I’ve recently had major attention-span issues, especially with parser games and find myself not able to bring myself to play them. That’s probably a separate issue. I of course ate up parser games when I was in my teens and 20’s. I’ve had discussions with people that I probably am undiagnosed and living with a mild attention deficit disorder, which makes sense with that.
Thinking about this I always confuse east and west on a map. I know west is “to the left” and east is “to the right” when visualizing but I always get this wrong. Just now when I typed “west” my brain visualized it “to the right” and I immediately went no, it’s the other way. I usually don’t draw physical maps so I’ve played entire games going “well, this space is non-Euclidean and weird” until I realize I’ve been visualizing it backwards and mentally mapped both wings of a house on top of each other.
It doesn’t happen with north/south. I have never confused these two directions with each other. If I’m working with diagonals I know north is up but I might initially picture “northeast” going toward 10:30 on the clock instead of 1:30 unless I remember to consider which way is it really??
This actually happens in real life also when navigating if I’m not just following GPS directions. We have an interstate highway where I live that runs east/west, then turns a major corner after which it goes north/south and the highway signs give directions accordingly.
I’ve approached this road on the way home and I’m like…*okay, that’s the eastbound turnoff, do I want west? If I picture the map I know I want to go that way but am I to the east or the west?
I know this is weird, it’s like a specific dyslexia with east and west. I suspect I’m the only person who does this, and it’s odd because I’m normally good with navigation and maps (specifically because of picturing map layouts in parser games) unless I have to make a quick snap decision - and I remember doing this even when I was a teenager - that momentary “which way is west again?” hesitation.
I practically never get this wrong in real life or on a map, but I do it pretty regularly in IF. A year or two ago I dedicated some time to trying to straighten it out in my head and I’ve been mostly better since, but before that? Yeah, probably 40/60 me drawing the map flipped left-to-right. IIRC I played the entirety of Sugarlawn and got into the 100K+ score bracket before I realized I had the map backwards…
I have that with IF as well, I suspect it’s fairly common.
Something that was a game changer for me was when somebody pointed out that (at least on a qwerty keyboard) the W and the E keys are positioned the right way relative to each other!
I don’t have that. I"m a bit proud of my “nature skills”. But rarely I, too, get east and west wrong. Most of the time I know where north and south (and thereby east and west) are just automatically (without thinking ) even when I drive around and change direction. This fails when I drive lots of curves which ardn’t 90 degrees.
I have a different weakness: I sometime have two somehow similar people stored as one in my brain. Both aquaintances and celebrities. For example when I hear a song by Billy Joel and Elton John. They have similar (but not identical!) voices. Other example would be actors who look a bit similar.
I’ve had a few moments where I had to consciously remember that East and West should spell “WE” when you look at it on a map. Whenever I have a brain fart, “WE” solves it immediately.
I struggle with left vs. right in general and I think that’s why I also struggle with east vs. west in IF. Even looking at a map I’ll routinely get it wrong, because I can memorize “east = right, west = left” but that kinda doesn’t mean anything to my brain. Maybe it would help if I drew, like, very conspicuous compass roses on my maps.
In an IRL navigation context I am equally clueless about all cardinal directions; east/west is not particularly more mystifying to me than north/south.
I don’t know if most people do strongly associate them with left and right that way, it’s just an artifact of my heavy reliance on maps due to lacking both an innate sense of direction and an ability to visualize layouts.
I do still do that, faintly embarrassing though it is.
East and west are completely intuitive to me both in IF and in real life, and have been as long as I can remember; I have memories of it taking some effort to tell my left from my right, but nothing like that for compass directions.
Lest you think this is an unalloyed asset, though, it’s led to more than one grumbly miscommunication with my loved ones when I give what seem like totally easy directions but which turn out to be super confusing if your brain works differently from mine (memorably, I once missed a showing of Return of the King I was going to go to with my sister because we spent a solid ten minutes talking past each other about where to meet up; another time my wife text-shouted “EAST AND WEST MEAN NOTHING TO ME!” when I was trying to figure out which subway exit she was at).
Well, it is if you’re facing north! But yes, maps normally have north at the top for historical reasons, which puts east to the right and west to the left. If it helps, they’re arranged like that on a QWERTY keyboard too, so you need only look down if you get lost.
I am lucky in that I can spatially visualize - I’m looking at a map, north is “up” west is “left” and then picture laying the map down in my head and rotating it so it’s oriented the actual way I’m facing. It’s just when a sign tells me “270 West” I have to go am I west or east from where I want to be right now? and that calculation frequently causes me to miss the exit if I’m not sure or go the wrong way first and have to turn around.
Luckily since I can picture it spatially I don’t have trouble turning around, like people in my family who can follow directions but are absolutely useless when they make a mistake and have to correct - since I missed my right turn, after turning around and coming back the correct way is now a LEFT turn…
directional correction woes
My mom once got hopelessly lost when she worked in Chicago. She only knew the exact set of directions to reach her workplace and there was a “right at the gas station” turn she had to make. She traded shifts one time and worked midnights and because the gas station was closed and the sign was turned off and it was dark, she didn’t see it and drove fifteen minutes obliviously still looking for the gas station before she knew she was lost, and didn’t know how to retrace her steps nor what the street was, how it was oriented from a different direction, or what it looked like at night…
The mnemonic I was taught as a young’en was to treat the Compass Rose as if it was a clock, and if you start at 12 then the four cardinal directions are: Never Eat Soggy Weatbix
I don’t recall having any problems with confusing east and west or left and right.
I do remember that some schools used to teach us the phrase “Never Eat Shredded Wheat” to remember the compass points, as that is their order clockwise.
Of course, you then have to remember which direction a clock’s hands move in.
Thanks to everyone for the directional mnemonics. The thing is I know how the map works, it’s just my brain seems to always start from a mirrored transposition of east and west on first thought and I know I have always stop and correct no, west is THAT way. If I don’t think about it, that’s when Alias, the Magpie’s map turns into a non-Euclidean Lovecraft zone!
I rarely confuse west with east, and never north/south. I also never mix up left and right, except at physics EM field theory exams I got the wrong answer due to applying the right hand rule with my left hand. But that is due to being a right handed writer and laziness to drop the pen, thinking that I would just flip the end result vector. One would assume that I would have learned a lesson after I have forgotten to do that at the end for umpteenth time, but no, I was am stubborn.
I mix up directions all the time in parser games—both N/S and E/W. I also have a problem IRL where I’ll mean to tell someone, for example, “that’s to the east,” but “west” is what comes out. Same thing with right/left, which has been somewhat of an issue when I’m navigating for someone in the car—I’ll say “turn left at the light”, fully meaning “right” and not always realizing the opposite is what came out. So I tend to have to consciously think about which one I really mean before I say it (and I think this is why I have the issue in parsers, because I tend to initially hit whatever key feels right instead of taking the time to think it through).
Yes. Constantly. In every parser game and IRL. There is a directional dyslexia. Also, left-handed people tend to have more trouble and I am left-anded. It’s also fairly common in autism, and I test into the spectrum, low but definite. I also have trouble with telling left from right under pressure. I have a scar on my right hand and looking at that is how I know.
