[strken]

Steady on now: there's an interesting psychological effect going on. A well known art exercise is to draw a subject upside down, particularly a person or a scene with a clear usual orientation.

When you take something you're very familiar with and turn it upside down, you see all the details - volume, shape, distance between points, geometric similarity, colour - with fresh eyes. With art, it becomes easier to draw a human figure because it discourages symbol drawing. With a map, I find it helps me realise how close certain points are to each other, how small politically significant regions are, which lattitude different climate bands sit at, and so on.

A mug is a pretty boring object which we're all used to seeing upside down and which doesn't have many interesting features, so of course turning it upside down will not reveal anything interesting.

[j4coh]

If you're sitting on the opposite side of a table looking at a map that a person on the other side laid out in front of them, you don't just see the map from the other side? You instead see details about volume, shape, distance between points, geometric similarity, colour, and so on? I sincerely just see the same map even if I'm across the table, except flipped. I'm not sure how it would impact my drawing a map, though that isn't really what the article talks about.

Can you read upside-down or does it become a jumble of lines? I can read upside-down with no special effort so maybe this is canceling something out.

[strken]

I can read upside down, but it's an acquired skill. I can't read at a 90 degree angle without difficulty, although I could probably learn to.

It's not that I don't see the map from the other side, it's that when it's the right way up I see all the extra information I have about it. For example, I bet an eye tracker would show me focusing on Western Europe, Central Asia, Australia, and the US. When the map is flipped, I see it closer to how it really is because I can ignore those preconceived ideas more easily. I don't see e.g. the Iberian peninsula as represented by a land mass, I see the actual land mass, and can concentrate on its size and distance more easily.

This is really interesting!

[BrandoElFollito]

I agree. In addition I can relate to elements (such as imagining the road from Paris to Munich), it just takes more processing.

[1718627440]

I too have no problems reading upside-down, but for some reason I do find it hard to read sidewards.

[sanderjd]

This is all very interesting, but I'm sorry, personally I just feel the same as the poster you replied to. I don't experience this as anything weird, I just experience it as if I'm looking at a map from the top.