So, you went ahead and installed the brand-new “Lion” system software on your Mac, and while you can’t stop marvelling over the new bells and whistles, there’s one tried-and-true feature—scrolling with the mouse—that feels upside-down, topsy-turvy, and just plain wrong.

In the pre-Lion days (all of two days ago, mind you), you’d flick “up” on your mouse wheel or trackpad to scroll up, or down to scroll down. Seems logical, right?

But Mac OS X Lion introduces “natural” scrolling—which means (somewhat counterintuitively) that you flick up on your mouse to scroll down, and down to scroll up.

Say what?

Alright, here’s the thing: as I wrote just yesterday, Apple is clearly trying to bring elements of the iPhone and iPad to the Mac with its just-released “Lion” update—and among other things, that includes the way you navigate using a touchscreen.

On the iPhone, when you want to scroll down a web page, you touch the screen and drag up—and the page scrolls down. And if you want to scroll back up, you touch the screen again and drag … down. It makes perfect sense on a touchscreen, but feels reversed using a mouse.

Personally, my brain gets the whole “natural scrolling” concept, but my fingers are still stubbornly trying to flick up when I want to scroll up, and it’s been making for a rather interesting Day Two with Lion.

In any case, we’ve got two options here.

One: get used to the new “natural” (or at least as far as Apple defines it). Or two: forget “natural,” and go back to normal.

If you’re opting for the latter, here’s all you have to do:

• Open the Apple menu in the top-left corner of the page, then select System Preferences.
• Click the Mouse or Trackpad icon, depending on which one you’re using.
• See the first option, labeled “Scroll direction: natural”? Uncheck that box to return to … well, unnatural scrolling.

Have more questions about Lion? Let me know!