What Left-Handedness Reveals About How the Brain Works (2014)
I&#x27;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&#x27;m in my forties for additional context.<p>I&#x27;ve discovered the following things:<p>* I&#x27;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.<p>* 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&#x27;t practice this.<p>* I recently booted up a videogame called &quot;Getting over it&quot;, which requires intense hand&#x2F;eye coordination. I haven&#x27;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 &quot;shortcut&quot; 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&#x27;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.<p>* After the 2 month mark, I sometimes slipped into a mental state where I could &quot;watch&quot; my right hand write the characters, as if I wasn&#x27;t in control, and some other entity was controlling it. Now, I&#x27;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&#x27;t know what to make of this.<p>* In general I feel smarter in some ways. I&#x27;ve noticed a big spike in new ideas for solving problems that I don&#x27;t think I would have had before. I do a lot of programming on project ideas that I find interesting, and I&#x27;ve found I&#x27;m a lot better able to see when a plan of attack isn&#x27;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&#x27;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.<p>---<p>So, one thing I got out of the above is that it <i>seems</i> as though learning coordinated, dexterous movements are all that is needed to perform well at a variety of tasks with one&#x27;s non-dominant hand, even if one has little or no practice at a specific activity. I also have the feeling that I&#x27;ve &quot;woken up&quot; a part of my brain that was dormant before.<p>Also, here is probably a dumb thought, as I am not very knowledgeable about AI, so take this for what it&#x27;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.<p>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 &quot;Getting over it&quot; videogame, as well as write English so well with hardly any practice at the two activities?<p>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&#x27;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.