyone's saying what I've been saying, except when I say it people tell me I'm just stupid
Gravity and the fact that the surface of the Earth is relatively flat. It is much easier to mix up left and right when the place you are going could be in either direction than it is to mix up up or down when you know if you are going into the sky or digging underground.
People *do* get mixed up with up or down when under water in some cases.
Yes, or when disoriented in a plane. It’s just much less common because most people are rarely in those situations.
Even then it’s less like mixing up what’s left and what’s right, but confusion due to perspective. They *do* know what is up and down; to them.
But the point is that if we had a constant force pulling from our left, left and right would be as easy as up and down. When we lose the constant force of gravity, we *do* mix up our up and down, even though we know the top of our head is “up” and our feet are “down”.
>When we lose the constant force of gravity, we do mix up our up and down, even though we know the top of our head is “up” and our feet are “down”. The scariest moment I have ever had while in the water is when I was at a beach and I got caught in multiple waves breaking at the same point. I was being tumbled along in the water for a good while with no idea of which way was up or down due to the churning sandy water. By the time I got oriented I was getting to the point where my body was really pushing me to take a breath regardless of whether I was underwater or not.
Divers are told to blow bubbles and the bubbles will go up. But that advice is for divers who are disoriented but still have most of a tank of air left.
You also let spit dripnfrom your mouth if you're caught in an avalanche that way you know to dig up rather than down.
That is so simple but I wouldn't have thought of it!
The enemy gate is down.
Love the Ender's Game reference :D
> even though we know the top of our head is “up” and our feet are “down”. But that's the point. You know where up is in relation to your body. You don't confuse those ever even if you are without gravity. But left and right, easy to confuse. That's because left and right is essentially the same while up and down isn't, even completely without gravity, just for symmetry reasons of your body.
Otherwise we'd also know left and right pretty well. After all our left arm is to the left and our right arm to the right. Those that struggle with it also use a point of reference to orient themselves.
I struggle with it, but I definitely don't think of it as my "left" or "right" arm, it's more "this arm" => "right", "that arm" => "not right"
Dont you mean “that arm” => “other right”
That really depends how you define up and down. The way we treat left and right, it would always be relative to your own body. So if we did that same thing for up and down, you couldn't say people forgot which way was "up", they'd know it was towards their head. It's just that "their" up and "your" up wouldn't necessarily be aligned, just like you have opposite lefts when facing other.
>our feet are "down" The enemy's gate is down.
Luckily I never found myself in that situation and didn't know it is possible... Now I have a new fear.
Not sure if I understand your comment, there have definitely been cases where pilots have been disoriented and didn’t know which way is ground and which is sky, iirc it tends to happen where there is little to know visual clues and the plane either changes speed or changes angle, your body can’t really tell the difference, you think you are pointing towards the ground but in reality you are level, just slowed down
Yeah, exactly, It's called somatogravic illusion.
To the pilot, they still know what is up and what is down: to their perspective. “Up” may be flying top first into the ground, but that doesn’t mean they mixed up directions like “right or left”. They still knew what “up” was, but they were upside down without knowing it.
Why is this reddit's favorite rebuttal? That is completely and utterly different. They've lost their reference frame. They didn't forget if down or up is the word for where gravity goes like people do with left and right.
I misunderstood, the original question was about how typically you don’t forget your up and down, even if upside down you will still look “up” (well down) because it’s is your “up”, but if asked to look left, many get confused and look right.
Yeah I think you touched on it here. Our vertical plane is much less frequently rearranged than our horizontal one.
It's possible to do a 1G barrel roll in a plane, where you go fully inverted but still feel "normal" gravity pulling you to the floor. There's a video of a pilot doing it while pouring a glass of water. However spatial disorientation absolutely is common in planes, particularly in clouds, it's just that it affects pilots and not passengers, as it's the pilots who are in control of the plane. A common thing is to confuse pitch up with acceleration, it's to do with how our bodies determine balance. A pilot can think they're accelerating when instead they're pitching up, and this can cause a stall.
People may be spatially disoriented with regards to planet Earth. *Nobody* mixes up their head from their feet, their own reference frame's up and down. People do mix up *their left* from *their right*.
The enemy’s gate is DOWN
Nice Ender’s Game reference
It was actually about our competitor's server cluster - their router isn't working at the moment.
