brain | humor | aging | directions
I Have No Sense of Direction
a life of exploring alternate routes
Spatial Orientation
When I was in high school, we took a lot of tests. Many of them were New York State Regents exams. In college, we could volunteer for tests as the validation base for a large test maker and we got some sort of credits for that. We volunteered through my psychology classes, and as we learned, many of the tests were validated on college sophomores, which is what we all were — but anyway, it was a lot of multiple-choice tests that I took in my youth.
At some point in high school, I realized that I could not do any of the spatial orientation questions. I learned to just skip those questions. You know — the ones like steering the boat or something where you had to figure out which way the horizon was, which way you turned the wheel, etc. I could never answer them — so I figured why bother trying.
That was another thing I learned in high school — how to take tests — and one of the major things was to skip the questions you know you don’t know.
At one point I also realized that left and right were not easy for me to process — I wore a watch and I knew that was my left arm, so if I was driving someplace and had to turn left…