Thursday, April 9, 2009

Do It Yourself: Ambidexterity - Part II

Well, it's been seven months since I set out to teach myself to be ambidextrous. Check out the beginning of my experiment in Part I. During my months of mind and body hacking, I've endeavored to write with my left hand as much as I can remember to. Most of it ended up being during work while waiting for particularly large Photoshop Documents to save (30 minutes for a 4 gig file. Ouch).

But all my hard work has paid off. I can now write comfortably with my non-dominant hand, and legibly as well! At my current level of muscle memory, I can write with my left hand just as quickly with my right with only moderate legibility issues. But if I slow down to about 75% of my right hand's speed, I can make my left handwriting nearly indistinguishable from that of my right. Behold the fruits of my labor:


What you're looking at is one line written by my dominant right hand, and the following four written with my left. It may not look like much improvement compared with that of my first post, but there is a marked increase in the speed with which I can write. As an added bonus, I discovered that I can write with both hands at the same time... which gets trippy when your hands move together most of the time, but cross t's and f's in opposite directions. My brain asplode!

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Swell job! Question, have you been writing other things other than that sentence? If so, does the lack of muscle memory of full words slow you down?

Larissa said...

Very impressive, Sun.