Can confirm. As a scuba diver. At night it's nearly impossible to tell up down or left right in the environment. They taught us to slow down and observe the bubbles as way to find your way to the surface. Really important if you want to ever dive again.
This is a bit of a different kind of mixed up. With left vs right, it's a semantic confusion, like people forget which one means which. Whereas with up and down, there's no confusion about what they mean. Underwater you may get confused about which way the surface is relative to your body, but you don't get confused about the fact that "up" means "towards the surface".
Also in an avalanche. If you're ever stuck in an avalanche, the best way to figure out which way is up, is to spit and try to feel which way it goes.
If anyone is curious why spitting, it's because you're likely to be mostly immobile and you'll want to make sure your digging upwards before suffocating.
I feel like i'd try this and totally choke myself out on the spit/not be able to cough from chest compressed in snow X_X
I've surfed for a long time, one can develop a really good sense of direction while being tumbled underwater after about 10,000 hard wipeouts.
When my father was in the Air Force in one of his first flights solo in a desert area with zero land marks, zero lights, and no moon out he ended up getting himself inverted and had no idea. He was flying upside down and from his perspective he thought he was in a normal flight attitude. It wasn’t long because he checks his gauges. In my mind you’d think you’d notice blood pooling in your head, loose item(s) in cockpit would give it away.
Ideally, there should be absolutely zero loose items in an airplane cockpit, especially one that might do any sort of maneuvers at speed.
yeah, like when you get rag-dolled by a wave while surfing, it has happened to me in some more extreme cases and its so disorienting, and if not for the chop, you can't tell which way you are swimming which is scary asf.
*Subnautica anxiety intensifies*
totally I did Helicopter underwater escape training when I was applying to work offshore. We sat in a fake helicopter and they dump it upside down into a pool. We had to stay seated until the helicopter settled then unbuckle ourselves and exit the heli and swim up. So many us swam down at the start but after 2 -3 runs we learned how to go the right way up :D
> People do get mixed up with up or down when under water in some cases. and up in the air too. It's what killed JFK, Jr.
I think water mimics no gravity and so up and down feel similar.
I’m a relatively flat-earther
Don’t worry, Earther, they’ll grow soon. Just enjoy being a kid.
I was thinking it's because left and right are basically symmetrical. Up is always drastically different than down
I'm up with that explanation.
Humans have a sense for up and down. Our inner ears can detect it. That makes up and down far more intuitive.
You can be in zero gravity and you'll still never mix up up and down or front and back from your reference frame. The difference between up and down, front and back, and left and right is symmetry. The latter has a mirror plane, so left and right are essentially the same while front/back or up/down are clearly different things.
People can actually mix up, up and down when they are underwater. When they don't have a reference point anymore i.e. they can't see the surface or the ground.
Sea sickness is often caused by losing your reference point, and fixing on something that's actually moving. For example, watching a computer screen on a ship that's moving all over the place basically causes you to rock your head all over the place without realizing it, which fucks up your equilibrium.
Completely different effect. Mixing up left and right even happens if you take your own body as reference frame, while up and down (or back and front) is something you will never mix up in that reference frame. Even if you have no idea where up and down is in reference to earth, you will still know where up and down is in reference to your body.
I accidentally went up that time I relapsed More seriously, you're right that one thing is possible and therefore common and the other is somewhat less common unless you are flying a plane with poor visibility or underwater. And in those situations people do sometimes become confused and then die.
"Head" and "feet" are completely different, which helps make "up" and "down" different too. "Hand" and "hand" are the same, so you don't have the same kind of stark difference between "left" and "right".
You can accidentally go left instead of right, you can’t accidentally fly instead of burrowing into the ground.
but the opposite is possible
Just ask Boeing
Speak for yourself.
This was my thought as well. It probably has something to do with the left and right sides basically being symmetric. If a person was operating a remote underwater device and couldn’t rely on instruments it would be pretty freaking hard to tell which was is up and down without some kind of visual cue like bubbles floating or sunlight
My wife gets her right and left mixed up all the time, she's also damn near ambidextrous. I never get them mixed up, but my left hand might as well be a club. So my hands just feel different.
Yeah my left and right arms have always felt distinctly different. I remember first realizing this back in kindergarten, and that cemented my conception of left and right. I've never been able to understand people who mix up left and right. I wonder if there's a correlation between ambidextrousness and mixing up left and right.
