what is the benefit of having a dominant hand/leg as compared to having equally skilled limbs?
In: Biology
I trained myself to use a computer mouse (for work) on both sides and it instantly transfered to most other skills. For instance I’m equally proficient at shooting a rifle on both sides now. I can write almost as good and as quickly with my non-dominant side. The only thing I can’t do as well is throw a ball. It wasn’t thousands of hours to train either, a couple of hundred at the most.
generally both hands are good at different things, its not that one hand is just plain better. usually you need both hands to do a task well.
The main benefit would be not having to take the time to decide which side to use. If both sides were equally dominant, time would be wasted, and that could result in death.
I’m ambidextrous and I never think about which hand I use. For examle, when I assist surgeries, I chose whichever is more convenient for the head surgeon. It doesn’t matter in the slightest which instrument I hold in which hand.
It also doesn’t matter the slightest bit which hand I use for shooting a bow, for example.
But since we had to choose one hand to learn to write with at school (I chose right because most people were right-handed and I wanted to fit in), I write faster with my right hand. It’s equally readable, though left may be a little more beautiful because I write slower with left. But at the end of the day, my right hand writes mich more efficiently because it’s faster.
So I guess when you learn a new skill it matters what hand you use to learn this skill, especially when it comes to how fast you can perform this skill. And I think evolutionary speaking/in nature, speed is incredibly important, for example in hunting.
Theoretically speaking it should take more time to learn a new skill with both hands, but I’ve personally never experienced this (that I know of).
Looks like this video will help explain it to you pretty well ^^
My sister i oaw is ambidextrous. She says that she really doesn’t think much about it. If the pen is closer to her left, she wrotes with the left, and vice versa.
She decides which hand/leg to use, based on convenience.
A quote from her: “I’m equally clumsy with both.”
As a lefty who was pushed to stop being a lefty I can’t do any sports. When we were hunter gatherers a left on one side and a right on the other would kill the prey faster.
Also you other hand is really getting good at holding and supporting. Often they work in tandem. Both takes practice.
Something nobody else seems to have pointed out is that the more dextrous side, in almost all cases, is the same side that your brain’s language processing happens on. (That means left handed people more frequently have their brain’s language centers flipped around, too)
It’s theorized that this is needed for the extremely fine motor control required to produce speech, and your hand also being more accurate on that side is basically an “unintended” side effect.
It’s *not* just training/habituation as some people have tried arguing, because we know that left-handed people forced to conform to right-handed training perform more poorly than when allowed to use their dominant hand. If it were entirely habituated, left handedness basically wouldn’t exist, because every child is taught to use its right hand to write first. (Or, if you want to argue that the difference is settled at a younger age, then the right/left distinction would be basically random)
~~Also, since ambidextrous people exist, we *know* the mutation for ambidextrosity is out there in the gene pool. So the fact that most people are still right-handed means that being ambidextrous simply isn’t enough of an advantage. (Or possibly a disadvantage)~~
Edit: Unsure about the last paragraph, probably best ignored.
Instead of thinking of it as if being good at both hands is the default, and asking why one hand is worse, it helps to think of it as if being BAD at both hands is the default, and then asking why it’s good enough to be good at just one hand.
The quality of human hand dexterity is *amazing* and takes *work* and processing power. The difference between having zero good hands and one is enormous. The difference between having one good hand and having two good hands is less so. You get less “bang for your buck” putting the same effort into having a second good hand than you got for having at least one good hand. One good hand plus one merely okay hand seems to be a “good enough” solution.
I think the more interesting ELI5 question is, if our arms have mirrored symmetry, then why is picking the right hand to be the one all that effort goes into so much more common than picking the left?
The existence of left-handed people proves it’s not really any detriment to be left-handed (except culturally because right-handedness is such a common assumption when making things).
Is it nature, or nurture, that makes most of humanity right-handed? I’d have assumed nurture, except that doesn’t explain why so many different cultures became right-hand dominant independently before they contacted each other.
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