Joseph Casciani and a guest explain Mirror Movement Development, a practice where you train your non-dominant side by mirroring your daily actions: brushing teeth with your left hand, throwing with your left arm, typing on a mirrored keyboard. Young children have symmetric brains before learning to read; Leonardo da Vinci and Benjamin Franklin had highly symmetric brains, suggesting the cognitive payoff.
Well, let's shift to some of the simple exercises you can recommend to our listeners. And what kind of things can we do to develop our opposite hand? Mostly it's going to be our left side because, what, 90% of the world is right-handed. So what can we do to build up our left side?
So in all of this, what is so beautifully simple about this— mirror movement development is one thing. It's learning how to do everything in mirrored motion. So I tell people, imagine you were video recorded throughout the day doing everything you do throughout the day. You then take that video footage, you mirror flip it. Your goal of MMD and dual dominance is to work to learn what you see yourself in that video doing. So in the video, you'd see yourself throwing with the other arm, kicking with the other foot, writing with your other hand in mirror direction, reading in mirror direction, um, typing on a mirrored keyboard, which I have one right here. Shout out to the company Keebio who produced that for me. You can get that on their website, the mirrored keyboard, mirrored clock like you see here behind me. You can find on Amazon, market it as like a wacky clock. So you can do all that stuff, but to keep it simple— and you'll find others who will talk about this too, between websites and stuff, good stuff, brain hacks— a lot of them will tell you brush your teeth with your other hand, try that, use your other hand for the light switch, use your other hand for the door. Kids, they can mirror read way faster than average adults. Young kids who know how to read, they can mirror read way faster. There's developmental studies that show— in fact, it's one of the first that I cite book. There's a certain symmetry in the brains of young kids before they learn how to read. That symmetry goes away after they learn how to read. Theoretically, it would remain and develop though if they practice mirror reading and mirror writing, mirror typing, so on and so forth. And we all, we often comment, kids are so smart, their brains can sponge up so much stuff. We can argue the same about Da Vinci and Franklin. They all had more symmetric brains.
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