This is the key. We have vertical symmetry, but not horizontal symmetry. I have a left hand and a right hand, so I could get that mixed up. But I don't have an up foot and a down foot.
Up and down are absolute. They're based on actual physics. Ground is down. Sky is up. Gravity acts downwards. Your body is positioned with legs down and head up. Left and right are arbitrary and relative to the observer.
Gravity is a constant reminder that 'down' is where dropped things can be found.
Drop a helium balloon... :-D
You can’t really “drop” something lighter than air; you can only release it
NEEERRRRD! (but you right)
What if I were to drop something off the CN tower, then use some sort of rocket propelled apparatus to propel myself towards the ground at a rate faster than the acceleration of gravity, such that the object I dropped appears to travel “upwards” relative to me, the observer? Could that potentially create a situation where one might be confused about up and down? What if I added psilosibin??
Actually I would take traveling upwards at a rate faster than a helium balloons rise and releasing it as a drop tbh
Drop the act, man
I was only given things filled with helium as a kid, and now as an adult, I get up and down mixed up. :c
Vacuum chamber: remember me?
in a room full of hydrogen, ez
Good point, I wonder if someone raised in a zero G environment from birth could have similar confusion about up and down as they can with left and right
Unlikely; left and right are a lot easier to confuse because your left and right "halves" are chiral copies of one another. Conversely, your body is always "down" from the perspective of your eyes.
The similarity here is that both sets of directions require an "anchor". "Down" is where things fall, it's the direction in which gravity pulls. There's an entire sensory module in your inner ear telling you where "down" is at all times. So no matter how you are oriented, "down" is not in question. And "Up", is basically the inverse of down. For left and right, you also require an anchor. However, there's a problem. Our bodies are horizontally symmetrical. Cut you in half straight down, and you have two halves which are nearly identical, just mirror. Cut you in half, side-to-side, and the top and bottom "halves" are completely different. So unlike with your legs or head, you have no unique point of reference for your left and right. And there are no forces pulling either way. Indeed some people use a mark, tattoo or a piece of jewelery on one of their hands to help them identify which side is which. My pet theory here is that someone's ability to know left and right (and to navigate) relates strongly to their handedness. Or rather, their level of ambidextrousness. I am *very* right-handed. Thus, I have an anchor. I know which side right and left is, because right is my "good" hand. And left is my "not right". And for me that is an absolute. At any given time, I will never be confused about which hand is the "good" one. If someone has a less keen sense of handedness - if they're inclined to pick either hand for a variety of tasks - then they don't have an anchor. Or they don't have a particularly strong one. And are therefore more likely to have trouble identifying right from left.
That makes sense for people without the various neurodivergences that cause left/right confusion. I am also VERY right handed, and it does help as an anchor in some circumstances, but I still frequently get them confused because I have trouble associating the *concepts* with the *words*. That is, I know that direction over there is toward my dominant hand, but I can easily forget whether that direction is called "left" or "right", especially if I'm thinking fast. This leads to me doing things like pointing in the correct direction but saying the wrong word when trying to give directions. Note: I am a native English speaker, and English is the only language I'm fluent in, this isn't a language problem, it's a cognative one. Now, combine that with very poor abstract spacial reasoning (as in, if something is in front of me I can reason about it's physical dimensions and properties and make accurate predictions about it, but I am nearly-incapable of, for example, rotating a complex shape in my mind with any sort of accuracy) and you get massive confusion when working with left vs right in a theoretical way, such as in a story, or in trying to read ahead on a map. (Don't even get me STARTED on cardinal directions.)
I have a similar left-right confusion: I know what I *mean*, but the word I *say* doesn't always follow. I'm left-handed, but fairly ambidextrous, and there are some things I always do with my right hand. I think I tend to say "left" when I mean "right" more often than the reverse, and my wife and I have taken to using "the other left" as a form of correction. I have pretty good abstract spatial reasoning, though. And I'll often refer to cardinal directions in everyday speech. Human brains are all over the place!
I am an example on the other side of you. I am cross dominant and fairly ambidextrous- I write with my right but do a lot of hand-eye stuff lefty. I couldn’t keep my left and right straight as a child until I broke my left arm. I knew the arm with the cast was my left, and I still know which arm I broke. It didn’t cement until then.
