Suffice it to say, I have now become a functionally ambidextrous person with respect to writing. But while teaching myself to write with my left hand, I became more and more enamored with the idea of training both hemispheres of the brain to do things far beyond "normal" by breaking down and reassembling the very way we naturally processes information.
When it comes down to it, what I really decided to do was to reinterpret the characters of the English alphabet as objects, not as symbols. Allow me to explain. If you see the letter "l" put on its side, it's a hyphen. If you see it at an angle, it becomes a backslash. The orientation of this symbol determines its meaning. But if you see a tree from the sky, or from the ground, from in front or from back, it will always be a tree. Written English demands that you read it with the proper orientation to give its 26 symbols the proper meaning. For whatever reason, I decided to train myself to learn to write independent of fixed orientation, and here are the results:
First came my right hand writing my control phrase. Then writing the same phrase upside down. Not to be outdone, I performed the same feat with my left hand. Then came the real brain twister. The circular writing test began with me starting in the center, and writing outwards in a spiral without altering my hand position in any way, and without rotating the paper. The test was to be able to write each letter correctly with a constantly shifting orientation (and while keeping the spiral reasonably circular). Give it a try for yourself, it's much more difficult than you'd imagine. The finale, of course, was in being able to reproduce the spiral with my non-dominant left hand... again without changing the relative angle of my wrist to the paper, and keeping the paper stationary (pun intended). Once you wrap your mind around what is essentially mental spatial rotation of the letters, you'll be surprised how easy it is to perform simple tasks like writing upside down. Next on the list of potential challenges, mirror cursive. That one could prove difficult...
