What Left-Handedness Reveals About How the Brain Works (2014)

I've been teaching myself to be ambidextrous. It started a few years ago after injuring my right elbow with lots of wood working, drilling and screwing and sawing. I started trying to drill and drive screws with my left hand. It felt very awkward at first, but after a few tries I started getting the hang of it. I would put the drill back in my right hand and pay attention to the angles and positions and then try to do that with my left hand. It takes a while to build up that coordination, but it does happen.

After a while I was using my left hand so frequently that I actually started getting the same injury in my left elbow and started going back to my right hand again. For a while I could not squeeze hand clamps with my left hand. I since have trained myself to notice when one or the other arm is getting sore and switch, and haven't had these problems in a couple years.

I also had to switch to using mice with my left hand when my right wrist started getting sensitive. I put two mice on my home and work computers and would just use the left one when my right side was getting sore.

Last year I consciously started doing everything with my left side as often as I do with my right: using forks and chop sticks, sawing, splitting wood with a hatchet (using an axe is a both-sided thing and there is very little difference which hand is on top). I haven't put the practice into writing with my left hand yet, it's harder to get past the awkwardness of something I expect to do so automatically. But I will keep working on it. And some things I just can't do with the left hand like bass playing or gear shifting, unless I want to move to England and get a custom guitar built!

So they didn't really answer the genetics question.

Both I and my partner are lefties, our child and the milkman aren't. Should I be having a conversation ;)

I write with my right, use smartphone with left, left footed, lefty with machinery, mouse in right, ballsports left, eat with fork left, spoon doesn't matter. Not sure what to think of myself.

Scissors is a bad measure given that many scissors have an inherent handedness.

"For Southpaws themselves — the affectionate term for lefties ", yeah maybe in the US but not where I'm from. Anyway, I write left handed and hold a pool cue left handed (and also I think I'm correct in saying this: I would hold a rifle left handed), but in every other way that I can think of, I am right handed. I've always thought that was weird, I mean at least compared to others. Anyone else have similar experiences?

Eating "right-handed" has always seemed irrational to me.

It dates back to medeival eating traditions when folks only had a knife - therefore, it was held in the right hand as it was the primary and only implement.

Fast forward to the present day, and the fork is the primary implement. Hence, to my mind, it makes significantly more aense to hold the fork in one's dominant hand.

I was in a meeting with someone from Japan and was astonished to see him take notes with his left hand (generally a taboo in Japan). He was taking notes in English during a meeting in English. Later I saw him writing in Japanese...with his right hand! I assume he was born left-handed and had it mostly wrung out of him in school and at home, but perhaps the English teachers couldn't care less. He exhibits no speech impediment.

(My own kid exhibited the "English teachers couldn't care less" phenomenon, though not in handedness: he was required to use only a fountain pen for schoolwork, except in English where pencils were allowed (they still used the German letterforms). His handwriting was clear as a bell except in English where it was barely legible -- even to me, a native English speaker!).

Does anyone else experience a "YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG" emotion when watching someone doing an action with different handedness from the way you would do it? I get very uncomfortable watching someone cut a loaf of bread the 'wrong' way for example.

Left: write, eat, brush teeth

Right: throw

Both: tennis, ping pong, hit a baseball, play pool, play football (not sure if that counts).

I went to high school with a guy who was the same, but in reverse (write right, throw left).

My dad's 100% left handed, so I assumed I just copied him -- since my hand writing is so poor I always thought of myself as a learned left hander, but according to the chart in the article I'm actually more left handed than right handed, strange.

Well, I tell people I'm right handed since that's my dominant hand in sports. Definitely wouldn't strike anyone out throwing left handed :)

I did the test. I was 4-4-2 so basically mixed handed, but really more so I don't care about top hand on a spoon, knife or broom, so really more like 4 left, 1 right, 5 don't care. So as mixed handed as it get cause I throw a mean right handed spiral too. And boy do I relate way more with left handers, all because I prefer highly to write with my left even though if I need to my right will do.

Righty for the most part, but I have trained myself to use my left for mouse operation when at the computer.

"The Anglo-Saxon lyft means weak or broken"

poor Lyft.

yes, i agree it's odd that that was what i took out of the article.

I'm mostly right-handed but learned to use a few things left-handed from my left-handed dad.

I'm left handed and have been studying Chinese for about 6 months, for 2 hours per day. Out of curiosity, I decided to learn writing Chinese characters with my right hand (also because I thought it was cool to be able to write English with my left hand while writing Chinese with my right hand at the same time). I'm in my forties for additional context.

I've discovered the following things:

* I've always had a moderate degree of social anxiety. But, after a couple of months, I noticed a substantial calming effect when I wrote with my right hand. This bled over into my life in general, and I am much less socially anxious, and more easily able to face anxiety rather than run from it when I need to.

* I able to write Chinese very quickly with my right hand but still not as quickly as my left hand, even though I have had far less practice writing with my left hand. I also discovered I can write English with my right hand nearly as well as Chinese, even though I didn't practice this.

* I recently booted up a videogame called "Getting over it", which requires intense hand/eye coordination. I haven't played the game in over a year, and did it exclusively with my left hand at the time, played for about 30 hours, I think, giving up around half way through (to the part with the very steep ladder after the boxes, where the infamous "shortcut" is, for the people who have played the game). To my amazement, I was able to get to the exact same place with my right hand after only playing for an hour or so! I'm also was able to use chopsticks with my right hand with little practice, as well as brush my teeth quite competently after very little effort.

* After the 2 month mark, I sometimes slipped into a mental state where I could "watch" my right hand write the characters, as if I wasn't in control, and some other entity was controlling it. Now, I'm able to do induce my mind to do the reverse, watching my left hand write, as if controlled by some other entity. I don't know what to make of this.

* In general I feel smarter in some ways. I've noticed a big spike in new ideas for solving problems that I don't think I would have had before. I do a lot of programming on project ideas that I find interesting, and I've found I'm a lot better able to see when a plan of attack isn't working, and abandon it before falling down a rabbit hole, whereas before I would lose focus on the general task, and spend far too much time working on approaches to solving a problem that weren't working. I suppose this could be the placebo effect, or an effect of learning a new language in general. But I thought it was interesting.

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So, one thing I got out of the above is that it seems as though learning coordinated, dexterous movements are all that is needed to perform well at a variety of tasks with one's non-dominant hand, even if one has little or no practice at a specific activity. I also have the feeling that I've "woken up" a part of my brain that was dormant before.

Also, here is probably a dumb thought, as I am not very knowledgeable about AI, so take this for what it's worth. Based on the above, I had a thought about how the brain works. I was thinking about a hierarchy of neural networks, where the top level networks could switch the inputs of the lower ones.

It seems that if the brain worked similarly to how neural networks work, I would have to have some sort of an ability to do this, or how could I have been able to do so well at the "Getting over it" videogame, as well as write English so well with hardly any practice at the two activities?

It also fits well with the idea of using memory as planning, or creating a blank NN to model something, and putting it in place of the outside world as inputs to two already trained NN's. That NN could be trained to manipulate both so that the same results would be received as when they were running against the outside world. In this way, the connected NN could begin to model the real world and plan strategies without having an outside NN to work with.

The expression "Right hand" is ambiguous.