Can switching hands release secret creative powers?

When she comes across a Facebook post touting the benefits on non-dominant hand usage, Christine Manby tries her hand at the task

Illustration by Tom Ford

Recently, on a friend’s Facebook page, I happened across a picture of a man showing off his naked torso. He was, to use the parlance, “ripped”. But what was even more impressive was how he claimed to have come by such a striking six-pack. Not by hardcore HIIT training. Not by spending days in the gym. Not by being born with it. He claimed that he – a natural right-hander – had come by those muscles simply by using his left hand when he would normally use his right.

Always on the lookout for a way to stay fit without following any kind of, you know, fitness regime, I was immediately intrigued. Disappointingly, I couldn’t find any fitness programme that backed up the Facebook stranger’s claims that merely swapping your toothbrush from one hand to the other cuts out the need for any old-fashioned weight-bearing workout, but it seems there are plenty of other less visible benefits to switching up which hand you use to do everyday tasks.

In 1988, Lucia Capacchione published The Power Of Your Other Hand, in which she proposed that swapping hands when writing and drawing, in particular, can help you to “channel the deep inner-wisdom of your true self, change negative attitudes about yourself, unlock creativity, uncover hidden artistic abilities and heal your relationships.” The book was updated this year. I ordered it.

Capacchione begins with exercises to unlock your creativity, describing how Herbie Ryman, one-time art director at Disney, demanded that new employees in the animation department draw with their non-dominant hands. It was a diktat that caused much uproar among the young artists who naturally considered themselves much better at drawing with their dominant hands. And wasn’t being able to draw what they’d been employed to do? Ryman had to get Walt Disney himself to weigh in before he could persuade the artists to give it a try. Reluctantly, they agreed. As they’d predicted, the drawings they made were less polished but they discovered upon returning to using their dominant hands that their drawings had now gained a new sense of freedom that made them more suitable for animation than the stiff sketches they had drawn before the exercise.

The reason the switch-up works, according to Capacchione, is that our brains are divided into two hemispheres. One is creative, while the other is more logical. Most commonly, the right hemisphere is described as the creative one. And since the right side of the brain also controls the left side of the body, using the left hand – the non-dominant hand in a culture that prioritises right-handedness such as ours – wakes it up. Ta-daa!

I can understand how Capacchione’s method might help visual artists to be more creative. A clumsy line drawn by a non-dominant hand might have intrinsic value in its shape, style and pressure. But I wasn’t sure how swapping hands would work for a writer. I rarely write with a pen these days. I type with both hands and, in my view, when I am writing creatively, the words have formed long before my hands get involved. I’m also sceptical about all this left-brain / right-brain talk.

I type with both hands and, in my view, when I am writing creatively, the words have formed long before my hands get involved

I have personal experience as to why it’s simplistic to say that the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body and vice versa. As an undergraduate studying experimental psychology, I was often roped in to be a subject in someone else’s research project. A fellow student asked me to take part in an experiment designed to map the motor cortex. Sitting in what looked like a dentist’s chair, I was calm as my friend and his professor attached a clip to measure muscle movement to the forefinger of my right hand before sticking an electrode to the left side of my head. The idea was that a mild electric shock to the left side of my brain would register as a small muscle twitch in my right hand, proving the connection.

It didn’t quite work like that. The electric shock registered as a small muscle twitch in my left hand. I told the professor who was monitoring the test. He said I must have imagined it. He instructed my friend to turn the voltage up. And up. And up. And up. Until my entire left arm flew up in the air.

“I think she is getting a reaction on the left,” my friend confirmed at last, while I lay dazed in the chair.

The professor sighed. “We’ll have to leave her out of our results.”

“Should I be worried?” I asked when I could speak again.

“No,” said the professor. “That kind of ipsilateral (same-side) connection is often seen in monkeys.”

It stands to reason that it would probably often be seen in human beings too, if we were in the habit of letting psychology students wire us up to electrodes.

My left hand answered immediately  “Don’t want to” in a script that immediately brought to mind the mirror writing in the “Red Rum” scene in The Shining

I digress. Whether my left hand is linked to the right side of my brain or not – and it seemed that day that it’s probably not – it’s definitely underutilised. And as a writer, always keen to see things differently, swapping hands seemed like a simple enough way to change perspective. As Capacchione suggests, I got out a note pad and asked questions in writing with my right – my dominant hand – before answering them with the left in an effort to access a different part of my consciousness. The first question I asked was, “Why is it taking you so long to write this week’s effing column?”

My left hand answered immediately “Don’t want to” in a script that immediately brought to mind the mirror writing in the “Red Rum” scene in The Shining. My handwriting is bad enough when I’m using my dominant hand but there was definitely something malevolent about Leftie’s barely legible scrawling. It did look as though those words had come from somewhere else.

I swapped the pen back again. Right hand asked, “Could you just work on it for an hour? Please?”

Left hand. “Take me out for lunch first.”

Right hand. “Seriously? Why? You don’t deserve it.”

Left hand. “Not writing until after.”

My inner child was definitely in charge.

Ten questions later, having failed to persuade that inner child to agree to a 20-minute writing blitz, I went out for lunch, as my left hand had insisted. Down in the town centre, Leftie picked a restaurant I didn’t like the look of: a trendy new burger joint, rather than my usual artisan toast emporium, that smelt of ancient cooking oil that had been recycled once too often.

My right hand – and inner grown-up – recoiled. “I wouldn’t have come here,” right hand scribbled on a napkin, wrinkling her nose as Leftie made a mess of cutting our vegan burger in half.

“Eat it with your fingers,” my right hand sighed.

Leftie made a proper mess of that too. Luckily Leftie had chosen a soya milk shake over my usual green tea, so at least I wasn’t scalded when Leftie spilled it all over my lap. Leftie laughed maniacally at the mess. My right hand paid the bill and marched Leftie straight home, ensuring the kitchen knives were out of reach before sitting down at the laptop to get this sodding column done. At the keyboard, Leftie couldn’t get a word in.

Did writing with my left hand bring me any new insights? Well, it was definitely weird. I did feel an odd freedom when the pen was in my left hand and as a result I went out and did something I would never normally do on a Tuesday. Perhaps I was just play-acting for the purposes of this feature but my brief non-dominant hand experiment did remind me why I don’t normally eat bean burgers for lunch and it certainly gave me an idea for a horror story.