Two rights making a wrong
Oct. 13th, 2006 05:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackWhenever I read a non-uk messageboards, my brain has got into the habit of reversing all "left" and "right" in any rant about driving. It's decided that that one simple preprocess and then imagining things the way they would be on a normal road is easier than visualising the actual road and reminding yourself that "overtaking on the right" doesn't mean what it normally does.
In fact, since almost everyone I know tends to use bikes, my brain has started to do this in *any* driving anecdote, which is wrong.
And now, finally, it's started overcompensating. It's so used to switching it reads "left", sees "right" and then goes "ah, um, did I reverse that? Must be 'left' then" and gets half of them wrong, which is even worse than to start with.
Anyone who was told, eg. matrix indices, are "always the other way round to the way you think" is used to this phenomenon.
For that matter, I think it occurs on a higher level as well. I instinctively present the other side of an argument to the one being raised, as you know, not to be contrary, but as a way of considering the issue more fully. Sometimes my brain does this so fast it presents a refinement to the obvious response to what someone said, while the response it totally lost.
In fact, since almost everyone I know tends to use bikes, my brain has started to do this in *any* driving anecdote, which is wrong.
And now, finally, it's started overcompensating. It's so used to switching it reads "left", sees "right" and then goes "ah, um, did I reverse that? Must be 'left' then" and gets half of them wrong, which is even worse than to start with.
Anyone who was told, eg. matrix indices, are "always the other way round to the way you think" is used to this phenomenon.
For that matter, I think it occurs on a higher level as well. I instinctively present the other side of an argument to the one being raised, as you know, not to be contrary, but as a way of considering the issue more fully. Sometimes my brain does this so fast it presents a refinement to the obvious response to what someone said, while the response it totally lost.