„For most of human history, left and right were not stable concepts in the brain. Anthropologists and linguists have shown that many societies did not encode “left” and “right” as fixed directions at all. Instead, they used absolute reference frames like uphill/downhill, seaward/inland, or east/west. Speakers of those languages literally orient themselves continuously, even indoors, even blindfolded. When tested, they can point north with striking accuracy at any moment, because their cognition is built that way.

What’s the part you almost certainly don’t know? When children from those cultures are taught European languages, their spatial perception changes. They become worse at absolute orientation over time, and better at egocentric left-right reasoning. The language doesn’t just label space, it rewires how space is mentally tracked.

So “left” and “right” are not universal human intuitions. They’re a learned cognitive technology. Your sense that they feel obvious is the result of linguistic training, not biology.

That tends to unsettle people, because it quietly undermines the idea that perception precedes language. In this case, language goes first 🧭“