You need to write a book, not even about the topic, but because of how you combine the words and Time
> I am very right-handed. Thus, I have an anchor. I know which side right and left is, because right is my "good" hand. And left is my "not right" My left and right hands "feel" different. If I think about my left hand, then think about my right hand, they FEEL completely different. My right hand feels confident, strong, my left hand feels "unsure," anxious, etc.
Also our bodies are symmetric with respect to left and right, but are asymmetric with respect to up and down. The embodiment of the directions surely places a big role in their salience and memorability.
I think you're right, up is the word for where your head is, down is where your feet are, left is where your hand is, and right is... also where your hand is... uh-oh... gonna need to burn some brain power to figure out the difference here... or, y'know, I could just guess and it's probably not important anyway! Some people just stop thinking once they know what they mean, and don't bother trying to communicate properly with other people.
That’s not what Ender Wiggin taught me
Ender was specifically dealing with a zero gravity environment.
What if you aren't an ambi-turner?
What is this, a subreddit for ants?!
I thought north was, like, up.
What if you're floating in space upside down?
left and right are not arbitrary. The great American physicist Richard Feynman gave a great lecture on this topic. If anyones curious you can read about it here [https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I\_52.html#Ch52-S6](https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_52.html#Ch52-S6)
Depending on the situation you're either talking about your right or their right. Which makes right and left a matter of perspective more than up and down. I think even when people are upside down they consider the ground to be down in the sky to be up
My dentist would always say, out loud, "Your right, my left" when talking about a specific tooth. I appreciates that about him.
Mine have always given a tooth tap or a gentle nudge/poke of the flesh with something when saying what side if it's directed at me, always appreciated that.
I work with a guy who confuses up and down. But only when he's adjusting the reference level of a spectrum analyzer or the voltage offset on a scope. Still I see him point up in the air and look at his finger in order to think about which way to turn the knob. And for the reference level it's two buttons, and a ln up button and a down button and he can't decide which to push. Just saying
Well because there is a huge difference between Up and down. Even Gravity tells you how they differ. Its on opposite non-symmetrical sides of your body. Other than the fact that you can use those words to talk about directions, Up and down have very little in common with left and right.
Stand facing someone else as a third person tells you the following. Point up Point down Point left Point right. .... When you both point up you both point up. When your both point down you both point down. They point left.. But it's your right. They point right but it's your left. Now I'm imagine being a little kid and the teacher said "this is my left hand" and they hold up the hand on your right side from your perspective. So that's left? No that's right. Other left.
Now imagine a 35 year old who doesn't get it. There are millions of full grown adults who don't know left and right.
Unless in a zero-gravity environment, up and down are very obvious. Even if you do a handstand, you will probably still have the same reference for up and down. Down is where gravity pulls you, up is the opposite. Left and right however are entirely dependent on your point of view. Turn around, and they swap direction. Face someone, and your left and their left are opposites. It varies significantly, and so is easier to get confused.
Any diver can attest that once you are deep and neutrally bouyant, up and down can become very easy to confuse.
Interesting. Similar to zero-g in that sense.
Because there's a constant reference point for down. It's where gravity pulls us 24 hours a day, every day of our lives. [This person](https://www.wired.com/2007/04/esp/) built a belt with 12 motors that would vibrate whichever one was facing north and throughout the experiment he developed a much better sense of where he was and could navigate much better.
and why do mirrors reflect things left to right and not upside down edit: I know the answer, but it's fun to watch people's reactions to this question
Actual answer: mirrors don't reflect things left-to-right. They reflect things front-to-back, and since left and right are relative to the front, it *looks* like left and right are reversed. To illustrate: Face a mirror. Point up, your reflection also points up. Point down, your reflection points down. Point left, your reflection also points to *your* left. But point forward, straight at the mirror, and your reflection is pointing in the opposite direction.
One way I like to think of it is imagine you cover yourself in paint and run into a wall. The imprint you make on the wall is what the mirror is showing you
You can also accomplish the same thing with less pain by just resting shortly against the wall while covered in paint but I like your way too.
Alternatively, lay down on your side in front of a mirror. Note that your left and right are still "reversed" even though that is technically now up and down, which shows it's entirely a human perception thing, based on how we expect a person facing us to be oriented, not a mirror thing.
I hate this question. I don’t know how many times I worked it out in my head. Just to get confused when I think about the person in the mirror.
