OK…to set the scene I am out picking nightcrawlers last night and I am by no means a natural (they are faster than they look). I ended up with 4 dozen in about 45 minutes. For a good stretch though I was grabbing and missing. Now I am a right hander. I write, throw, bat, and shoot right-handed. I also know that my right eye is my dominant eye. However in the course of last night crawler picking escapade I determined that I had a much higher “hook up” percentage with my left hand. Why is that?
Kind of follows with riding a bike. I am much more stable using just my left hand than I am using just my right. Again WHY??
If I do anything else with my left hand I look like any number of US Presidents trying to throw out the first pitch. (Ugly):o
I don’t know what kind of manual dexterity it takes to grab worms, but I don’t imagine it’s too much, so i think that your success in worm-grabbing is due to chance.
I am right-handed, too.
But I brush my teeth with my left hand. I can’t do it with my right. And I eat with my left hand as deftly as i do with my right.
I think if your practice enough, you can become ambidextrous. Actually, I know this for a fact because a month ago I posted a question of whether it was possible to become teach oneself to become ambidextrous as an adult.
I got some mixed answers, but I went ahead and wrote in my journal every night with my left hand. You can look through the pages of the journal and see the handwriting get better and better.
As with the bike, I think you just fell into a habit of using your left and now you favor that hand. It doesn’t take TOO much strength or skill to ride a bike. And in my case, it’s not too hard to eat or brush your teeth so I just happened to use my left hand.
But the real strength and dexterity-required activities, like writing and throwing and batting- the dominant hand has a distinct advantage so you use it.
mixed dominants are common - I think 11% of the pop is leftie, but another 19% are mixed dominant, including true ‘ambidexterous’ folk (who can use either hand for everything) and the more common “hammer with the left, write with the right, throw with the right, punch with the left” kind.
Some skills seem to sort themselves out better on another side of the brain. You could be very slightly mixed dominant… but more likely, it was another kind of sided thing - right brain/left brain. Perhaps it was just that your right brain was better at catching an organically moving creature than your left was - instinct instead of TRYING. So therefore your left hand was able to succeed more. (Right brain runs the left side of the body…) This would also explain the balance while biking issue, which is more a ‘go with the gut’ thing than a ‘think it out’ thing.
It takes more dexterity than you think. The other thread I opened along with this one regarded the speed of nightcrawlers. They are fast and you need to hang onwhile you coax them from their hole. Broken crawlers not being a good thing if you want the rest to stay alive. You need to be quick, accurate and have a deft touch. None of which are adjectives normally associated with my left hand.
I think from an accuracy stand point, specifically hand eye coordination in this case, the dominant eye should lead you to greater crawler picking success.
Still leary with the dominant eye but I have found many things that I do better when I just react rather than think about what I am going to do (or what I am going to do wrong in the process of doing what I am trying to do.) My golf game is a good example of too much thinking.
Maybe right hand/left hand is more of a ranging quality where most people lie somewhere in between the extremes. I am close to the middle, having mixed dominance. Most skills are either left or right handed for me, but not both. Most sports I play left handed, while I write and do other things with my right hand. Learning new skills with are either right handed or left handed difficult because I am not sure which hand to use at first.
This books was suggested as helpful for understanding the right/left questions.
“Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of
Language” by Robin Dunbar (1997) from local library.
It had to do with hunting from the left and the development of language on the other, less used side. Not sure if I buy it but I haven’t seen anything better.
Ambidexterity would seem to be an advantage competition-wise. Why then did evolution leave most of us with one hand that works really well, and the other that gets the role of the dumb assistant? Are there any documented disadvantages to ambidexterity that anyone knows of? Slower reaction time? Less well-developed reflexes when the work is split between two hands? Anyone got anything along these lines?
OK, this topic was brought up for discussion with a group of friends this weekend while we were putting the above mentioned nightcrawlers to good use.(Actually the fish weren’t in a nightcrawler mood so we ended up switching to minnows)
The exact scientific reason for this was not given but a correlation was made between using your left hand to grab crawlers and using your left hand to pick up a groundball. Generally speaking for most right handed people it is easier to use their left hand as their glove hand for baseball/softball. In this role the left hand performs admirably. That instinct thing mentioned earlier comes into play be it stabbing a line drive out of the air or snatching a crawler from the ground.
