SIDE EFFECTS

If you take a person who is right-handed and make him switch to writing with his left hand, you run the risk of creating dyslexia—dyslexics of the world untie! The brain just doesn’t have that kind of elasticity; it specializes, side to side, lobe to lobe, region to region. Different parts are in charge of different functions, just like some of us write code, or sell coffee, or clean the litter box.

Creative functions are often mapped to be right-brained functions. Oh and by the way, whichever side of your brain is dominant, it drives the opposite hand, like we were all cross-wired when God created Adam. My question is, say you take a left-handed person, someone with a theoretical greater aptitude for painting, drawing, writing—WRITING. Say you take left-handed writer, a person dominated by creative function, working from his right brain and accustomed to using his left hand to imagine his art AND THEN YOU GIVE HIM A KEYBOARD on which to write. You invoke use of both hands! What then happens to cognitive function? There’s got to be some effect. If it’s important enough not to change writing hands to preserve mental stability, what does sudden two-handed involvement create? How does it change use of brain sidedness? And what effect does that have on the writing?

Certainly this would not work for a person with a severed corpus callosum—the connection of the two hemispheres of the brain. Both sides must think together in order to tell the fingers how to move. Or does it? What do I not know?

The keyboard went through 26 variations (one for each letter of the alphabet) before it standardized at the QWERTY (your upper left alphabet keys). It had to be redesigned so all the letter arms wouldn’t stick together on the old manuals when they moved up to strike the ribbon. Makes me wonder, though, about the bias of the consonants and vowels, those assigned to the left. How do we use those in the language today differently perhaps from the time before the emergence of typewritten text?

Here’s the thing. Left-handedness, the left, has long been considered bad. Of course the social bias has begun to lift in modern times, but it’s still more difficult to find left-handed scissors. B. F. Skinner teaches us that behavior can be learned by either positive or negative reinforcement. If long-term, culturally ingrained behavior has given us a bias against the left for centuries, how could we believe we created and use an alphabet-scrambled keyboard unbiasedly?

I know there are writers who’d swear by their Underwood, or their Dell, but how do you scratch your head in the middle of writing or enjoy a cup of hot beverage? You have to take your hand off your art to think or to sip. How can this be productive? Progressive?

Musicians are shaking their heads at my questions. How many instruments do you play one-handedly? The kazoo? Musicians always have to play both-handedly, compose that way too. So this is a dumb debate. But I still wonder how different music would be if, say, a piano keyboard were arranged backwardly, descending notes left to right. How much of our language has to do with its written and read form left to right? How is our culture affected? How would we be different if we wrote English from right to left? Does opposing primary brain-sidedness in a culture cause conflict? Is war a side effect?