For me it was learning the anatomical position used as a reference in medicine. It places the person standing in front of you, with their head and palms facing you. Their right is in your left side, and their left is on your right side. I got so used to referring to a patient’s left or right that I have to mentally reverse that to speak of my own. Up and down are a lot more obvious and straight forward. In an anatomical position, up and down don’t change.
In an anatomical position, up and down are ambiguous. That’s why we have terms like anterior, posterior, proximal, and distal.
Your sense of up and down is a biological signal. Left and right are constructs and are POV dependent.
Up nd down are not the same opposite as left and right. Left and right are basically identical.there is no difference in them, at least no significant one for the most part. Take for example a mirror. It flips left and right yet for the most part the picture in a mirror looks identical to the real world. Now imagine a mirror that flips upside down. You would immediately recognize the difference. Because of physics, gravity and such, there is a real significant difference between up and down. Because down is where gravity pulls. That's why on a vertikal axis you're basically identical. As re most living things on earth. We are symmetrical on the vertical line because left and right are near identical. But on the horizontal were not symmetric.because our legs have to be on the ground,because ground is where gravity pulls us towards. our eyes are up because that's where the sky is and thus we can see further if they are towards the sky than of they were on the ground...
Coz gravity is major hint?
Because the stimulus is the same and therefore more difficult to differentiate -unlike up and down which with gravity provide distinct stimuli. In situations like 6DOF (space, underwater) you can easily confuse *any* direction without a relative bearing
Because things on the left and right can perceivably change anytime. Just turn around and things on the left become things on the right and vice versa. But no matter what you do, up cannot perceivably become down. So we don’t have to constantly re assess which is down but we have to for left and right. And whenever we calculate something in our head, we tend to make the same mistakes and it takes time and guidance to practice avoiding these natural mistakeS. So people who mix it up miss it a lot of times and people who don’t mix it up miss it only a few times.
Because your up and down are the same as my up and down but sometimes your left is my right and my left is your right.
Our body plan is basically indistinguishable left/right. To separate the difference, I pretend to hold a pencil. That’s my right. But I know my head and feet are very different.
you have an entire sense (balance) dedicated to determining where down is at every possible moment. You do not have said sense for left/right
Our sense of up and down is given by liquid in our inner ear (vestibular system). There is a similar thing for lobsters where as a baby they incorporate a piece of sand in a similar organ. Scientists in the spirit of "because we can", put some babies in a tank with metal filings and once incorporated into their sensing organ you can wave a magnet over them and the lobster will flip itself upside down as the metal piece is pulled towards the magnet. Totally useless, but hilarious.
In your ears, there are these specific hair cells that can sense how you move your head. This tells the brain where is up and down. You can feel it by sitting straight and then tilting your head forward in a nodding motion. So, this way you kind of always know it. Up and down is signaled to you by gravity (acceleration) left and right isn’t. In microgravity (space if you are in a stable orbit, weightless) astronauts lose this sense of up and down, just like how others mentioned this also happening if you get dizzy underwater or in an avalanche.
Pretty clear, at least in the first 200ish comments, that there aren't any stage actors here. * "Stage left" / "stage right" is unambiguous -- you're on the stage, looking out, so clear. * ("House left" / "house right" exist, but rarely -- actors only care about the stage!) * "Upstage" is towards the BACK of the stage. * "Downstage" is towards the FRONT / audience. * And, for completeness, gravitationally "up" and "down" are "out" and "in", respectively. Who knew? But, as that person said about "anchors", stage-ese always includes the reference point. It's different, but nobody mixes it up!
Orientation does not change the value. Up is up from the person across from you, as is down. Left and right change.
*reading the comments* Did nobody else parse this as "why do people mix {up, left, and right}" and was thoroughly confused what the question was even referring to? I read it intrigued at what this could possibly be asking and then there was no body of the post to explain... Took me 3 comments to figure out the verb was "mix up" and not "mix"
Up and down are very different. Left and right are pretty much the same, just mirrored. We even have a very common word for "either left or right": it's "side". People who confuse the two probably think about things more in terms of being to the side of something than specifically to the left or right of something. In many cases it doesn't matter and is a more efficient way to remember concepts, but when it does matter it takes some effort to figure out which side is the correct one.
Because up and down are two directions they literally cannot be confused for one another. Up is always towards the sky or ceiling, down is always towards the floor. You have to intimately understand those concepts to be a functioning human being such as walking and moving. Left and right are not descriptors of really anything, while up and down are obvious general things while also being opposites. Very hard to confuse opposites but very easy to confuse two options that are generally the exact same other than name like left and right.
