Can You Train Yourself to Become Ambidexterous?

Preference for using one hand over the other is both genetic and learned during childhood -- but can we change that later in life? Learn about how handedness and ambidexterity work in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio, Hey
brain Stuff Lauren Bogelbaum. Here, the world is made up
of about right handed people and ten percent left handed people.
Folks who are truly ambidexterous those who use their right
and left hand equally well make up a negligible sliver
of the population. But is ambidexterity inherited or learned? And

(00:27):
if learned, can it be learned as an adult? We
spoke by email with Dr Sebastian Aucklenberg, a professor of
psychology at Rural University in Bochum, Germany. He said a
little bit of both. Handedness is determined by about twenty
percent genetic factors and non genetic factors like environmental influences.

(00:48):
It clearly runs in families, so it is somewhat inherited,
but learning might also affect it. I think ambidexterity for
a specific task like hitting a tennis ball with a racket,
is possible, but full ambodexterity for all tasks is unlikely. Handedness,
being the skill and comfort of person feels using one
hand or the other, is considered a complex genetic trait,

(01:11):
and since genes are involved, hand preference develops before a
person is even born, But like other complex traits, handedness,
including ambedoxterity, doesn't have a simple pattern of inheritance. Yes,
there is a greater chance that children of left handed
parents will also be left handed than children of rights,
but remember the chance of being a lefty is just

(01:32):
ten percent overall, so most children of lefties are still
right handed, and identical twins are more likely than non
identical twins to both be either right or left handed,
but many of both types do have opposite hand preferences.
And that's before we even talk about whether a child's
handedness is allowed to develop naturally or whether parents and

(01:53):
teachers interfere. Hand dominance typically develops around age three and
is fully developed by age four to five, but it
can be influenced by insisting a child uses their other
hand or by happenstance. For example, when he was four
years old, former Major League baseball pitcher Billy Wagner broke
his right elbow and spent the summer in a cast.

(02:16):
In his memoir, Wagner vividly recalls being a natural righty
at the time and already mad for baseball, but for
the next six weeks he threw only left handed. When
the cast came off, he was in for a surprise
when he tried throwing with his right The ball went nowhere.
Had lost not just strength but coordination for throwing with
his right arm and gained it in his left. Wagner wrote,

(02:40):
I was a natural righty then and still am. I
do everything right handed, eat hold tools, right to start
the lawnmower, everything except pitch. Wagner wouldn't be considered ambidextrous,
though he certainly managed to have an incredibly successful career
working with his non dominant hand. Base all is full
of players who switch hit, meaning they hit equally well

(03:03):
from either the left or right side and are comfortable
facing left or right handed pitchers. Some like Hall of
famers Eddie Murray, Mickey Mantle, and Chipper Jones, were very successful,
but they, like Wagner, weren't truly ambidexterous, which is something
that's very difficult to do. But why. Aucklenburg said, handedness

(03:25):
is something that is generated in the brain, not the hands.
As such, the half of the brain contralateral to the
hand is better in controlling fine motor movements. For example,
the left brain hemisphere in right handers. The strength of
this preference varies between individuals. Some people have a very
strong preference for one hand and resulting from that greater

(03:46):
issue in using the other for specific tasks. So it's
the brain that sets the barrier. But if the brain
sets the barrier, the brain can also remove it. Take
the case of Billy McLaughlin. McLoughlin is an award winning
guitarist known for a unique style of play, placing both
hands on the fretboard. He was originally predominantly a right

(04:09):
handed guitar player, but in the late nineteen nineties, but
despite having a record at number seven on the Billboard Charts,
he was struggling with control problems. He was missing notes
when he played, and experienced muscle spasms to the point
that he was unable to perform. Finally, in two thousand one,
McLoughlin was diagnosed with vocal dystonia, a movement disorder causing

(04:29):
muscles to contract involuntarily. Though advised to find another career,
McLoughlin opted to teach himself to play left handed, and
he succeeded. So this begs the question, can we teach
ourselves to become ambidextrous as adults. A two thousand seven
study found that as we age, we actually become more

(04:50):
ambidextrous without even trying, in part because the hand that
we use more loses its dominance. The study was small.
It included sixty participants, all wrongly right handed according to
the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory. The participants completed various computerized dexterity tests,
which included line tracing and aiming task and tapping. The

(05:12):
youngest group, average age twenty five years, performed all the
skills proficiently using their right hand. The middle aged participants,
average age fifty years, performed well using either hand on
the aiming task, while the two oldest groups, average ages
seventy and eighty years, performed just as well using either
hand on all tasks except one. However, overall performance appeared

(05:36):
to decline with increasing age, especially for the participants dominant
right hand, leading researchers to believe that quote we become
more ambidexterous as we get older because our dominant hand
loses its superior dexterity and becomes more like our weaker hand.
Some people have wondered whether attempting to become ambidexterous could

(05:56):
strengthen the brain and potentially slow or fight the effect
of aging or dementia. Aucklandberg said that's a myth. While
it is true in general that brain training is a
good idea when aging, research has shown that what gets
strengthened is what is trained. So if I trained to
write with my non dominant hand, this would affect the
motor brain areas of the contralateral half of the brain,

(06:20):
but not the areas involved in memory. Thus a specific
memory training would make more sense in aging and dementia.
Today's episode was written by Patty Resmusin and produced by
Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of other topics,
visit how stuff works dot com. Brain Stuff is production
of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio,

(06:42):
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
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