Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

The Mind's Eye 277iment would ever reveal a law of nature that looked different through thelooking glass. He lost. The cobalt 60 nucleus is said to spin counterclockwiseif you look down on its north pole, but that description byitself is circular because "north pole" is simply what we call the end ofthe axis from which a rotation looks counterclockwise. The logical circlewould be broken if something else differentiated the so-called north polefrom the so-called south pole. Here is the something else: when theatom decays, electrons are more likely to be flung out of the end we callsouth. "North" versus "south" and "clockwise" versus "counterclockwise"are no longer arbitrary labels but can be distinguished relative to theelectron spurt. The decay, hence the universe, would look different inthe mirror. God is not ambidextrous after all.So right- and left-handed versions of things, from subatomic particlesto the raw material of life to the spin of the earth, are fundamentally different.But the mind usually treats them as if they were the same:Pooh looked at his two paws. He knew that one of them was the right,and he knew that when you had decided which one of them was theright, then the other one was the left, but he never could remember howto begin.None of us is good at remembering how to begin. Left and right shoeslook so alike that children must be taught tricks to distinguish them, likeplacing the shoes side by side and sizing up the gap. Which way is AbrahamLincoln facing on the American one-cent piece? There is only a fiftypercent chance you will get the answer right, the same as if you hadanswered by flipping the penny. What about Whistler's famous painting,Arrangement in Black and Gray: The Artist's Mother} Even the Englishlanguage likes to collapse left and right: beside and next to denote sideby-sidewithout specifying who's on the left, but there is no word likebehove or aneath that denotes up-and-down without specifying who's ontop. Our obliviousness to left-and-right stands in stark contrast to ourhypersensitivity to up-and-down and front-and-back. Apparently thehuman mind does not have a preexisting label for the third dimension ofits object-centered reference frame. When it sees a hand, it can align thewrist-fingertip axis with "down-up," and the back-palm axis with "backward-forward,"but the direction of the pinkie-thumb axis is up for grabs.The mind calls it, say, "thumbward," and the left and right hands becomemental synonyms. Our indecisiveness about left and right needs an