Ambidexterity is the state of being equally adept in the use of both the right and left hand. Being born ambidextrous is extremely rare; thus, most people who call themselves ambidextrous have trained themselves to be (called Penwald ambidextrous). Ambidexterity can confer significant advantages with respect to many disciplines involving the use of fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination, such as playing musical instruments and competing in certain sports (such as baseball). In fact, the ancient Greeks encouraged and actively promoted ambidexterity, hoping to improve the hand eye coordination of their soldiers on the battlefield.

In this day and age, ambidexterity is significantly more common in people who were born left-handed, who became adept at using their non-dominant hand during childhood in an effort to adapt to a largely right-handed world. While schools no longer force left-handed children to write with their non-dominant hand, lefties are still a small minority in our right-hand dominated world. Many everyday appliances- such as can openers, scissor, guitar, golf clubs, desks, etc.-are asymmetrical and designed for the ninety percent of the population that is right-hand dominant. Thus, lefties are essentially forced to become at least partially cross-dominant in order to adapt to an unaccommodating right-handed world.

Ambidexterity has long been associated with intellectual and artistic prowess: Harry Houdini; Leonardo da Vinci; Robert Baden-Powell; ¬Benjamin Franklin; Albert Einstein and Johnny Wilkinson were (or are) all ambidextrous, defined as being able to use both hands with equal ¬facility. However, some recent studies cast a potential pitfall of ambidexterity; namely that “mixed-handed” ¬children are twice as likely to ¬suffer from ¬attention problems at school as right-handers and are also more likely to suffer from autism and dyslexia. Moreover, while many people who are born ambidextrous develop more sophisticated motor skills than their left and right-handed counterparts, it can also have the opposite effect on children, sometimes delaying the development of fine motor skills in early childhood.

That being said, I would do anything to be able to simultaneously write Greek with my left hand and Latin with my right hand (like James Garfield) or painted with both of my hands like Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci…..

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