I’ve heard being ambidextrous improves the brain physically by (I think) increasing communication flow between the right & left hemisphere but is there any truth to it, does it lead to any extra nerve growth or communication? If there is extra brain growth or nerve endings in a certain area how do they know being ambidextrous is the cause and not the result of it? Maybe some people are just born with more nerves in some parts of the brain and as a result are naturally ambidextrous, and learning ambidextrousness if you are naturally right or left handed will not change anything.
What about learning to write backwards, does that have any effect on the brain.
I’ve heard somewhere that everything you learn in your youth makes new neural connections, less so when you get older (but still, if you can learn it it must be making connections somehwere).
I have heard of people doing things like trying to learn to write left-handed to stimulate their right brain, but I believe that’s fallacious. There are left-brain activities and right-brain activities and people with a proclivity toward one or the other, which doesn’t necessarily relate to their handedness.
I did some reading on this at one time but the only thing I remember is my starting point, which was Betty Edwards’sDrawing on the Right Side of the Brain (yes, a book on how to draw). She noted, for instance, that once people got deeply involved in drawing to the point that their drawing improved they had a hard time talking.
You develop your nondominant side, not by doing things with the opposing hand necessarily, but by doing things that woke up the nondominant side. Logic puzzles for the right-brained, drawing for the left-brained. That seems more useful than learning to write backwards–although I am somewhat ambidextrous and I can write backwards, with my left hand, and nobody else can read it! (Actually people have a hard time with stuff I write the correct direction with my right hand.)
Here is a site that talks about this some. I just googled & skimmed it.