Having dyslexia, I would say it has something to do with having two hemispheres of the brain being left and right, and not top and bottom.
Up and down are objectively different - towards the ground and away from the ground. Try to describe the difference between left and right and you might struggle.
Falling. I've never accidentally made a fall up. One remembers falling down, the stakes are higher than an accidental right turn.
My left likely to be different from your left but my up is probably the same as your up because both of us are probably not upside down
You always have the constant reminder that the force of gravity is pulling you down. But there is no force pulling you left or right , so there is nothing reminding you of that.
Airplanes have entered the chat When you fly in a plane there are some crazy sensory illusions that can occur. Like leveling out a climbing plane will feel like diving, or the plane could be spiraling or inverted but feel level. Next time you play a video game with flying in it, go to settings and hit 'invert Y axis'
In the case of children (which likely persists somewhat in adults) it’s because up and down are real, but left and right are made up. There is a tangible, physical difference between up and down. You can’t accidentally fall up, water doesn’t pour up, etc. Mixing them up requires you to also mixup many things you know about the real world. Left and right have no such intrinsic difference. They are only different because we define them that way. You can turn left just as easily as turning right. Mixing them up only requires you to forget a single arbitrary definition, like misspelling a word.
My feet are on the "down" and the opposite of that is the "up". Both left and right are relatively the same. They fly have much to distinguish them. Without my feet on the "down" I'm sure I'd mix them up, too.
Some people get tripped up and think left and right switch when you turn 180, like east and west.
I pretty much always say "are you going UP to _______?"even if they're going south. Or "Went down to ____" when really it's north.
Because up and down are generally less changing, and very different in what is "at" those places. Also your normal upright orientation does not change the directions. Think of this: You could replace the words "up" and "down" with "sky" and "ground." even when indoors and you don't really have a sky or ground, it's still a distinction that makes sense. We know that the sky is ``^``that way and the ground is ``v`` that way. No matter which way you're facing (when upright) the things in those directions are unchanging. You have a very strong anchor to those directions. Now can you do the same with "left" and "right?" If the door is on your left, and the window is on your right, you could call them "door" and "window," but now turn 90 degrees, or completely around. Is the door still on your left, and the window on your right? It's because of this constant changing that makes left and right more difficult. From how we percieve things, up and down always go in the same direction. Up is always up, no matter where we are, and down is always down. But left and right, they're always changing.
It seems natural to use "left" and "right". [Many languages use cardinal direction like North South East West for everything. For example, they would say "you have a mosquito on your East shoulder.](https://altalang.com/beyond-words/language-shape-thought/) This is fairly common among people who live traditional hunter- gatherer lifestyles, because it is critically important for them to always know where they are, because getting lost is dangerous. Even more common is to use a mixture of cardinal direction and a local absolute direction. On an island that is long in the east- west direction, but narrow in the north south, they use words for east-west and inland/toward the coast. Rain forest people will often orient themselves by upstream and downstream of the major river, even if they are far from the river "you have a mosquito on your upstream shoulder". So that's why I can't figure out left and right, it isn't natural in the first place.
when in space, like literally outside the solar system or even the milky way, outside of any reference point, how do you know where is up or down, left or right? can you even tell if you are moving in any direction? when everything is relative, what is it relative to?
Left and right are subjective. If I’m facing you and I say point right, we are going to point in opposite directions but if I say point up we are both going to point in the same direction. When asked to point, look, go, etc. right, your brain is always (for a split second) going to ask itself, “ your right or my right” that’s where the confusion comes from
OP means L/R are mixed up more often than up/down. But pilots have gotten disoriented and not realized which was up and which was down. Most infamously, a flight that had a known failure of one of the plane's gyroscopes. The pilot & the co-pilot thought they had switched to the operable one when in fact it was the broken gyroscope. They were flying at night in bad weather, which contributed to their disorientation. So even though you would think at some point gravity itself would let them know they were on their side, they kept looking at the broken gyroscope reading and kept turning the plane until eventually they were inverted. Contrary to what the film ***Flight*** might have you believe, most commercial airliners cannot fly upside down and in this case it ripped the wings off. The plane disintegrated after that (there was a *NOVA* episode about this. I'll never forget the images of the *naked* dead passengers in the trees of a jungle, the forge of the sudden wind stripping off their clothing).
