It’s something I try to reassure my learners about: the examiner doesn’t care if you go in the wrong direction so long as what you did to get there was safe and legal.
Obviously, don’t take the piss and make up your own route, but taking a couple wrong turns will never fail you your test.
this is a very real condition. my wife has a phd in experimental physics and can NOT remember which is which. if she looks at her hands she has a trick (the L your thumb and index fingers make is the correct orientation) but say “turn right!” to her and you might have well just made the muted trumped voice from the old peanuts cartoons
Does she remember whether she’s right or left handed? Just as a static fact about herself? I feel like it should be easy to reconcile an instruction like “turn right” by cross-referencing the knowledge of “I’m left handed” with “this is the hand I prefer to use”.
truuuust me she’s tried everything you can think of. I find it surprising that she cant remember right as in correct as in dominant hand but she cannot. its honestly a little baffling
Maybe it’s not something where they remember they’re right or left handed based on that specific thing, but just that they prefer using the hand on that side.
That sounds weird. You wouldn’t need to understand the concept of left and right to know you have a dominant hand. You would just innately know one hand is the dominant one and the other isn’t. If I told my cat that a treat was behind the door on the left he’d be like “wtf is left bruh”, but he almost always bats at shit with his right paw.
Yes, that’s my point. They know they have a dominant hand, and which hand that is. They are also likely to remember whether they are right or left handed. Even if they don’t know intrinsically what “right” is it can simply be memorized in the same way that people know their blood type.
Combining those two pieces of information should let a person figure out which side is which.
I have a problem with it a little bit. It aggravates the fuck out of me when I’m dealing with screws, especially if I’m screwing something in upside down or from around the back.
I literally hate myself. :p
I dont have this problem and thats tricky for me also
Try thinking of a clock. Most screws get tighter when turned clockwise. When time moves forward, your schedule gets tighter. Like the screw.
I’m not sure it’ll help, but since it’s a rotational reference for a rotational target, maybe it’ll help.
Personally I’m constantly drawing circles with my finger like a clock hand and then positioning my hand to face the screw while still drawing circles. It helps a lot.
The problem is the mnemonic everyone uses doesn’t use rotational motion. Maybe we need an actual rotational motion mnemonic. Maybe “clockwise screw wise” would work
I could never remember how screws worked until physics and the right hand rule.
Can confirm. Had it my whole life. If you shout “turn right,” there’s a 50/50 chance I’ll get it right, but my brain is just guessing. I have to stop and think about it to know for sure. I would make a shit Rally driver…
Yup, my husband is the same way. It makes for fun road trips when he’s the navigator 💀
I told my partner to turn left an intersection and she couldn’t remember which was which, so she went straight ahead instead. Like the choice locked her up, and resulted in no action being taken at all. I assume we would have driven into a building if it had been a T-junction
Tbh same, I don’t have to do the hand thing anymore though I just have to take a second to imagine me doing it, and that’s enough.
I wrote L and R on my hands for the driving test
the advice I got before driving was: your left hand is the one where the thumb is pointing to your right hand
and I still think about it
If you lay your hands flat with each thumb pointed at the other hand, your left hand will form an “L” shape. That’s probably what they meant to say.
Edit: oh looooooool, I literally just didn’t get the joke
This actually makes sense. I always assumed people know which one their dominant writing hand is and go from there. That’s what i always did until i just knew. Like when someone asked me, i made a fist or something with the hand i was writing with
That’s a sensible way to do it. You’ve got a built in asymmetry to map it to.
It’s perfectly okay to go the wrong way on the driving test in the UK, as long as you do so safely. Sometimes there are complicated places and weird roundabouts, it’s better if you’re in the wrong lane to commit to it
And also that you communicate that you’re aware what you’ve done, and how you’re going to continue.
I did it on mine, and said “I’ve just come off at the wrong exit, so I’m going to just continue along here.”
Examiner said it was OK, and just directed things back onto the route at the next junction.I didn’t even say this lol. They just informed me after calmly and gave me new directions.
The guy who did my driving test (US) generally did not tell me which way to turn at interactions or Ts and would get angry if I hadn’t guessed correctly. Apparently, it was very obvious to him where I should be going, and he shouldn’t have had to tell me.
At the time, my area held the test in the city with the worst designed roads. Experienced drivers (such as me today) can easily take wrong turns there. It’s like each stretch of road between intersections was independently designed by different people who never communicated.
Same here in Germany, if you only do it once or twice safely you will still pass. I dont know if you would pass if you do it every time. I sometimes also confuse left and right, but it only happened in the lessons a few times, not in the test.
Should’ve tried to argue that turning right is safer so they’re just going to make three rights
Only if anon is in a country which drives on the right.
No, they can still argue it, but it’d just be more stupid and wrong
Two wrongs don’t make a rightThree rights do make a left
Sitting there muttering to himself something about non-euclidean geometry.
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That’s a hell of a spin you just put on failing the driving test 5 times.
