Accueil - Entertainment - Is being ambidextrous a myth?
Date : 23 May 2025Categories : EntertainmentHistoryParentingSchoolUnusual
As much as left-handedness has, depending on the era, aroused envy or hatred, ambidexterity has always been the subject of rather positive fantasy. Moreover, the etymology of ambidextrous is to have two right hands… Nowadays, most left-handers are ambidextrous by force of circumstances. The world we live in having been made for right-handers, we have adapted. Right-handed friends, have you noticed that windows, bicycles or mopeds, mailboxes, wallets, your smartphone… everything is made for you and not much for us. So yes, we have become a little ambidextrous despite ourselves.
There would be less than 1 and 4% of ambidextrous people in the world population according to researchers who do not agree among themselves. But if we look more closely, are they really ambidextrous or are they just left-handed or right-handed people, perhaps without even knowing it?
According to some studies, “real” ambidexterity, that which is not linked to the environment or to an accident, is more linked to a poorly defined laterality. It mostly affects children who encounter difficulties (dyspraxia), and some will more easily become right-handed for the reasons mentioned above. The few ambidextrous people who manage to write equally well with both hands and use one as much as the other for all everyday gestures are extremely rare and are most of the time left-handed people who have learned to use their right hand as well as their left. Henri Poincaré, a very great French mathematician and physicist who was on first-name terms with Marie Curie, was quite dyspraxic. Until the age of 8, he could not tell his right hand from his left hand. At the beginning of the 20th century, this was nicely called an “unknowing left-hander”.
The most incredible example is that of the author of “Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World”, Jonathan Swift: he was not only able to write with both hands at the same time, but above all to write two different texts simultaneously.
Left-handedness was so badly perceived at certain times that left-handers were mostly upset. Some fell between the yoke of the right-thinking and remained left-handed all their lives, subject to mockery, or worse, while others were betrayed by their left hand: left-handed, you are born, left-handed, you are. You can succeed in forcing people to write or eat with their right hand, but often, a leopard can’t change its spots and for all other gestures, you are betrayed by your left hand, for example when brushing your teeth. Chaplin, for example, wrote with his right hand, but drew with his left. He hid his left-handedness until the day he made a drawing for an autograph and used his left hand. Bim! Revealed the Tramp!
This good old Plato, from the depths of his cave, did not only philosophize about the Republic, the Banquet or his damn cave, but he advocated ambidextrous education to rebalance the two parts of the body and make them more equal. We cannot say that this practice has had many imitators, but all the same, some have tried it, with more or less success.
We cannot talk about ambidexterity without mentioning Leo. No, not di Caprio, da Vinci, obviously. Left-handers and ambidextrous people alike are fighting over him as their standard-bearer. As soon as we say that a left-hander is clumsy, boom! Joker Mona Lisa! And if we don’t run after the latter, we can always fall back on Michelangelo, probably the most famous ambidextrous person in the world (it is said that he painted with his left hand and sculpted with his right, another thwarted person!).
What is funny is that at various times, some painters either found themselves left-handed by force of circumstances and realized that what they produced was not so bad, or forced themselves to paint with their left hand, as if to preserve a certain candor in their painting.
The answer is yes! Left-handed people were thwarted for a long time until the First World War. Since many unfortunate people lost their right arm or hand, left-handedness became fashionable. Anecdote in passing: right-hand amputees were better compensated than those who had lost their left hand, end of the anecdote, I’m just saying… Just in case, ambidexterity was required!
In short, yes, you can perfectly train your “weak” hand to write, cut. There are no ambidextrous scissors, but you can train yourself, like many left-handers who use scissors from the opposite hand, to use scissors for left-handers. If you play padel, it can really have its advantages to become ambidextrous…
Not a second-hand clothes seller, but the eponymous character of Voltaire’s tale, Zadig is the incarnation of wisdom. Voltaire must have known that this first name means “the just” in Hebrew or “the friend” in Arabic. “There was a great quarrel in Babylon, which had lasted for fifteen hundred years, and which divided the empire into two stubborn sects: one claimed that one should never enter the temple of Mithra except with the left foot; the other held this custom in abomination, and never entered except with the right foot. People waited for the day of the solemn festival of the sacred fire to find out which sect would be favored by Zadig. The universe had its eyes on his two feet, and the whole city was in agitation and suspense. Zadig entered the temple jumping with both feet, and he then proved, by an eloquent speech, that the God of heaven and earth, who has no respect for persons, does not care more for the left leg than for the right leg.” From there to say that Zadig does not have both feet in the same shoe…