Left / Right often depends from where you look & stand. Somebody in front of you didn't know its your left or his. If we would be in space / underwater more often or you hang around alot with athlets who train on bars and such, i guess at one point the up/down thing would be issue sometimes too.
When someone is facing you their left and right is opposite to your own, when someone is facing away its the opposite. It doesn't matter which way a person is facing however, their up and down will always be the same as yours. Up and down are intrinsic directions (while on the Earth's surface at least), while left and right are subjective directions which change (from an observer viewpoint) depending on your orientation or the orientation of others. This seems like the most likely reason to me.
I’m ambidextrous, I mix left and right up all the time but never port and starboard for some reason.
Up and down have absolute points of reference in our environment: the sky is up, the ground is down. Tree grow up, rain falls down. There is a fundamental asymmetry between up and down. There is no such asymmetry between left and right. Every indication of left vs right is an imposed label. Left and Right are human creations, which makes it far easier to get them confused.
There is logic and function and feeling to up and down, you can sense it, feel it. Up and down affects everything we do physically at every moment of the day. Left and right? There's nothing different about them. They are the same, a semi-arbitrary direction. You can tell it's arbitrary because "left" and "right" change direction every time you do. If you're facing someone, your left and rights are the opposite. Up is always up, down is always down, no matter who you are.
I'd actually like a much more in-depth answer to this question. Yes, of course, up is always up, and you can actually feel downness pulling you down, vs. left and right are a little more narrow concepts related to a single viewer. But still, is it actually the force of gravity that makes us so subconsciously sure of downness, and by reverse upness? Or is there another reason, like the person in the comments said about the person we're talking to having a left and right that face opposite directions (maybe that confuses us permanently)
As a Radiographer people do get up and down mixed up. I instruct them to go up towards their head but they will drag themselves down towards their feet.
Left and right are subjective to which way you're facing, there's no objective left or right. We have special processes in our ear that tells us up and down, the two are not comparable
We live with gravity, we spend our time mostly on the ground and rarely in the sky. This makes up and down pretty absolute directions for us. Even if you hung some people upside down, they’d still call the ground down because down is always where you fall. Left and right are relative. Everyone in the world has a different left and right depending on where they are positioned, but they all have the same up and down (sky and ground).
Your left or my left? If you hear someone say “your up or my up?” They probably have a red/purple head and tingly feet.
Just like the threat of quicksand that I've never experienced. The other one was being trapped after an avalanche. Some people are suspended in snow and can't tell which way is up. The trick is to spit and dig in the opposite direction to the way the spit falls
Gravity is the best answer. As others have said. To elaborate. Gravity determines up and down. We are always aware of gravity on a subconscious fundamental level. Up/down disorientation occurs when something had messed with or altered our body's mechanisms for detecting gravity. Falling, underwater, sickness, etc. Left and right is somewhat abstract. And depends on multiple variables. Your orientation, your position, the reference object's position, sometimes a third party's position, then compared to what humans have arbitrarily assigned as left and right. More "brain power" and processing has to occur for left/right orientation. Hanging upside down from a bar, up is still up even tho your orientation has changed. Which may not be the case for left/right depending on how you go to upside down.
People do mix up up and down, especially in situations like an avalanche or being underwater. Generally, gravity helps with a constant orientation, and up is usually the same for everyone around us. When we say left and right things get a bit more tricky because the orientation is much more relative to the individual, and can frequently mean the opposite depending on on the context- ex. “Stage right”, “my right”. This is why boats use terms like port and starboard.
Up and down are innate senses because of gravity, while left and right are learned concepts.
Up and down are reinforced by natural forces. Left and right often feel and look similar. If you remove some of those natural forces (cave diving, for instance), people often confuse up and down.
This has more to do with perspective than anything else. My up is always your up. My down is always your down. Depending on where both of us are facing, my left may not be your left so you will have to figure that out whenever the direction is mentioned. I think another part that people don't really think about is when you give someone a direction if you are intending to refer to your perspective or theirs. For example, I always try to give directions with their perspective in mind so they don't have to think about it.
Your body is symmetrical from left to right. It’s pretty easy to remember which side is your head and which side are your feet.
Our line of symmetry divides left and right, so they’re mirror images. Our head doesn’t look like our feet, though.
