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Login Forums Beyond Practicing Forum Are things different if you are left-handed? Reply To: Are things different if you are left-handed?

  • Noa Kageyama

    Administrator
    November 22, 2016 at 10:37 am

    Hi Anastasia,

    Good question, but to be honest, the whole left brain/right brain thing is kind of an oversimplification and often gets blown out of proportion. Some people are right-hemisphere dominant, others are left-hemisphere dominant, and it doesn’t necessarily have to do with handed-ness or the kind of thinker you may be. I would treat the right brain/left brain concept in lesson 1 as a metaphor, or a way of categorizing the kind of thinking that is more conducive to getting in the zone, and the kind of thinking that tends to get in our way. Hope that helps to clarify things a bit!

    As far as left-handed athletes having an advantage, that has less to do with reaction time in left-handed athletes, and more to do with the fact that right-handed athletes face left-handed athletes much less often, so many things are different (in tennis, for instance, the spin of the ball on the serve), and so it takes them a split second longer to adjust, and they can’t anticipate what’s going to happen as effectively. If you’d like to read more on this, there’s a great bit on anticipation in baseball hitters in a book called The Sports Gene, where he talks about a (female) Olympic softball pitcher who was striking out all the top (male) MLB All-Stars, because they couldn’t rely on the normal cues they would normally use to pick up on what kind of pitch it was going to be early enough to make contact with the ball. Very cool story, and fascinating book.

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