"Directionally Challenged"

Ahhhh...

Kevin Lenz sees it all the time.

As the founder and chief instructor of Driving In a New America Inc., Mr. Lenz often finds himself sitting next to a teenage driver when the following scenario unfolds:

"I'll tell them, 'We're turning right here,' and they'll put on their left turn signal, and I'll say, 'No, turn right,' and they'll say 'Right' and leave their left turn signal on.

"I had one student last week where I said, 'OK, we're going to make the second right up here,' and she turned left into a parking lot."

The teens may struggle with left and right because of the stress of learning how to drive, but they aren't alone.

Millions of adults around the world will remain "directionally challenged" for their entire lives. For them, a skill that most people master by the age of 12 will always be a craps shoot.

Studies show that, in general, women have a more difficult time with this task than men do. Other studies show that left-handers have more trouble discriminating left from right. Still others say just the opposite.

As to what's going on inside the brains of people who are directionally dumbfounded, there are plenty of interesting theories, but no definitive answers.

One of the few people who has studied this issue recently is Sonja Ofte, of the University of Bergen in Norway.

She asked college students four years ago to look at stick figures facing forward or backward and to identify right or left hands when the figures' arms were in different positions.

On that test, men did significantly better than women, and left-handed men did better than right-handers.

When she did the same test with children, though, she found no gender differences.