DaveO,

I know, consciously, which side of my watch is left and right (wrist & hand) but when I do look at my analog watch face I still have to make that conscious connection.

Don't ask me why, but I have a lovely watch, one of these modern Swatches, which doesn't have numbers, so I tell the time by the position of the hands. Mostly it's not a problem if *I* want to know the time, but it's panic stations if someone unexpectedly asks me the time because I stand there looking at my watch like a fool, and the conversation in my head goes: Is it 20 to 10 or 2:20? Well I haven't had lunch yet, so it must be morning.

Little Hawk,

You said that the "concept of right and left comes from within a person" but for me the difference has never really been clear. I think that the theory that dyslexics have a balance between right & left brain makes a lot of sense to me because if I were more right than left oriented, or vice versa, I would have more of a sense of the difference. Because they are balanced almost equally (according to tests I have done) it is not so easy to tell the difference.

When I am "looking" for the correct word for something I go through a thought process which goes something like this:

Imagine I am in a room which is packed with visual and conceptual stuff - pictures, 3-D models, thought concepts & ideas, but no words. Someone starts conversing with me about these visual & conceptual ideas. I reply, but I can't find the right word for something, so I go into the other room which is packed with filing cabinets, floor to ceiling. The categorisation in the filing cabinets is visual/conceptual cues, so the labels on the cabinets, and on each file folder, and each file is visual/conceptual, but filed under those labels are the associated words.

I find the file I need, look up the word, and continue with the conversation.

In conversations the common words, i.e. the ones I use most often, are easy to remember, but the ones I am dredging from memory or relating to subjects I haven't discussed in a while are slower to retrieve.

I also have problems with some words because of the order of letters. "Suspicious" and "superstition" always catch me out. There are lots of others. It's to do with the reversal of letter order - you know the jokes, "God" & "dog", etc.

Helen