If you’re right-handed and you’ve ever tried to write with your less dominant hand, chances are you’d struggle.
Now, imagine doing that with typing, writing backward, shaking hands, reading backward and even switch-footing in sports.
San Diego resident Jim Houliston taught himself to do that. It’s called Mirror Movement Development (MMD). Houliston says it changed his life, and he wants to show people how it can change theirs too.
Whichever way the grain goes, Houliston cuts against it. He greets with his left hand, types on a reverse keyboard, writes in his journal backward, and reads books using a mirror. He considers himself one of the most ambidextrous people on Earth and calls MMD the third pillar of longevity, next to nutrition and exercise.
But Houliston has not always been equally capable on both sides. Like most of us, he grew up with a dominant side. Years ago, a skateboarding injury left him struggling to perform the way he always had.
He decided to switch things up by switching his feet.
Through a concept called manual transfer learning, Houliston says he trained with his weaker side and consequently strengthened his dominant one. He found he was able to do tricks he wasn’t able to complete before.
Houliston says he wondered what would happen if he developed the skill further, doing everything switched on in mirrored direction. It's a concept he explains in his book, "BIG3MMD: History’s Ambidextrous and the Benefits of Mirror Movement Development." Each page is written in both directions. He also shares information about the history and benefits of MMD on his website, ambilife.org, as well as resources for learning more in one of his workshops.
“You would think we should be doing this for the benefit of memory. Recollection is one thing that majorly increases with this spatial awareness, which you can see majorly with the top athletes in the world,” Houliston said. He points to athletes like LeBron James, Kobe Bryant and Cristiano Ronaldo, who trained themselves to be equally proficient on both sides of their body.
And the skill is not limited to athletics.
“Jimi Hendrix was mixed-handed — dominant lefty. Preferred playing guitar left-handed. But his dad, who gifted him the guitar, had said that left-handed guitar playing was a sign of the devil and he was threatening to take away his guitar. Hendrix was like, ‘You ain't taking my guitar away.’ He learned how to play right-handed,” Houliston said.
Two of Houliston’s favorite historic figures also touted the ability to use both sides. Benjamin Franklin, who operated a printing press, became accustomed to reading language backward for the majority of his day. In 1779 he published a witty essay entitled “A petition of the left hand,” lamenting the underutilized appendage. “From my infancy,” Franklin wrote, “I have been led to consider my sister as being of a more elevated rank.”
Houliston also cites Renaissance artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci. “Also a man of many, many expressions. Da Vinci wrote all of his notebooks in mirrored direction,” Houliston said. The order of the letters and the letter orientation were reversed.
Ayse Saygin, professor at UC San Diego in cognitive and neurosciences, said any kind of brain use is not a bad idea. She said this may be a case of “neurons that fire together, wire together,” also known as Hebbian Theory.
Saygin recently studied the way the brain is constantly in loop between hemispheres visually and spatially, called hemispheric lateralization. An oversize prosthetic hand was used to grasp objects. “We were testing touch perception, and the representation of the hand became changed within 15 minutes,” Saygin said.
She said left-handed people generally have a bigger corpus callosum, a bundle of nerve fibers bridging the brain’s hemispheres, “because they're probably doing a lot more manual tasks or flipping tasks and using both sides of the brain to deal with the world.”
“So many things that, to me, have felt incredible, that I know people want to feel that, too. That's what I want them to experience. That’s why they should practice this,” Houliston said, noting that MMD is a cost-, drug- and pain-free way to create body symmetry.
“Practice MMD, wherever you are,” Houliston said.
