Can you become left handed

Individuals with the C gene will have a 50 percent chance of being right-handed and a 50 percent chance of being left-handed. These theories of hand preference causation are intriguing because they can account for the fact that the side of hand preference of individuals with the C gene most left-handers and some right-handers can be influenced by external cultural and societal pressures, a phenomenon that researchers have documented. These theories can also explain the presence of right-handed children in families with left-handed parents and the presence of left-handed children in families with right-handed parents.

If the familial genetic pool contains C genes, then hand preference becomes amenable to chance influences, including the pressures of familial training and other environmental interventions that favor the use of one hand over the other.

The proposed genetic locus that determines hand preference contains an allele from each parent, and the various possible genetic combinations are DD individuals who are strongly right-handed, DC individuals who are also mostly right-handed, and CC individuals who are either right-handed or left-handed. These genetic combinations leave us with an overwhelming majority of human right-handers and a small, but persistently occurring, minority of left-handers.

Already a subscriber? They could only be deciphered by holding the paper up to a mirror and reading from the reflection. Practice your own backwards writing with your left hand -- you might be surprised at how easy you find it.

Remember to write from right to left, "thumb to pinky" on your left hand. You will also need to write the letters backwards for true backwards writing! Do some drawing. Although the goal is to learn how to write with your left hand, you can also benefit from drawing with your left hand. This will give you valuable practice in controlling your left hand, while also building strength.

Then progress onto sketching items you see around you, like trees, lamps, and chairs, then if you're feeling particularly confident, people and animals. Drawing upside down known as inverted drawing using your left hand is another great exercise you can try.

This will not only improve your writing skills, but it is also a great brain-training exercise which will open you up to more creative thinking! This enabled them to switch from one hand to the other while drawing or painting if their hands got tired or they needed to work at a particular angle. Landseer was also famous for being to draw with both hands simultaneously. Have patience. As mentioned above, learning how to write with your left hand is a process that will take time and dedication.

You will need to be patient with yourself and prevent yourself from giving up too easily. Remember that it took you years to master writing with your right hand as a child and even though it shouldn't take you quite this long to write with your left as some of the skills are transferable the learning process will take time.

Don't worry about speed initially; just keep practicing with as much control and accuracy as you can, and you will become faster and more confident with time. Keep reminding yourself of what an impressive and useful skill it will be when you can write with your left hand. Staying motivated is the biggest challenge you'll face as you work towards becoming left-handed.

Part 2. Do everything with your left hand. Skill automatically transferred from your right hand to your left hand somewhat in all those previous years of your life, so it won't be extremely hard to start doing things with your left hand at first. Since skill also automatically transfers from one task to another task somewhat, you will gain the skill faster to do a specific task with your left hand if you do all tasks with your left hand than if you do just that task with your left hand.

Be patient. Some people say the older you are, the harder it is to change to left-handedness but that's misleading. The illusion that changing handedness is easier at a younger age comes from the fact that the higher the skill you have with your right hand, the lower the patience you have for a given amount of skill in your left hand. In fact, the older you are, the shorter it takes for your left hand to gain a given absolute amount of skill. The easiest, but most important thing you can do to strengthen your left hand is to use it to complete all of the actions and activities you would normally do with your right hand.

You can also comb your hair, pick up your coffee cup, butter your bread and open doors with your left hand, among many other daily activities. Also try throwing darts in a safe environment , playing pool, or throwing and catching a softball with your left hand If you're finding it hard to remember, and keep using your right hand accidentally, try bandaging the fingers of your right hand together. This will prevent you from being able to use it and force you to use your left hand instead.

Lift weights with your left hand. One of the best ways to strengthen your left arm and hand, and correct any strength imbalances between your dominant and non-dominant sides, is to lift weights. Hold a dumbbell in your left hand and do exercises such as bicep curls , kickbacks , hammer curls and dumbbell presses. Start with a low weight, then move up to heavier weights as your strength improves. Learn how to juggle.

Learning how to juggle using three and then four balls is a great way to strengthen your left hand and arm, while also providing you with an impressive party trick! Practice bouncing balls. One great exercise for improving ambidexterity and strengthening your non-dominant hand is to take two table tennis rackets and two balls and to bounce them simultaneously with both hands. Once you master this, you can progress to using smaller rackets, or even wide-ended hammers.

