Definitely less painful!
How’s that going? I don’t want to criticise but I’m sure I’ve heard you lament before that your ideas are not always received by others in the intended manner, and maybe your refusal to cooperate with (maybe even hostility toward?) everyday conceptual shorthands only serves to obfuscate the points that you want to make. In the vast majority of conversations I have on a daily basis there is at least one party using a second language, and in my opinion there’s maybe nothing more important to effective communication than meeting people halfway. By contrast, raging about convenient and universal metaspatial constructs seems counterproductive.
Are there any concise words for “in the direction towards a central reference point” and “in the direction away from a central reference point”? How about we use the words “down” and “up” as a shorthand? Is it really such a big deal if the same words can be used in both cartesian and polar reference frames? At the human scale the two systems are pretty interchangeable, at least until you want to navigate around the world or launch rockets into space or build really long bridges.
Just supposing you have a quantity of things, and you put them in a pile. If you add more things the pile will be higher, if you take things away it will be lower. I agree with you that modelling non-spatial concepts using spatial metaphors is arbitrary and maybe less than optimal. I’m just saying that spatial reasoning is what we’re good at, apparently right down to the hardware level, so like this guy I used to know who had no arms so he built a boat with his feet* we are making do with the equipment we have.
So of course we use the “higher” pile/“lower” pile metaphor as a proxy for a more exact description. A newly minted human being can work out how to perambulate within a physical space in about a year (some animals have it sorted out in a day), while learning to math good takes the average human a good decade or two. Evolutionarily speaking, animals have been working with space for a very very long time, whereas counting to ten and beyond is one of those “two minutes to midnight on New Years’ Eve” type inventions.
The book I listed above does a good job of exploring how various sign languages make use of space in syntactically different ways to encode temporal or sequential information, or to reconstruct complex scenarios with multiple actors, real or abstract. Once you accept some simple abstractions such as up is “more” and down is “less”, or backwards is “before” and forwards is “after”, you can use them as modifiers in all sorts of different contexts. Does sign language annoy you? Why do you hate the deaf, Popo? 
And the rest of us do it too. If I’m telling a story about two people, and I don’t know their names and they’re of the same apparent gender, one convenient shorthand I can use is to talk about this guy, gesturing over here to the left, and then this guy, over there on the right. Sure there are other options, but I’ve got all this space between us so why not make use of it?
I mean, what’s the big deal? Gesticulates wildly.
All I’m saying is I can see why that might be. The hardware is optimised to support certain working models at the expense of its ability to efficiently maintain other working models. The working models we use perhaps aren’t the best, but they mostly get the job done even if there are weird side effects like forgetting what you’re doing when you walk from one room to another sometimes. And sure, there are other abstractions that might do the job equally well or maybe even better, but trying to run some of them on the hardware at hand isn’t transcendental so much as it is a kludge that fights the operating system only to achieve the same essential ends. As someone who does a lot of programming the analogue that springs to mind is the inner platform effect.
And I’m curious what you mean by “improve upon it”. It looks like I have no internet for the next few days so I can’t carry on the conversation, but I’d like to hear more about how exactly you would define “it”, and in what sense and to what ends it is deficient and how you would like to see it improved.
*A fucking boat. With his feet.
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What is at issue here is not really “me”, nor “my ideas”. From a very young age I made up my mind to try using the most accurate conceptual/linguistic models I can for my own reasoning as well as communicating with others. It was discouraging as a child to have actual teachers glibly acknowledge that many relationships they described in casual conversation were known to be inaccurate or outright false. Once you know that your planet revolves around its sun, why continue to refer to this as sunrise/sunset? Once you know that the Americas are not India, why refer to its inhabitants as Indians? Once your phones use buttons and DTMF tones, why refer to them as dialing? These are ideas of the world at large. My idea I suppose is that it is lazy to not update them as one becomes aware of new data and evidence, more accurate models.
This is as much a matter of social responsibility with me as it is my own personal comfort. I can appreciate classical models and modes of reasoning, but I try to acknowledge that this is what they are. We can posit some millennia-old notion such as good versus evil, or a mind/body split and still have an interesting and/or informative discussion based upon these. But the distinction is worth making.
What I have always supposed is that they are not the same essential ends - they only appear as such when the same models are required to be used. Using a different model of the world affects how one integrates new information, and what one is able to do. It is not a matter of simply replacing a label with another of arbitrary meaning and leaving the underlying model unchanged. So what I mean by “improve upon it” is only for people to make some small effort to try to use models which are as accurate as they can, and help others to do the same.
“Radial” and “anti-radial”.
For orbital mechanics geeks, anyway. I don’t recommend using them in everyday conversation.
http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Maneuver_node#Directions
As for the doorway effect, they missed one of the major benefits of the context switch - it engages different parts of the brain, allowing different thoughts about whatever’s in it to have a chance. It’s why so many problems (especially the difficult ones) are best solved by going outside and looking at the leaves on the trees, going to take a shower, or taking a nap instead of just continuing to sit at a desk, staring at a screen and flailing at a keyboard (or whatever the work involves) for more hours.
It’s more noticeable if going outside or inside than just going from room to room as they described, so maybe they didn’t think of it because they didn’t go outside. (Or maybe they were just a bit oxygen-deprived from not breathing while making the video. 
)
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“Inward” and “outward?”
Or:
I’m sure he’s heard this approximately a billion times before, but: quite the feat.
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