2023-11-05 09:40:59
by Elena Meli
The most frequent problem in women and affects 15% of the general population. also at the origin of many errors by surgeons who get confused and operate on the wrong side
What do the sinking of the Titanic and the news stories in which operations are performed on the healthy knee instead of the diseased one have in common? It is possible that the helmsman of the ocean liner and the surgeon of the wrong operation have a problem in recognizing the right and the left, an eventuality that is anything but unusual and certainly not confined to school-age children: as explained by Gerald Gormley, an internal medicine specialist Queen’s University of Belfast in Northern Ireland which has been studying the phenomenon for some time, of all orientations in space, high or low, near or far and so on, discerning right from left is the most complicated and not surprisingly the source of many errors doctors.
Biopsies on the wrong breast, injections in the healthy eye, even amputations of limbs without any pathology: avoidable clinical errors often involve confusing the side on which to operate.
Find solutions
Gormley also analyzed the issue to find solutions and teach doctors how not to fall into a trap: Distinguishing left and right in another person is complicated because it requires complex processes, from spatial and visual processing to memory, says the expert.
First of all, it is necessary to orient left and right on oneself and for some this is not immediate or easy: those who do not respond immediately admit to using tricks such as thinking about the hand they write with, a tattoo they have on one side of their body and clues similar. The next step to understand which is the right and left of another is to rotate yourself so as to look where he or she is looking, because when we are facing someone our left is facing her right and vice versa and it confuses us. Mental rotation adds a degree of difficulty to the process.
The rotation strategy
How decisive but complex the rotation strategy is is demonstrated by a recent experiment conducted by Ineke van der Ham, a neuropsychologist at the Dutch University of Leiden, in which volunteers were asked to indicate which hand was highlighted in some photographs, as quickly as possible: when the character in the photos was from behind, with left and right matching those of the volunteer, the speed and accuracy of the responses increased.
In short, we use our body to recognize left and right in others, taking advantage of the representation we have of it in our heads: the Dutch expert’s experiments have shown that even if one’s hands are covered or crossed during the recognition test of the right and left of others the results do not change. Precisely because our body acts as a guide, the more asymmetric it is, for example in the way we use it, the easier it is to find our way around: those who are ambidextrous, for example, have much more difficulty.
Symmetry
If one part of the brain is slightly larger than the other, you tend to have better discrimination between left and right, Gormley observes. For many all this happens in an instant and without thinking about it, but as van der Ham recently demonstrated, 15 percent of the general population admits that they do not discriminate right and left well, 43 percent that they use the hand trick with which you write to recognize them in yourself and help yourself do so in others.
It is above all women who need to turn to help, furthermore men tend to be quicker in their responses; research from some time ago suggested that they are also better at recognizing left and right, especially if they are left-handed, perhaps due to a better, innate ability to orientate in space.
November 5, 2023 (modified November 5, 2023 | 08:39)
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