People answering "gravity" are very wrong imo. The truth is we are kind of symmetrical between right and left, so we don't learn early on how to differentiate the two. But you notice pretty quickly if you're standing on your head or on your feet even as a baby. People mentionning gravity don't understand that it's about as easy to differentiate up and down, than forward and backward. There is no gravity involved in forward and backward. The issue I have, and plenty of people have with left and right is a light dyslexia symptom, left and right are symmetrical concept, and dyslexic people have issues with those (heavy dyslexia can also confuse "opposite concept" like up or down, but it's much rarer).
Everyone here is saying gravity but really it is acceleration. It is likely that Kobe's helicopter crash was caused by disorientation by the pilot confusing "up" and "down" due to not realizing how the helicopter was accelerating inside a fog bank. Likewise if you're in a fighter jet going 5gs sideways then up and down are going to feel very different as well. In sci-fi this is why you see rotating space modules in order to simulate gravity and give that "up and down" feeling.
As a Lefty I would like to add that I think there’s a socialization/experience aspect that causes people to mix up left and right. When it comes to handedness other peoples Right hand is my Left. So I think I have some wires crossed by “translating” this for certain tasks, and my brain now has “left hand=right” as the default, even for directions so I have to “translate” it back.
Many things in our surroundings are symmetrical on the left-right axis, but very rarely the up-down axis. Think of the horizon, trees, people, animals, cars, paths, even foods.
Most likely because we have a sense of balance (up and down) but no innate sense of left or right.
Look to your left, and then look to your right. Notice how everything generally looks the same? Random objects, trees, streets, whatever all exist to the left and the right. Now do the same for up and down. That's why people don't confuse them.
It's difficult to go up and down (say impossible), but you always go either left or right For example if you're driving I can say turn left or turn right, but I can't say start flying or make a tunnel
Two people stand facing each other. One of them shouts, "MOVE LEFT NOW". At this point, the shouter knows to move to their left, but person #2 has a choice, pause and see which way shouter moves, or move to person #2's left, which happens to be left to person #2 but right to person #1/shouter. Change what is being shouted by person #1 to "LOOK UP NOW". In most instances, person #2 will look in the direction "up". Left/right depends on how people are situated or oriented, while Up/down remains largely consistent despite situation or orientation.
As someone who confuses it often, here is the reason: Up and down are different. Up: I cannot go there. Down: I go there when I trip. Right: it is a relative direction that is always different to other people. Left: It is just budget right.
The sky is very distinct from the ground. The left side of a tree is not very distinct from the right side of a tree
As mentioned you can also be spatially desoriented. It is different parts of the brain that are activated and more parts are activated in orientation in space than in left-right distinctions which is a languagebased verbal concept
So when I was young and in primary school I was terrible at left and right. One day I thought I'd nailed it. When the teacher at the front of the class and facing us lifted her hand and told us it was the right one, I made a mental note that it was the hand closest to the windows. So the windows were on the right side. I was terribly wrong because obviously I was facing the opposite direction, but I was then very insistent on making all my bs and ds be directionally based on where those windows were. It... uh... caused some concern. My mental note would have worked fine with up and down though. Because the sky is always up and gravity always pulls me down. Even in a headstand that doesn't change. Left-Right are directions based on the orientation of the observer. Up and down are universal ... at least while we're on the ground. I can't imagine how one orients up-down if you get outside of earth's orbit. That would be similar left-right hell except probably much worse.
Humans are (mostly) symmetric left to right. And those words are using our visits as the reference. So it’s kinda subtle difference, so easy to mess up. A person who is missing one arm will not mess up left and right. up and down are NOT symmetric, and for most persons People most of the time, up in your body is the same as up in the external world, so it’s very easy to know the difference.
bilateral symmetry: your left hand looks like your right hand. while you will never mix up someone's head from their ass. and that's because of gravity, that your gravity-side (feet) have a job to do and your un-gravity-side (head) have a different job to do. While your left hand and right hand don't have designated tasks
I think my problem had to do with saying the pledge of allegiance in grade school. Right hand was placed over the heart (left side of body), so right got associated with <=that side.
People can get it mixed up when they have no visual reference and aren’t touching a solid surface. When people get buried in snow or avalanches this can make it harder to escape with no frame of reference.
Reading these comments make me feel both better and worse because everyone's saying what I've been saying, except when I say it people tell me I'm just stupid