In addition to improving your left-hand usage, this is a fantastic whole brain exercise! Pick up a musical instrument. Many people who play musical instruments which require the use of both hands are already somewhat ambidextrous. As a result, picking up a musical instrument -- such as the piano or flute -- and practicing everyday will help you to strengthen your left hand. Go swimming. Swimming is another ambidextrous activity which has been proven to help with balancing the brain hemispheres, allowing you to use you non-dominant hand more fluidly.

Hit the swimming pool and do a few lengths to strengthen the left side of your body and get a great cardio workout at the same time! Wash dishes with your left hand. Washing Dishes regularly with your left hand is a safe and simple method to improve on the dexterity of your non-dominant hand. This can be both fun and useful in the long run, apart from cleaning the dishes. Start doing finer motor tasks such as mirror writing, playing pool, cutting cords out of shrimp, and throwing darts with your non-dominant hand now that you practiced it up with simple tasks.

Doing that will also practice up the general skill of automatically transferring skill from an action to its mirror image so that the next task you start doing with your left hand that you used to do with your right hand, you will be a tiny bit more skilled at doing it with your left hand when you first start than you would have been if you had never done it with either hand before.

It may take many years for your left hand to catch up to the skill of your right hand but probably less than 2 months for your left hand to become very nearly as skilled as the right hand. Once your left hand becomes skilled enough to do the job easily, there's no need to be impatient about your left hand becoming more skilled just because your right hand is even more skilled.

You can skip the steps if you want to hurry up and become ambidextrous and can handle the boredom of doing them slowly at first. Remember to use your left hand at all times. Using your dominant right hand has become so ingrained in your brain that you will use it automatically, without thinking. For women, however, handedness made no difference. It doesn't mean you're artsy. Southpaws also have a reputation for being introverted and artsy, says Grimshaw.

They did, however, find that mixed-handers were more introverted. It's linked to a higher risk of breast cancer. Left-handedness seems to be associated with some physical health issues. In a study published in the British Journal of Cancer, researchers found that left-handers had a higher risk of breast cancer than right-handers, especially for cancer that occurred after menopause.

While the two seem completely unrelated, Yeo says that both could be the result of something affecting a fetus in early development. It doesn't affect your general health. Scientists long suspected that being left-handed was somehow related to immune function, and that it may be a risk factor for an autoimmune disorder. Research has not been able to back up most of these claims, says Grimshaw, and that theory has been largely debunked. But one autoimmune condition handedness does seem to be associated with is inflammatory bowel disease.

A British study found that lefties are twice as likely to suffer from bowel problems such as Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis than righties.

It's linked to some sleep problems. Southpaws may be more prone to periodic limb movement disorder PLMD , which causes patients to involuntarily kick and jerk their arms and legs while sleeping. It doesn't impact longevity. It was once thought that left-handed people were doomed to die earlier than their "normal" peers, thanks to a study from the University of British Columbia.

The study also found that car accidents were often to blame, so lefties also took on the reputation for being bad drivers. But several studies since have debunked those claims, and scientists now generally accept that being a rightie or a leftie has zero effect on lifespan. It may up the risk of PTSD. A Scottish study found that left-handers were more likely to display symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder after watching clips from a scary movie. Other studies have found that non-right-handers experience more negative emotions.

Both findings could be due to the fact that non-righties are more likely to have unusual brain lateralization, which could affect the way their brains process fear and anger. It doesn't make you a bigger drinker. Hand preference probably arises as part of the developmental process that differentiates the right and left sides of the body called right-left asymmetry.

More specifically, handedness appears to be related to differences between the right and left halves hemispheres of the brain. The right hemisphere controls movement on the left side of the body, while the left hemisphere controls movement on the right side of the body. It was initially thought that a single gene controlled handedness. However, more recent studies suggest that multiple genes, perhaps up to 40, contribute to this trait.

Each of these genes likely has a weak effect by itself, but together they play a significant role in establishing hand preference. Studies suggest that at least some of these genes help determine the overall right-left asymmetry of the body starting in the earliest stages of development.

So far, researchers have identified only a few of the many genes thought to influence handedness. For example, the PCSK6 gene has been associated with an increased likelihood of being right-handed in people with the psychiatric disorder schizophrenia. Another gene, LRRTM1 , has been associated with an increased chance of being left-handed in people with dyslexia a condition that causes difficulty with reading and spelling.

It is unclear whether either of these genes is related to handedness in people without these conditions. Studies suggest that other factors also contribute to handedness. The prenatal environment and cultural influences may play a role. Like many complex traits, handedness does not have a simple pattern of inheritance.