I write with my right hand. I don't recall a time when I found it difficult, nor that I was forced to. However, as a kid I do remember practising with both hands. I figured there seemed no logical reason why I could only write with one hand so I tried to write with both. What I discovered was that trying to write a legible sentence, scanning left to right, but writing with my left hand was actually quite difficult and needed a certain amount of concentration to get it to look good. However, writing mirror-image sentences, from right to left, was really easy! So my right hand can write left-to-right and my left hand can write right-to-left. I found this quite satisfying as it also showed a certain symmetry in the brain. I thought everybody could do this - but apparently not!

Try it. Whichever is your dominant hand, try writing with the other hand. Then see if writing mirror-image is actually easier with your other hand than trying to write legibly. Mirror writing will look perfectly normal if the page is held up to a mirror and you look at its reflection. There are famous examples of mirror writing, the most famous being Leonardo da Vinci. As the writing looks perfectly normal in a mirror I figure he did the same thing - wrote it with his non-dominant hand. There is no need for clever devices to achieve the effect.

However,"Research suggests that the ability to do mirror writing is probably inherited and caused by atypical language organization in the brain. It is also hypothesized to be a X-linked dominant condition. It is not known how many people in the population inherit the ability of mirror writing (an Australian researcher estimates the proportion to be 1 in 6500). Half of the children of people with the ability inherit it. There are more left-handed mirror writers than right-handed ones, probably because left-handed people tend to have atypical language centers in their brain. 15% of left-handed people have the language centres in both halves of their brain. The cerebral cortex (thin layer of dense brain cells covering the whole brain) and motor homunculus (relates to voluntary movement) are affected by this causing them to be able to read and write backwards quite naturally."

This also raises the possibility that if a child starts to write in mirror-text then the simplest thing is just to put the pen in their other hand and see if they write correctly. I mean, we have enough tyrranies in the world, strikes me as stupid to have a left or right-handed bias. Vive la difference!

To comment on this article Register for Free.
To post your own articles and earn money Join Here.