I don’t mean Ambidextrous!
Yesterday I tried cutting a vegetable with the knife in my non-dominant hand and it was a weird and uncomfortable thing. I wonder if there are people who have that distinct discomfort of using your “bad” hand, but on both hands?
I don’t think it would fall under ambidexterity, because that kinda implies someone is comfortable with either hand, but could someone be uncomfortable with both?
I think those people would be labelled as clumsy or lacking motor skills. The brain is pretty good though so with experience it can almost always figure stuff out.
It’s a very interesting question, and I can’t speak to the science but I can speak to my personal experience.
Going back to childhood I always remember the adults insistence that I decide which is my handedness yet knowing intuitively that I could favor either side, and they each had an advantage.
I played left wing in hockey, only because there was never enough left-handed players, so I just pretended I was left-handed.
When I would play little league baseball, coaches would shout at me saying hey, don’t you bat the other way?! To me I just naturally, almost randomly picked a side according to how I felt about the pitcher.
When I played snooker semi-professionally, I shot right handed, but not because my right arm had more finesse, but because my left arm was better at providing rock solid stability with fine control, and because my right eye is slightly stronger. In my life, I played perhaps 50 games of billiards left-handed, out of perhaps 20,000 games total. And I can pick up and play left-handed with ease… You would think I’d been shooting that way my whole life.
I use my right hand to write, but when I skateboard, I skate “goofy foot”. When I destroyed my shoulder and it was a piece of meat hanging off my body for 6 months, I picked up a pen in my left hand and within 3 days I was writing at the same grace I could in grade 6! Within a month I was actually writing better than right-handed. It was still chicken scratch so I’m not sure what that’s worth lol
I know that I am right-handed by choice because there’s a difference in the knuckle/tendon of my left thumb. It makes it impossible to move from certain positions on the “circle” to others without first moving to a transitional spot. And I have more dexterity with my right for that reason alone.
I always wanted to play on P2 of the Street Fighter II cabinet.
Jessica Cox is a certified scuba diver, a light sport pilot, and I think it is safe to say she is without handedness.
Dyspraxia
I mean, depending on the task, I have felt this. There are sometimes things I can’t figure out which hand to use because both feel wrong. Not often. Guitar feels like that for me.
I also read that as we get older, we become less “handed” and it’s not because we become ambidextrous just less dextrous overall, the dominant hand loses dexterity.
I’m left handed, and the topic has come up with right handed people over the course of my life. Living in a world largely built for right handed people forces you to adopt some right handed habits. Wii Sports let you choose your handedness per activity which is helpful to a lot of us southpaws; we legitimately do some things the “right handed” way.
Guitar for example; when I started taking guitar lessons when I was 12, they handed me a normal guitar off the rack with the neck in my left hand and it was instantly comfortable. After a few lessons it came out that I am left handed and “Oh we have a left-handed guitar if you want to try it. Here.” and it felt wrong. Meanwhile I would say just over half, say 54% of the right-handed people I’ve handed a guitar to went “oh no this isn’t right” and wanted to play it the other way. So I’m convinced “normal” guitars are in fact left-handed.
Right handed people often report being strongly right handed and that doing things with their left hand is very difficult. “My right hand is a hand, my left hand is a clamp.” I’ve heard very few left handed people report the same.
