I’m writing this with my left hand
Physical impairments create cognitive impairments
I’m typing this out with only my left hand. I skinned my right palm rollerblading yesterday. It’s difficult to type with one hand. It’s slower with half the arms and fingers. It’s more cognitively demanding too. On top of converting my ideas into words, I also have to consciously think about how to type out those words. I’ve got no muscle memory on the right side of the keyboard, so it’s all hunt-and-peck.
Sometimes I voluntarily do handwriting with my left hand. It started with me trying to mimic my 6yo’s handwriting to fool my wife. But I also hand-wrote a letter to my sister left-handed. It’s hard; harder than typing left-handed.
Curiously, my impaired inscription ability also impairs the quality of the prose itself. The additional mental load and physical strain makes it difficult to devote my full cognitive abilities to transcribe thoughts into prose. In my left-handed letter, I used a lot of very simple sentences like “This is hard.” and “How are you?” I wanted to say more but I was physically and mentally exhausted. Without context, I probably seemed like a simpleton.
The experience made me think about other forms of impaired expression. Non-native speakers, unfamiliar interfaces, and other impairments like Stephen Hawking’s thing probably make people seem dumber than they are. There’s that meme of boomer parents sounding stupid when texting or posting on social media, and I imagine unfamiliarity with the medium and interface are at play.
Anyway, I wanted to cover the gamification of drone warfare in Ukraine. It’s a macabre case study of the power of economy design. But I didn’t feel like I could do it justice at the moment. I also wanted to talk about my attempt to become ambidextrous after a shoulder injury. But my hand is getting tired of typing.
If you want to see for yourself, try hand-writing a description of what you had for lunch with your dominant hand. Then use your off-hand to describe what you ate for dinner. See the difference in detail.
EDIT: after writing this, I found a bunch of pop psych articles claiming typing with one hand actually improves writing quality, citing this paper. Maybe I’m totally wrong? But their abstract says: “While much previous research has suggested that decreased transcription fluency has a detrimental effect on writing…” which implies that their result is anomalous. 🤷