Thoughts on Right-Left Bias in response to Jenna's response to Sarah.

(this got pretty long so I thought i'd post it on the main page)

This issue should yield insight on the nature vs. nurture question. I didn't know exactly where to look, and I'm sure Elizabeth would have the answers, but until then: I found this abstract of a study done on french vs. tunisian children (who write from right to left in arabic). It doesn't address the issue of a gestalt tendency, or the phenomenon of asymmetry in adults, but tests for ipsilateral bias in line bisection (the tendency to mistakenly identify a midpoint to either the right or left side of a line or circle), clockwise direction in circle drawing, and something called "outward tendency for horizontal displacement in dot filling" which I'm afraid I don't understand.

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a713754473

The study found a bias in children after the age of 7-9 (those who have learned to read) paralleling the directional movement of written text.

That may or may not prove anything about the idea "anisotropy of physical space" on a horizontal axis as presented in chapter 1. Written script can move from right to left, from left to right, from top to bottom, and even from bottom to top (I'm not sure if any culture has developed bottom-up writing organically, but I know that Labanotation, the system developed to notate dance and movement, starts at the bottom of the page and moves upwarddddlllllly)

On the other hand, the hands of a clock will always move counterclockwise, in order to mirror the direction of movement on the shadow of a sundial as the sun moves from east to west. For readers of a left-to-right alphabet (or I should say for people who experience a left-to-right anisotropy and I don't know if I'm using that word correctly) the hands of the clock would seem to be moving in accordance with a "natural flow.' Which would mean that someone who experienced a right-to-left anisotropy experiences the hands of the clock as having to overcome resistance as they moved "against a natural flow." This is at odds with our inherent understanding of time as a force which moves effortlessly from past to future. It seems unlikely that an opposite conception of time could develop organically. Which implies that in certain right-to-left cultures, a standard clock would be seen as out of sync with the movement of time itself. And so thank God for the digital watch.

Before leaving the analog clock: clockwise movement contains both a fall from top to bottom (12:00 to 6:00) and an ascendance from bottom to top (6:00 to 12:00). I'm not sure how to synthesize the idea of monodirectional movement around a circumference with the idea of a top/bottom anisotropy (again not sure if I'm using that word correctly). The momentum generated by circular movement makes the 6:00 to 12:00 motion less burdensome than a vertical lift.

Top to bottom is a non-cultural bias, as it incorporates our awareness of gravity (a counterexample would have to come from a culture which had developed in a weightless environment, such as those which are the future of space space space travel). Horizontal bias seems to have both cultural and non-cultural origins, and it'd be fun to get specific about what exactly influences what.

An interesting example from the world of conceptual thought: if you imagine a river flowing down-hill, you will almost certainly picture it moving from left to right.

Second to last thought: the sun always moves from what we call east to what we call west. In our culture we conceptualize this trajectory as movement from left to right, but this is a map-making convention. A right-to-left-reading person could view the sun's east-to-west trajectory as movement from right-to-left. Note that according to the windroses on our culturally biased MAPS, which place west to the left and east to the right, the sun actually moves in the OPPOSITE direction of our written text. A reader of arabic or hebrew could derive comfort from such a map, as he or she could conceive of script as moving in the same direction as the sun. Alas, for similar consolation, a reader of english would have to move to the southern hemisphere, and flip his or her atlas upside down.

Last thought: It seems like it would be worthwhile, if it were possible, to study composition and directional movement in the art of those cultures that had not yet developed a written alphabet.