Because you’ve read my columns for years, you’ve read about my fountain pen addiction, right? Chief among my favourites are a red Giuliano Mazzuoli Ducati Officina End Mill Tempi that my wife and daughter got me for a birthday, and my current everyday carry – an orange Visconti Rembrandt I bought in Florence, where they’re made. It’s currently filled with a gorgeous ink by Diamine called Skull and Roses.
Writing is, obviously, something you do with your hands. Let me tell you about hands. As well as doing stuff like writing, what we use our hands for is a “shorthand” for how our brains are wired. Did you know that your right hand is directed by the left hemisphere of your brain, while the right hemisphere looks after the left?
Just to make it even weirder, each hemisphere is in charge of the opposite side’s sensory input. That means that what you see via the left side of the back of both of your eyes is processed first by the visual centre at the back of your right hemisphere. The right visual field goes first to the left visual cortex.
If you think that’s crazy, imagine what might happen if something happens to one of your visual cortices, say, in the right hemisphere. You’ll still “see” things that fall on the left visual field of each eye, but it doesn’t have anywhere to go, and you may not even know! This hemispatial neglect gives rise to unusual things, such as someone eating only the things they see on the left side of their plate (which goes to the right visual field).
Back to hands. The majority of us in the West are right-handed – 90%, in fact. That means the remaining 1 in 10 are left-handed. Handedness is associated with “laterality”, or the preference most of us show for doing things with one side of our bodies because we have a dominance of the opposite-sided hemisphere. A total of 95% of right-handers, like me, have lateralised language in our left hemispheres. That means the part of our brains that understands what other people are saying, and that produces what we say back, is located in our left hemisphere.
My wife is left-handed, and a minority in a variety of other ways: she is red-headed and lactose intolerant. I don’t know for certain which side of her brain organises language, but statistically, there’s an eight in 10 chance it’s her right hemisphere – the opposite of what we usually find in right-handers, though it’s not as strongly concentrated.
She can also mirror-write. She can write backwards so you have to read it in a mirror. It’s not the reason we married, but it’s pretty cool.
A very small number of folk can use both hands. Ambidexterity – being able to use either hand for most things – is so rare (less than 1%) that it’s hard to get a good sense of how common it is. About 4% of people are mixed-handed, which means they have a preference for using different hands for different tasks. Richard Hadlee, one of the greatest cricketers of all time, bowled right-handed but was a left-hander with the bat.
Let’s return to using our hands to write. As I look up at the vista of Apple symbols staring back as I teach, I sigh inwardly. I suspect that some students are multitasking – alternating typing out notes with cat videos as I lecture – and I know they’re not processing the lecture as effectively, not encoding important information as effectively, and won’t remember it as effectively, compared to whipping out a pen and writing it down.
The process of creating the word “ambilaterality” with a pen is much more cognitively demanding, and much more effective than pressing the keys that represent the letters in the word.
Go get yourself a pen. And I don’t receive any money if you buy a Rembrandt.
