What are the effects of switching from left handedness to right handedness?

Question

Hello. I was born left handed, however at the age of four, I switched to being right handed. As a result, I am now cross-dominant: right handed, left eyed and left eared. I am now 16 years old and have decided to start writing left handed again. I am just wondering, what are the effects of switching handedness on the brain e.g. does switching handedness affect laterality of the brain? Also will correcting my handedness reverse any changes that may have occurred as a result of changing handedness or will efforts to change handedness now be in vain? I'm not interested in opinions or efforts to console without evidence. References to scientific studies would be very much appreciated and personal experiences equally so.

Here is some extra information about me which I am not sure is relevant but I thought may be of interest from my own personal research:

- I was not forced to switch handedness, rather I noticed that all my other classmates at the time were writing right handed and thought that I thus must have been writing 'incorrectly'
- I have dust allergies and hayfever (I remember this was linked to anomalous cerebral dominance)
- I have OCD (Checking and counting rituals. Obtrusive thoughts about knives and death whereby I worry that I might have a moment of sudden total insanity where I might cut myself. 'Virtual reality' thinking - belief that I am being watched by another dimension. Muttering religious phrases to calm myself down even though I do not belong to a religion etc.)
- I have anxiety-related stuttering (as in I don't stutter unless I feel nervous), this can occasionally get to the point where I even stutter talking to my sister. Otherwise I can be very eloquent.
- I do not believe I have any learning difficulties. I have sometimes had suspicions that I have mild dyslexia but nothing too untoward that it has affected my learning, so in the conventional sense it doesn't really pose as a 'difficulty' as such.

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

There aren't really any effects, besides that you'll be one of the few people who have learned to write with both hands. The brain's laterality won't change - really, with enough practice and patience, anyone can learn to do anything with either hand, but for most people, they'll simply still prefer using the dominant limb. There are lots of examples of this happening - for instance, fingering on most musical instruments is either done with the left hand or both hands - yet like the rest of the population, the majority of musicians are right handed, but they are still able to develop an unusual level of fine motor control in the left hand. Likewise, people who have lost the use of their dominant limb (due to injury, amputation, a stroke, etc.) are still eventually able to learn to do everything with the functional, non-dominant limb.



In terms of the brain itself, it's not clear what effect handedness has (if any) on the rest of the brain's organization. It doesn't even correlate all that that well to other "dominant" functions, like eye preference or foot preference. It's well-established that the brain is asymmetric in terms of its organization, with the left brain geared more towards calculation and more concrete thought and the right more towards interpretation and abstraction, but that doesn't change depending depending on handedness (i.e. this is the case for everyone, regardless of hand). In fact, even speech lateralization, the best-studied function that does seem to correlate with handedness, is not absolute. The majority of right-handed people control speech primarily with the left hemisphere - it would logically seem that the reverse would be true for left-handed people, but it's not - most left-handed people still control speech predominantly with the left hemisphere, and it seems that the majority of the remainder show shared control by both hemispheres (it's hard to study this phenomenon without using an invasive test, like the Wada test, or a very expensive one, like fMRI, so most of this data is estimated from a small number of subjects).



Approaching dominance from the other direction doesn't work that well either, in terms of actual evidence. One popular psychological belief is that left-handed people are more creative because their right brain is "dominant," or more developed, but there isn't much solid evidence for that either. Instead, it seems to be more that the hemispheres just split the different responsibilities, but that you can't have one bossing the other around because both are equally important to accomplishing the task.



So, that was a really long-winded answer, but I guess the main point is, it doesn't matter. You're not going to scramble your brain in some horrible way if you want to learn to do more things with your left hand instead of the right, or vice versa.

Answer 2

What an excellent answer above. Don't be too worried (OK you probably still will be, but not forever) about your odd thoughts. Nearly everyone in the world has such 'unusual' thoughts at times that they could think of themselves as going round the bend if they worried about it too much.

For evidence try getting the real truth from people who like nearly all of us rarely speak it about such a subject. Who would want to admit it?

You're obviously feeling nervous and a bit exposed to the dangers of the world. That again is perfectly normal and any 16 year old or anyone else who doesn't have feelings like that at times is a superman immortal from a comic book or a sci-fi film.

We've all been 16 who are now past that and well past 16 it is good to be.

It's a rotten age for feeling insecure and unpopular, not having the same assets that others have, being generally no good at anything compared to the ideals of the heroic warriors and sports and film personalities that give us a false idea of what is a reasonable expectation for our own achievements.

However you do have some notable advantages over some other people.

You have more use of your hands than I do and many other people do.

You obviously have a sensitivity and an awareness that let you see and feel more than those without such good development.

That's a two-edged sword however and can be difficult to deal with.

Any psychiatrist will tell you that some people are only sane because they are too unaware of what is happening to them and their lives for it to matter to them or too thick to understand it.

That fine line between genius and insanity is a long way from those people.

Intelligence has it's drawbacks in the real world we share with other people.

Toughness is the solution, and it takes a while to develop. Some never get it.

One of my daughters has very bad hay fever but she gets involved in a lot of things. She teaches, is the local traditional dance champion, and went to Camp America to teach American youngsters about the great outdoors...navigating, kayaking, climbing, archery....and because of the appalling standards of knowledge she found in those children she set up an evening school as well.

An American on here yesterday actually asked "Which State is Hong Kong in?"

She went sea kayaking in the Cook Islands in the South Pacific for a month and climbed Sydney Harbour bridge in a thunderstorm in an organised group, backpacked around Australia alone and crossed the central desert. Hay fever didn't stop her.

Another daughter is in a wheel chair after a spinal injury and three years in Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Buckinghamshire, a specialist spinal injuries unit and one of the best in the world..

She plays wheelchair basketbsall in a national league team and goes cycle camping in mountains...Snowdonia and Scotland.....using a hand cycle and sets up the tent herself which she carries in a trailer behind the bike which also carries a collapsable wheelchair, clothing, food and stove etc, and she has a full time job in computer programming.

Our third daughter was treated for eight years for epilepsy which was falsely diagnosed and suffered miserably from the 'profressional' help she had. The real problem eventually got sorted.

She now has a fine and successfull family.

I went away to care for my sick Mother for five weeks and the local newspaper reported me missing, presumed dead by suicide, such were the problems we had and well known in a small community.

I returned to find my bank account had been placed in the archives.

I had been using another account in the town I come from. The police had my mother's number but said it didn't exist as they had tried several times to phone her with the same 'no such number' response.

The number was perfectly correct.

You couldn't believe some of what this world does to people.

We live still and (almost) prosper, as most do and laugh at the world.

Thousands more people with physical or emotional problems large and small lead happy lives and full ones.

So be kind to yourself and laugh off worry. Every little helps.

For evidence...see the world around you. It's a great place in spite of the set-backs.

When I joined the Army my school mates laughed their guts out and said I'd be dead in a week....old beanpole boffin in the Army?

Hahahahahahaha......

Three months later six sports medals including a Nijmegan Cross got me some changed looks and a few pints in the local.

Be happy. It works.

Answer 3

Do you suffer from panic and anxiety attacks? If so you are not alone, it is said that just over 35% of the population will suffer at some point in their life. I suffered for 10 long years, until I finally found the answers I needed to be able to cure myself. Read here https://tr.im/dkKlC

So, yes, anxiety is treatable and no matter how many false dawns you've had so far, you don't have to just live with it

Answer 4

I would start using both or switch back to your left, whichever makes you most comfortable. It won't cause any negative effects