When Righties Turn Lefties (and Vice Versa)
The Three Main Benefits of Deconstructing Habit
“Oh, it’s you,” said Darwin from IT. And then we had a big laugh.
Earlier that year, thanks to some nagging wrist pain, I had switched my computer mouse settings from my dominant right hand to my non-dominant left hand. Doing so flips the button configurations as well, meaning the left-click button you would normally use to select and drag is now the right-click context menu button.
Learning to become “mouse ambidextrous” meant undoing all those habituated movements and reconstructing them for my ungainly left hand. It was a super fun brain exercise for me but a huge pain for people like Darwin from IT who had to, on occasion, gain remote access to my system to fix a bug. (I always offered to switch the settings back for him, but despite the many grunts of frustration he said he enjoyed the mental challenge of it, too.)
Deconstructing physical habits is not easy. Your body and brain have spent considerable time and energy turning novel actions into automatic behaviors that can be accomplished outside of conscious awareness (more on that phenomenon next week). However, the benefits of doing so extend beyond the physiological advantages like injury prevention and balanced muscle use. Here we go!
It makes you a better teacher. “As you get better and better at what you do, your ability to communicate your understanding or to help others learn that skill often gets worse and worse,” says cognitive scientist Sian Beilock. Tacit knowledge is hard to explain unless you’re accustomed to doing so, and I’d argue that deconstructing physical knowhow is its own brand of hard.
Relearning how to use my non-dominant hand required me to break down every micro-movement. For example, the unconscious act of clicking and dragging the mouse to select multiple files became an awkward and lengthier task of coaching my left hand until it was committed to muscle memory.
It’s good for your brain and body. Bilateral transfer, or the act of transferring motor skills from its trained limb to its untrained counterpart, can stimulate and challenge your brain in new ways, promoting cognitive development, improving neural connectivity, and fostering overall coordination and adaptability.
Challenging your non-dominant limb to do the work that its other half was doing increases connectivity between the brain's hemispheres. As you learn and perform a task with one hand, the brain creates neural pathways and connections. This learning can transfer or generalize to the opposite side of the brain, promoting greater communication and coordination between the two sides.
It creates a virtuous cycle. Giving your awkward, untrained limbs a chance to shine is uncomfortable. We’ve all had the experience of injuring our dominant hand and having to lather shampoo into our hair using only our non-dominant hand. But the more accustomed you are to practicing skills with both sides of the body, the faster you become at acquiring and refining other motor skills.
When you relearn the mechanics of an activity, you can rebuild it in a way that’s stronger. Adam Grant discusses this phenomenon in his chapter “Getting Unstuck” in Hidden Potential. The path from frustration to competence to confidence is not a comfortable one, but being able to seek out and live with discomfort is one of the most impactful character skills one can develop.
Deconstructing habituated knowledge, either for oneself or one’s audience, has numerous benefits. It’s awkward and less-efficient at first, and certainly takes time to develop, but if those drawbacks are livable, then by all means: go forth and start brushing your teeth with your non-dominant hand.
