@djensen47 They look on the left to me? Where are you referring to? The only thing I can see that's not a topic title is the usernames being on the right, which, should be on the left for the reason you've stated above. When you've got a few thousand members, you don't remember their avatars. 
The only place I can think of, where topic title is even slightly to the right, is when you're in a topic, and you've scrolled away from the breadcrumbs and it appears to the left of the pagination slidebar thing. But by this point, people know the topic, as they've seen it twice. Once when entering the TID, and again (if) they saw the breadcrumbs.
Also heatmaps are subjective to the content, so don't really work for this usecase, if you're looking at text, you read from left to right. If there's a structure (header, content, sidebar) you start from the top, then go down, then right. You see what catches your eye first. For example I saw your blue link, before I started reading the text. Heatmaps are good for split testing and guaging what your users are looking at, where your content works.