Why do we naturally favour one hand over the other?
In: Biology
Because you usually don’t alternate between the hands.
You just use the one you are used to using.
The one you use gets more practice, and it then becomes your dominant hand.
Your dominant hand is better because it gets used more, because it’s better, and so on.
Do you mean why do people have a dominant hand?
People learn how to write etc from their parents, so whichever hand they use will likely be the one you use. It takes hundreds of times of doing an action to wire your brain to be able to master the action, but you can practice switching hands to get more equal skill for both hands. Most people just don’t do this, probably because I imagine it takes longer to develop the skill.
Growing up using just one hand for mastering those tasks creates neural pathways and doing the task repeatedly strengthens those pathways, so when you suddenly try to use the other hand for the same task, your brain doesn’t have the same development of those specific neural pathways, causing one hand to be more dominant.
From what I know, I could def be wrong,
No one really knows, just genetics?
It is a mixture of nature and nurture.
Evolution has caused the left hand side of the brain (which controls the hand) to control language and speech in most (but not all) people. It is thought that two potential alleles (part of genes) control hand dominance. If you have a D-allele (which the majority do) then you will very likely be right handed. If you have a c-allele then you have a 50/50 chance of being right or left handed. Thus a random person is more likely to be right handed – about 85% of the world’s population.
However, as fine motor skills are a learned skill it is quite possible to teach someone to have a dominant hand, at least if you do so at an early age. Likewise if you suffer an injury to your dominant hand, it is quite possible to either become more ambidextrous switch dominant hand. It is not a genetic instruction written in stone.
These practice based answers are kind of right, but there’s a biological aspect too. Each of your arms is controlled by the opposite half of your brain -left arm by the right brain and right arm by the left brain. While myths about dominant brain halves are rampant, the language center of the brain happens to be in the left side, which would explain why right-handed-dominant genes would spread and dominate with the Advent of written language.
This makes me wonder about eye dominance as well. Used for things like shooting or looking through a scope. I was born a righty until I started pitching and my dad switched me to left-handed pitching believing that lefties are harder for a right handed batter to deal with. Took many months of practice to switch, but I became ambidextrous with everything in life after that training. I can even write, paint, and play guitar left or right handed. I am still right eye dominant though. My brother is a lefty and is left eye dominant so he always had to have a pump action shotgun when we would bird hunt as kids so shells didn’t eject in his face. Makes me wonder if that could have been a trainable situation too. Anyways, this rant I just had has me curious as to if someone’s eye dominance can be changed like my hand dominance was at a young age.
My father is left-handed, but was forced to use his right hand in school. This was in the US 1950’s. He can use both to write, play baseball, etc.
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